"It is the night that is terrible," he went on, lowering his voice as though afraid of being overheard. "Those who died here come back and look into the windows and cry out with awful voices. They cannot rest, and must come back to this place where they were killed. Some of them are our people and others the British, and sometimes they fight the battle over again!" For a moment I thought he was guying us, but a glance at his eyes told me that he was in deadly earnest. Snyman and Biddy caught his spirit and egged him on to tell more ghost stories. Now the ignorant Boer is very superstitious, so that it was not long before we had all kinds of ghosts loose about the place. The young Boer took the stories seriously, and those two rascals soon had him quite terrified. A sudden burst of thunder made him jump as though he had been shot. Well, we told ghost stories and tales of other supernatural visitations for some time. Then, the rain letting up a bit, we went back to our camp, to find that Sibijaan had finally succeeded in getting a fairly decent fire going. Before leaving we had bought the store out. It only contained quantities of "flag" cigarettes, coffee, and yellow sugar, but we took all we could get. The Boer assured us that he had sent to Ermelo for a large stock of goods which would be at our disposal as soon as the roads allowed it to be brought in. Late that afternoon it looked as though the stormy weather was breaking away, and this cheered us up. We planned to start at dawn next morning and make up for lost time by forced marches. Shortly after dark Snyman announced that he was going to visit the young Boer again. He went out, leaving Biddy and me smoking our pipes in the tent. Snyman had been gone for about half an hour when the stillness of the night was shattered by a succession of rifle shots. They came from the direction of the ruined house. We could hear some one shouting, also, and each outburst was followed by more shots. With one motion I snuffed our candle and dived to the wet floor of the tent. Biddy was almost as quick, and swore softly when his face hit my heels. We neither of us could imagine what was taking place, but our training taught us that the ground was the safest place when people began shooting wildly. We had hardly got our breath when Snyman dashed into the tent, falling over us and almost pulling it down. He had been running hard and was fairly gasping for breath. Presently he recovered sufficiently to loose a volley of profanity in Dutch and English. When he calmed down a little--the shooting had stopped by this time--we asked him what all the shooting was about and why he had returned in such haste.