The Colonel’s gaze was ruthlessly challenging.  George met it stiffly.  He knew that the roads, if not the tracks, had already been searched.  He knew that he was being victimized by a chance impulse of the Colonel’s.  But he ignored all that.  He was coldly angry and resentful.  Utterly forgetting his fatigue, he inimically surveyed the Colonel’s squat, shining figure in the cavalry coat, a pyramid of which the apex was a round head surmounted by a dripping cap.

“Yes, sir,” he snapped.

By rights the tyrant ought to have rolled off his horse dead.  But Colonel Hullocher was not thus vulnerable.  He could give glance for glance with perhaps any human being on earth, and indeed thought little more of subalterns than of rabbits.

He finished, after a pause: 

“You will be good enough, Major, to let this officer report to me personally when he has found the convoy.”

“Certainly, sir.”

The horse bounded away, scattering the group.

Rather less than half an hour later George had five men (including his own servant and Resmith’s) and six lanterns round a cask, on the top of which was his map.  There were six possible variations of route to Kingswood Station, and he explained them all, allotting one to each man and keeping one for himself.  He could detect the men exchanging looks, but what the looks signified he could not tell.  He gave instructions that everybody should go forward until either discovering the convoy or reaching Kingswood.  He said with a positive air of conviction that by this means the convoy could not fail to be discovered.  The men received the statement with strict agnosticism; they could not see things with the eye of faith, fortified though they were with tea and tinned meats.  An offered reward of ten shillings to the man who should hit on the convoy did not appreciably inspirit them.  George himself was of course not a bit convinced by his own argument, and had not the slightest expectation that the convoy would be found.  The map, which the breeze lifted and upon which the rain drummed, seemed to be entirely unconnected with the actual facts of the earth’s surface.  The party mounted tired, unwilling horses and filed off.  Some soldiers in the darkness, watching the string of lanterns, gave a half-ironical ‘Hurrah.’  One by one, as the tracks bifurcated, George dispatched his men, with renewed insistent advice, and at last he and his horse were alone on the Downs.

His clothes were exceedingly heavy with all the moisture they had imbibed.  Repose had mitigated his fatigue, but every slow, slouching step of the horse intensified it again—­and at a tremendous rate.  Still, he did not care, having mastered the great truth that he would either tall off the horse in exhaustion or arrive at Kingswood—­and which of the alternatives happened did not appear to him to matter seriously.  The whole affair was fantastic; it was unreal, in addition to being silly.  But,