In front of them, hardly visible, stretched a long black kopje.

It was the very Nicholson's Nek which they had come to occupy.

Carleton and Adye must have heaved a sigh of relief as they realised that they had actually struck it.

The force was but two hundred yards from the position, and all had gone without a hitch.

And yet in those two hundred yards there came an incident which decided the fate both of their enterprise and of themselves.
Out of the darkness there blundered and rattled five horsemen, their horses galloping, the loose stones flying around them.