‘What terrible tidings? Ignatious, that you are wounded?’ queried the old man.
‘No, father. I am terribly scorched, but I may yet recover; but poor Daniel--oh, my father, that I should live and he die when we were side by side.’
‘What--dead!--dead!--my Daniel dead? You cannot know what you are saying; you are delirious from your wounds.’
‘No, my dear father, I fear me he is dead. Take courage; you must be strong and help us to comfort mother; come.’
The old man seemed to make a strong effort, rose and helped to raise Ignatious.
‘You are right, my son. Your mother must be our first care; come.’
He begged Steve, with tears in his eyes, to go and find Daniel while he went home with Ignatious, who could scarcely stand.
‘I will send a cart or waggon at once to bring him home, if you will only wait there and do unto him as if he was your own dead brother.’
Steve and his four companions went, and what a sight met their eyes!
The hill on which they found themselves was the highest point of the rolling plain. On it were scattered masses of ironstone. Whether there was any kind of metal present in the soil of the hill, or whether it was because it was the highest spot in the neighbourhood, Steve could _not_ determine, but he later on learned that this was a favourite spot for the lightning to strike down on.
Two horses, dead and all twisted up as if they had no bones in their bodies, indescribably horrible to see. Entangled with one horse, a man’s body was seen. When they lifted him up by the arms, his head dropped backwards between the shoulders, as if his neck was composed of only skin and soft flesh. His hat and most of his clothes were carbonised, and his flesh, where exposed, was scorched and burnt in crooked lines. But let us draw a curtain, ’tis God’s work; His ways are inscrutable.
The body was conveyed, in a waggon (sent for the purpose), home.
When the body was carried into the house, the mother of the dead man cast off all restraint and threw herself in a passion of weeping upon the corpse, and had to be dragged away by main force from the awful sight of the mutilated body of her son.
To cut a gruesome story short, the body was buried the following day at midday. Steve and his companions came over from a neighbouring farm, where they had gone the afternoon of the accident, as so many relatives and friends had come to assist the bereaved family that they thought it well to leave and relieve the house of the care of stranger guests.