o rise again, since I had been taken
prisoner. The man who spoke was little more than a lad, a pale-faced,
slenderly built son of the veldt. He had tangled curly hair, and big,
pathetic blue eyes, soft as a girl's, and limbs that lacked the rugged
strength of the old Boer stock; but there was that nameless "something,"
that indefinable expression in his face which warranted him a brave man. He
carried one arm in a sling, and the bandage round his neck hid a bullet
wound. "The Australians can fight," he said simply. "They wounded me,
and--they killed my father." Perhaps it was the wind sighing through the
hospital trees that made the Boer lad's voice grow strangely husky;
possibly the same cause filled the blue eyes with unshed tears.

"It was in fair fight, lad," I said gently; "it was the fortune of war."

"Yes," he murmured, "it was in fair fight, an awful fight--I hope I'll
never look upon another like it. Damn the fighting," he broke out fiercely.
"Damn the fighting. I didn't hate your Australians. I didn't want to kill
any of them. My father had no ill-will to them, nor they to him, yet he is
out there--out there between two great kopjes--where the wind always blows
cold and dreary at night-time." The laddie shuddered. "It makes a man doubt
the love of the Christ," he said. "My father was a good man, a kind man,
who never turned the stranger empty-handed from his door, even the Kaffirs
on the farm loved him; and now he is lying where no one can weep over his
grave. We piled great rocks on his grave. My cousin and I buried him. We
had no shovels; we scooped a hole in the hard earth as well as we could, a
long, shallow hole, and we laid him in it. I took his head and Cousin
Gustave carried his feet. We folded his hands on his breast, laid his old
rifle by his side, because he had always loved that gun, and never used any
other when out hunting. Then we pushed the earth in on him gently with our
hands, breaking the hard lumps up and crumbling them in our palms, so that
they should not bruise his poor flesh. He had always been so kind, we could
not hurt him, even though we knew he was dead, for he had been gentle to
all of us in life; even the cows and the oxen at home loved him--and now
who will go back and tell mother and little Yacoba that he is dead, that he
will come to them no more? Oh, damn the war," the lad called again in his
pain. "I don't know--only God knows--which side is right or wrong, but I do
know that