Suddenly realisation came to Hector, and from the heights he fell headlong to the depths, the certainty of disappointment upon him. Fool that he was to have forgotten; fighting, there would be no fighting; there was, there could be, no one in that valley below. No, the darkness would lift, the emptiness be revealed, and all his labour would be gone or nothing—worse still, unrecognised.
Hector did not fear the consequences to himself once the fraud was discovered, for that was the gamble, and if he lost, he was prepared to pay, but to know himself a leader of men, and for that knowledge to go unshared by all save him, that to Graeme was bitterer than death. A dreary laugh broke from his lips as the realisation of the giant hoax he had played upon all, himself included, came home to him. He pictured Bradford and the long-nosed Godwin struggling over the mountains; their cautious injunctions for silence in the ranks, the eager anticipation of the officers as they posted their men, and impressed upon them the necessity of straight-shooting. God! how absurd it all was, how damnably absurd.
Then, as hope never dies in human hearts, a thrill of excitement ran through him, as he became aware that the solid blackness was loosening and the hour of revelation close at hand. With heart wildly beating, he watched the shapeless masses around him take form and become the tops of mountains, blurred at first, and then sharply defined against a sky fading from violet to green. And suddenly it was light, and a still grey world stood revealed.
Straining his eyes downwards, he lay till the last patch of shadow clothing the valley below had melted away, when, with a sudden cry of exultation, Graeme flung his helmet into the air, and rolled over and over on the grass, laughing hysterically at what he had seen. In the centre of the valley, or, rather, horseshoe-shaped indentation in the mountains, stood a rough farmhouse, with a cluster of large cattle kraals close by, and around the house and filling the kraals were dark masses of horses. It was Van der Tann’s commando beyond a doubt.
No sooner had one hope been realised, and anxiety relieved, than another equally insistent took its place—the fear of the escape of the quarry lying so unsuspectingly below. True, the main entrance, that on the side farthest away from him, and leading into the open veldt beyond, would be certainly held and barred by now; nor was flight possible up the mountains on either side, for these rose sheer from the valley’s level. No, it was not there that the danger lay, but at his end; for Graeme had made a mistake, and a bad one, the previous night. He was not standing at the edge of a precipice, as he had imagined, but on a neck or depression between two hilltops, whence the ground sloped gently to the farmhouse, forming a natural causeway at least two hundred yards across, and easily accessible to Boer ponies and horsemen, who, finding other exit barred, would assuredly turn about and make straight for where he stood. And to stop them, to block that two hundred yards, he had but seventy-five men all told—a weak obstacle, truly, to the rush of desperate fugitives.