The Gobernador had shown little interest in the wireless messages from the world’s capitals. He had left Olifa with no more than a suit of dress-clothes, and had been fitted out from the wardrobe of Archie, who was much the same height and figure. One morning Sandy came in to breakfast with a new light in his eye.
“Things are beginning to move, sir,” he told Castor. “The time has come to get into campaigning kit. We shan’t be a dressy staff, but we can’t go about like earth-stoppers any more.”
Thereafter everyone appeared in simple khaki tunics and breeches. Castor submitted good-humouredly to the change.
“You look like General Smuts, sir,” Archie told him, “only a little darker and less benevolent.”
Castor smiled. “That would seem to be in keeping. Like Smuts, I am an intellectual compelled by fate to be a leader of guerrillas. Is it not so?”
That night Sandy and young Latimer pinned up on the wall of the mess-hut a big map mounted on calico, and proceeded to ornament it with little flags.
“There is your province, sir,” he said, “a better map than anything the Surveyor-General has in Olifa. The colour-washes represent altitudes. The red flags are our posts, and the green are the Olifa army. I am going to give a staff lecture, for the bell has rung and the curtain gone up.”
The map showed only the northern half of the republic, from Olifa city to the apex where the great mountains crowded down upon the sea. From the Courts of the Morning the land fell in tiers—first the wooded shelves, then the barrens of the Seco Boreal, and then the broad shallow cup where the Mines and the city lay. From the Gran Seco city the country ran westward for a hundred miles till it ended in the rocky sierras of the coast. Eastward it rose into the savannahs of the Indian reserve and the Tierra Caliente, till it met the main chain of the Cordilleras. The map did not embrace this latter feature, and there was no sign on it of the pass into the Poison Country. The south boundary of the Gran Seco was a ridge of dolomite cliffs, broken apparently only at one place—by the long winding valley up which the railway ran from Santa Ana.
From the contours it looked to be otherwise unapproachable from that side, save by one or two tortuous and difficult footpaths, at the head of which under Castor’s administration there had been block-houses and patrols. There was no breach at either end, for on the west this southern ridge ran out in the coast sierras, and on the east became a buttress of the main Cordilleras massif. There were red flags in the city and at the Universum, clusters at two points in the Indian Reserve, one of them very close to the mountains, and a chain running up towards the Courts of the Morning. In the plain of Olifa there was a big green concentration at Santa Ana, and a green blob half-way up the railway.
“Lossberg has got his rolling stock at last,” Sandy explained. “He has his pioneers and one of his machine-gun battalions at the frontier, and his cavalry patrols were last night within five miles of the Gran Seco city.”
Castor donned a pair of horn spectacles and examined the map closely. He studied especially the Seco Boreal and the eastern frontier. He ran his finger along the southern rim.
“That was always a troublesome place,” he said. “Practicable for a mountaineer or an Indian, but scarcely more. At least, so our reports said. But we had to watch it. Rosas “—he smiled—”was always very strong about keeping posts there.”
He took a step backward and surveyed the map.
“It appears that the military gentlemen who write to the papers are right,” he said. “I seem to be in a very bad strategical position. Olifa can force a passage—it may take a little time and she may have losses, but she can fight her way up the railway to the Gran Seco. After that we are at her mercy, at least so far as the city and the Mines are concerned, for I do not suppose we can hope to win a field action against her.”
“Not a chance,” said Sandy cheerfully.
“Then nothing remains but a guerrilla war on our savannahs. I think she will beat us there, for ours is a hard dry soil and tanks and armoured cars can go anywhere. I speak as a civilian, but am I not right, Lord Clanroyden?”
“Perfectly.”
“Our troops are mounted?”
“All of them.”
“Where on earth did you get the horses? The Indian ponies are a miserable breed.”
“Not so bad as you think,” Sandy smiled. “But we had other sources of supply. Olifa is a famous horse-breeding country.”
“But how did you draw on Olifa? How did you get the horses up?”
“Some day I will tell you—but not now.”
The Gobernador looked puzzled.
“I take it we have a certain amount of food and munitions?”
“Enough to go on with.”
“But not indefinitely… Then it looks as if before long our present dwelling-place would become a point of some importance. It is now our poste de commandement, and presently it may be our last refuge. We have access of the sea. If we can find ships, we shall have to make a moonlight flitting, as your people did at Gallipoli.”
“I shouldn’t wonder.”
Castor took off his spectacles. “I speak with all modesty, but was it not a blunder to let Olifa strike first? I should have thought that our best chance would have been to obstruct the railway—like—like my Dutch prototype in Dur South African war. Can an inferior safely surrender the offensive?” And he smiled pleasantly.
Sandy shook his head. “It wouldn’t have done. We should have given old Lossberg a lot of trouble, but he would have smashed us in the long run.”
“Won’t he smash us anyhow in the long run?” Castor moved closer and again studied the map. “God has been unkind to us in planting that wall of rock and snow in the east. It is most unfortunate that the southern wall of the Gran Seco runs clean up to the mountains without a convenient pass for honest guerrilleros to descend upon Olifa.”
“Most unfortunate,” said Sandy, but there was no melancholy in his tone. “Well, that’s the layout. Now I will expound the meaning of our flags.”
He enumerated in detail the strength and composition of the various detachments, and then explained the composition and marching order of the Olifero forces. Castor listened attentively and asked questions. “We are holding the city lightly, but the Mines strongly. Ah, I see. We have a big detachment on the railway. Who, by the way, commands in the city? Rosas? We have given my friend the post of honour—and danger.”
Day by day the green flags crept northward till they were spilled in clusters beyond the Gran Seco frontier. Every evening Sandy gave his staff lecture. It was noticeable, now that the campaign had begun, that his spirits rose, and though he had scarcely time to feed or sleep he showed no trace of weariness. Yet there was tension in the air. The faces of the men would suddenly go blank as some problem swept them into preoccupation. Even the Gobernador was not exempt from these sudden silences. He alone had no routine work, but Janet, who had become his chief companion abroad, reported that he was becoming temperamental.
“I think it is this place,” she told Sandy. “I don’t believe he has ever been much out-of-doors in his life before. He has always lived in cities and railway-carriages, and Nature is rather a surprise to him and puts him off his balance. He told me to-day that this living with sunsets and sunrises made him giddy… His education is progressing. I wish I knew what he was thinking when he has that blindish look in his eyes.”
“He seems to be interested in the campaign,” said Sandy. “As an intellectual problem, I suppose. Something for his mind to work upon.”
The girl hesitated.
“Perhaps,” she said. “But I think there is something more in it than that.