Now it was a hospital train which
halted at the camp on the way southward, and each red-taped nurse
had reminded him of Alice Mellen, and of those last days in
Johannesburg. Now it was a two-day trek, as escort for a convoy
train whose long lines of bullock-drawn wagons marked the brown
veldt with a wavering stripe of duller brown. Again a wounded picket
came straying back to camp, bleeding and dazed, to report the
inevitable sniping which furnished the running accompaniment to most
other events; or an angry squad came riding in, to tell of the shots
which had followed close upon the raising of the white flag, or of
the score of armed men who had suddenly leaped out from the safe
shelter of a Red-Cross ambulance. And, on one occasion, he had been
in the thick of a similar fray. Hand to hand, he had fought on the
doorsteps of a farmhouse to which he and his five comrades had been
bidden by a sprightly Boer in gown and sunbonnet. At the door, the
bonnet had been cast from the cropped head, and the gown had been
pushed back to give access to the bandolier beneath, while a dozen
shots from an upper window had driven them from the dooryard into
the comparative shelter of the lower rooms.
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