About midday
I had got up to a place called Shimonwe , on the Pathi river , where I had ordered letters to be sent , and one night coming in from a hard day after kudu I found a post-runner half-dead of fatigue with a chit from Utterson , who commanded a police district twenty miles nearer the coast . It said simply that all the young men round about him had cleared out and appeared to be moving towards Deira , that he was in the devil of a quandary , and that , since the police were under the Governor , he would take his orders from me . `` It looked as if the heather were fairly on fire at last , so I set off early next morning to trek back . About midday I met Utterson , a very badly scared little man , who had come to look for me . It seemed that his policemen had bolted in the night and gone to join the rising , leaving him with two white sergeants , barely fifty rounds of ammunition , and no neighbour for a hundred miles . He said that the Labonga chiefs were not marching to the coast , as he had thought , but north along the eastern foothills in the direction of the mines . This was better news , for it meant that in all probability the railway would remain open .