LONDON, Jan. 26. Among the passengers on the American liner St Paul, bound for South Africa, is the celebrated American scout, Mr F. R. Burnham. According to the New York correspondent of the "Daily Mail," Lord Roberts recently cabled To Burnham to join the: intelligence Staff immediately. Whether this be so or not it is certain that Burnham, "when he'd heard the veldt a calling, would never eed daught else." When the war broke out he was away in Alaska prospecting, and even "then he wrote to a friend in London: — "Ever since I received the news I have had the picture of the road to Pretoria in my head. I Have been over it all again, thinking where they must camp, get water and where the big fights will take place. I can see it all so clearly.”
In whatever capacity Burnham joins the Imperial forces, his services will be invaluable. One who knows him well is assured that no force of troops accompanied by Burnham will ever lose their way, or fall into a Boer trap, and declares that Burnham will "save the situation."
He is one of those wonderful scouts who might have stepped straight from the pages of Maine Reid of Fenimore Copper. Fiction has produced no character who could follow up a scent or track a spoor more keenly, than Burnham. He comes of a 'generation of scouts. His father and grandfather before him were scouts, and the scouting instinct seems hereditary in his family. He has it tracked red Indians in the Wild West until he can follow a trail with the best or worst of them. Nature seems to him an open bock on which lie can read every imprint made by man. A crumpled blade of grass, a broken stick, a grain of displaced sand, a brushed leaf, each has a story to tell him. From the condition of a horse-dropping he will tell you how long it is since the horse passed. With a Sherlock Holmes's powers of observing and drawing inferences from trifles, he will, from the other debris of a troop not only inform you of how many the troop was' composed, how long they have gone, and whither, but in what condition they are. To use his own words, the leavings may indicate to him “These men are reduced to dead horse, served with boiled grass. Press on, and hit; them while they're weak.”
On one occasion Burnham tracked for over three months a band of Indians who had committed unspeakable atrocities upon some white women. His party was a huge one when it started, but by degrees its members returned home, until there were left only himself and the brothers of the murdered girls. It was a case of diamond cutting diamond. The Indians might carry stale horse dung to plant by the way for the purpose of deceiving their pursuers, they might twist and turn on their tracks, but i -they could never shake off Bumham and his dogged comrades. At last, one foggy night when the patience of the worn-out I palefaces was almost exhausted, a glow in the mist told Burnham's practiced eye that he saw the reflection of his foeman's camp fires, which, relying on the darkness of the night, the wily- redskins had ventured to light. Creeping up like snakes, Burnham I and his companions surprised the camp at break of day, and took a complete revenge for the murder of the white women.