"I tell you, I can't stop.Give me something and let me go.I've work at Lindley that must be done, and a convoy leaves in an hour."An hour later he was trudging over the veldt in the direction of Lindley.Lindley was forty miles away; the roads were dusty, and the sun of early February struck down upon him with the heat of a belated summer.Nevertheless, at Lindley was his squadron, and with his squadron would be work.Never in all his past life had Weldon known this imperative need for work.In it now, and in its accompanying excitement and in its inevitable risk, would lie his ultimate salvation.For him, the future held but one plain duty, and that duty was to forget.
The experienced eye of the doctor had told him that the gaunt trooper was a sick man; it had also told him that the trooper's determination would outweigh his sickness, at least for the present crisis.He made no effort to penetrate the cause of that determination.He merely yielded to it.A doctor less wise would have ordered Weldon into bed.This one saw further.He knew that a delicately adjusted machine often receives its worst damage from the friction needed to stop the whirring wheels.Better to wait and let them run down, untouched.
The forty miles from Kroonstad to Lindley were reducing themselves from a geographical fact to a matter of physical and mental anguish.
There had been no rain for days, and under the burning sun, the dusty veldt seemed dancing up and down before Weldon's tired, feverish eyes.Now he passed through a stretch of bare and burned-out sand; now he tramped over patches of tall dry grass; now he plodded wearily around a heap of smooth black stones.Brick-red ant-hills higher than his knees dotted themselves over the veldt, their shell-like surface shielding a crowded insect colony within.Ant-bear holes lurked unseen in his pathway, tripping his heedless steps; and an occasional partridge went whirring upward, making him start aside in causeless terror at the unwonted sound.And over it all rested the glaring, shimmering, blinding light, laden with myriad particles of dazzling red-brown dust.Later still, the red-brown color vanished, and he walked for weary leagues over the fire-blackened veldt where the black rocks offered no contrast to the eye, and where the air was heavy with ashes caught up and scattered by the light breeze which heralded the coming night.And it was all so lonely, so hostile, so limitless.But no more lonely and hostile and limitless than the desolate future which stretched away and away before his gaze.
As yet he dared not trust his mind to rest too much upon the past.
The future demanded his whole attention.It was a far cry for him from the present up to his limit of threescore years and ten.Still, he would not funk it now.That was the part of a sneak.Now, as always, he would stand by his young resolution to play out the game, to abide by the rules and to take the consequences.Nevertheless, it would be weary work to play out the game to its end, when the end held nothing for him in its keeping.His mind trailed off upon all sorts or vague corollaries scarcely connected with the fact.He recalled it with a jerk.
