But still it rained outside! It came down as it only can in the Transvaal, and that means a steady, relentless downpour which looked as though it would last for days. We decided to make ourselves as comfortable as possible, and our host insisted that we take over his house. He was a very pleasant fellow and before long we were good friends.
It seems that the old house had been the home of his parents and grandparents. It was a pioneer homestead and had been burned by the British during the Boer War. Both his parents had died there and the place had never been rebuilt. He had been born in the room in which we rested and he told us that he hoped some day to rebuild and make his thousands of acres profitable.
Bit by bit we got the story of the place from him. It had been destroyed in retaliation for some act of treachery, for which, he assured us, his parents were not responsible. I asked him if he did not get lonesome living there by himself and suggested that he ought to get a wife to keep him company. My question opened up a queer side of his character, and then we understood the hunted look in his eyes.
"By day," he said slowly, "I don't mind being here alone. In good weather people cross the river and come to me to buy things. I have a store, you know, and sometimes as many as five or six come each week."
This was news to us. We did not see any evidence of a store, but this probably explained the small boxes and bundles in the back room.
"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.