It's all I can do for
him, and he's done much for me."
"Try him and see, Paddy," Weldon advised. "If I know Captain Frazer,
he'll have nothing to-day that will please him more."
With feasting and story-telling and the inevitable letters to wife
and sweetheart, the sunshiny day lost itself in twilight and the
twilight in the chill of night. Along the line of the blockhouses
for miles away, lights began to twinkle out from the narrow
loopholes. Throughout the camp, answering lights twinkled back at
them till the night was spotted thick with dots of yellow, winking
up at the yellow stars above. And around the camp and the
blockhouses lay the dark, measureless veldt, and the veldt was very
still.
Stillness was not in the camp, however. Even the gluttonous
Queenslanders had recovered from their woes of the morning; and,
from end to end of the great enclosure, there was a spirit of
merrymaking born of the feast day, the dinner and the unwonted
allowance of rum. In the groups scattered about the camp fires,
tongues wagged freely of home, of boyhood, of adventures in past
years. War talk was tabooed that night. According to his custom,
Tommy ignored the present and ranged at large over the remote past
and yet remoter future.
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