They can make out
Boer scouts on the horizon, but no one pays much attention.
Driscoll, of Driscoll's Scouts, is a thick-set, sinewy man, rather short
than tall. He is of an absolute sooty blackness. Hair and moustache
coal-black, and complexion so scorched and swarthy that at a little
distance you might almost take him for a nigger. There is about his face
a look of unmistakable determination amounting to ferocity in moments of
excitement. He looks and is a born fighter, but is apt to be over
headlong in action. His scouts are part of our 250 mounted men under
Rimington.
As for the Colonel I don't know if I have ever tried to describe him to
you. He is a man who invites description. Of all the men in the army he
is the one you would single out to sketch. An artist would be at him at
once. He is the living image of what one imagines Brian de Bois Guilbert
to have been. An inch or two over six feet high, his figure, spare but
lengthy and muscular, has been so knocked about (by hunting and polo
accidents) that it has rather a lopsided look, and he leans slightly to
one side as he walks, but this does not interfere with his strength and
activity nor detract from the distinguished and particularly graceful
look of the man. His face, like Driscoll's, is sun-blackened rather than
sun-browned; its general expression stern and grim, and when he is
thinking and talking about the Boers (he talks about them just as Bois
Guilbert did about the Saracens) this expression deepens into something
positively savage, and he looks, and can perhaps sometimes be, a
relentless enemy.
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