“Eventually, yes. About a week after we arrived. The men were complaining about the smell. They had all been for stripping the corpse at once and heaving it into the river. Stupid, perhaps, but I felt I had a duty to do right by him. He’d looked me in the eye, after all, recognised me for what I was, an honest British soldier, and entrusted me with his fortune. Probably not his to bequeath, and certainly not mine to inherit, but it was a bond of sorts. Lacking volunteers, apart from a little grudging help from Syd, I cleaned and dressed the body myself in his own gear. Made it look decent. Then Ratty and Herbert between them dug a grave deep enough to make it jackal-proof, some distance away from the cabin. We all stood around, and I delivered the nearest I could manage to a Christian burial. We put a four-foot cross made of jackalberry boughs at the head of the grave with his initials carved on it. It was a big marker—a precaution, in case later anyone wanted to recover the body . . . Cecil Rhodes cast a long shadow in those parts. If he decided to make enquiries about the fate of his kinsman, it could have caused problems for us.”

He lapsed into the deep silence Redfyre had learned to respect in the men he questioned. Then, haltingly, thoughts moving faster than his words: “Funny that!” he said. “It never struck me before—the day the company rode away from that foul place, I looked back. That cross had become part of the scenery. It wasn’t there . . . It wasn’t there,” he murmured again. “I expect some lumbering animal had stopped to scratch its bum and knocked it over. Africa! What a country! It wears down, reclaims, silts up and covers over. And now no one will know he’s there.”

“No visitors apart from wandering wildebeest?”

“No. It was very strange. No one came near us. We could hear fighting going on to the east and Long Tom pounding down on Kimberley to the north, but we were in the calm eye of the storm. Nevertheless, we stayed uncomfortably tense and always on the alert for danger. It’s easier to face an enemy when you can see his eyes. The worst is when you realise you’ve been looking into those eyes for months and he’s sitting right in front of you.”

“I’m sorry, you’ve lost me.” Redfyre was startled. “Are you implying that one of you was a traitor?”

“In a way, we had our traitor. Not so much betraying his country as betraying his unit. In my book, that’s as bad.”

Redfyre nodded agreement.