Against this, however, was the evidence of a civilian refugee who declared that there were many more than three hundred Boers concealed in Koorn Spruit, and believed that secret information must have been given to them of the fact that no force had been posted to guard the drift by which Broadwood’s column must cross. On Pretorius’s Farm he met a burgher who had given up his arms, and received a pass from our military authorities permitting him to return to his home and settle down in peace, secure from all fear of molestation at the hands of British troops. This disarmed burgher, who had been fighting against us up to the occupation of Bloemfontein by Lord Roberts, showed such an accurate knowledge of the Boer movements that he must have watched them very closely. He could tell the exact position from which every gun would open fire on the English, column before it came into action. This knowledge he imparted without reserve, and yet, apparently, he had no apprehensions of ill-treatment from his former comrades as the penalty for deserting them. The incident, whatever interpretation may be put upon it, is curious, and will, perhaps, help to explain many things that happened when submissions were accepted and passes granted with too lavish leniency. It is more than probable that a Boer attack on the waterworks in order to destroy the pumping machinery there was part of a plan conceived directly after the occupation of Bloemfontein by our troops, but it could not be carried out before the column holding Thaba ’Nchu had been forced to retire. The artillery positions may therefore have been selected some time previously for the purpose of shelling out any force that might make a stand at the waterworks, and it is all consistent with the Boer prisoner’s statement that no deliberate attempt was made by General Broadwood’s pursuers to surround him until they found that his convoy had been accidentally headed off and partly destroyed at the drift across Koorn Spruit by a comparatively small body lying in ambush there for another purpose. Such a combination of accidents seems improbable, but certainly not more so than the assumption that a Boer commander, calculating all the chances to a nicety, had ventured to detach such a small force and send it round by a wide _détour_ across some miles of open plain with the object of intercepting, by an ambush, a column that had been able to hold its own against odds for some time. If so, he gave more hostages to fortune than the Boers have risked elsewhere. Whatever may be the truth in this respect, it is clear that neither the officer in charge of communications, whose Mounted Infantry held Sanna’s Post, nor Brigadier-General Broadwood, had reason to suspect the presence of any hostile force in that immediate neighbourhood.