Corporal Connal

Connal is a colonial soldier risen from the ranks in a hard-fighting South African campaign, a mongrel type whose physical bulk and local knowledge make him useful and dangerous in equal measure. He singles out the narrator for abuse from the day he joins, and only Raffles's twenty-minute beating ends the bullying—though the narrator begins to suspect something worse than mere brutality. When the troop is left under Connal's charge and ordered to escort wagons eastward, his suspicious navigation puts Raffles and the narrator on alert, making him the pivot of a quiet wartime treachery.