On Monday morning we are able to have horses, which we go and catch ourselves in the great courtyard which serves as a dépôt. We have also some old English saddles, and after buying some rugs and some indispensable provisions, we are ready to start at about five in the evening.
Our departure is fixed for eleven o'clock, by the special train which is to take _Long Tom_ to Kimberley, where we are to join Colonel Villebois. This _Long Tom_, a 155 millimetres Creusot gun, is a personage, a celebrity. It weighs 2,500 kilogrammes; its carriage weighs the same. Its fame is derived from its history.
One night last November, at Lombard's Kop, in front of Ladysmith, where the gun was mounted, sixty English, taking advantage of the slumbers of the Boer sentinels, stormed the hill, seized the cannon, and finding it impossible to displace it, damaged the two ends with dynamite. After this the burghers, coming up in force, retook the gun, brought it to Pretoria, and repaired it in a remarkable manner. It was, however, shortened by about 25 centimetres.
After these adventures it has become a sort of prodigal son, a legendary weapon beloved of those great children we call the Boers. It is, therefore, no small honour to be called upon to escort _Long Tom_. We share this honour with a gunner named Erasmus, a strange being, who, after being severely wounded at the taking of 'his cannon,' had sworn only to return and fight in its company.
On this Monday night, accordingly, at eleven o'clock, in a downpour of rain, we and our horses take our places in the train, which, profiting no doubt by its being a 'special,' starts an hour after time. It consists of three or four first-class coaches with lateral corridors. These coaches, which are comfortable enough, and very high in the ceiling, have in each compartment two seats of three places each, covered with leather, and in the centre a folding-table about 50 centimetres wide. At night a second seat, which is raised in the day-time, or serves as a luggage-net, makes a sleeping-berth, so that four travellers in each compartment can rest comfortably, a convenience highly desirable in a country where journeys often last forty-eight hours, and even six or seven days, as from Cape Town to Buluwayo and Fort Salisbury.