Dead, oh! undoubtedly dead; the good knife had gone home just below the left shoulder--no need of a second blow--a famous place, that. Yet he was sorry too--it would have been good to have struck again, and yet again, and--ah! that hated face! should he crush it shapeless with his heel, staring up at him careless and proud even in death? Should he? Should he? The Kaffir blood in him surged in waves to his heart, the desire to mutilate and mangle his enemy smote him sore. Not with his boot, though--no--no--leave signs--besides, too soft; only _Veldt schoens_; no--the knife again, blade or handle--all the same. He leant over and strained at the handle; as he strove to draw it from the wound, the eyes of the dead man seemed to roll and fix themselves on his. With a cry of superstitious terror he recoiled, and to his vision, maddened by passion, weakened by physical exhaustion and starvation, the blanched lips of the corpse moved in the old smile of cynical mockery. A nameless dread seized upon him--the white man in him, that had given the nerve and passionate resolution for the steadfast fulfilment of his vow, gave place in a moment to the unreasoning, superstitious savage. The man’s body was dead--he knew that assuredly--but his spirit was alive and _there_--that proud and sneering spirit that he could not slay. He shrank back and crouched in a huddled heap against the rock, watching with fascinated gaze the movements of his enemy. Now, to a diseased and distorted vision moonlight plays queer tricks with things. The tortures of the damned came upon Pietris Vanhiever, and, greatest torture of all, he was deprived of the power of flight. It seemed to his terror-ridden brain that the spirit through those eyes was drawing him slowly--slowly--to the body of his victim, there to hold him to eternity. Then a fresh horror came upon him, and the devil of superstition turned his thoughts to the tales crooned to him by his Kaffir mother, in the half light of the evenings, at the door of the native hut. The tales of the spirit of the Karroo, the Great Spirit, that comes to the souls of men whose lives and blood are spent upon the Karroo’s breast, and gathers them to itself; the legends of the woe and ruth that befall the living man who looks upon the gathering of that harvest; and he shook with the cold fear that seized upon, and paralysed, his limbs and knees. So minutes and hours went by, and the moon dropped low behind the great rocks, and a black darkness came over the pass of death, and ever the white upturned face held him through the blackness in a stupor of terror, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, save only, in those staring, shining eyes, the spirit of his enemy. Ah--h--h, what was _that_?--at the end of the Pass, what was that?--white, silent through the darkness--what was it? _Lieber Gott_, what was it? Coming, white and terrible, yes, coming to the harvest.