'My mother, we girls, our grandfather here, and some children.'
'I think I had better put up my horse in the shafts,' said Mortimer, 'though I much doubt if he'll go.'
'It is no use, the wheel is broken,' said the girl. 'We were just going to carry him home, only they will not do anything but cry. Anna, Emma, for shame! What use are tears? Come, we are strong; let us carry him out of this rain.' The girls still moaned and wept, however, and she spoke sharply again to them, this time in Dutch, the language in which their lamentations had been.
'See here,' said Mortimer, 'I will take him up on my saddle.' He dismounted and went to the cart and felt about nervously. The English-speaking girl lifted up a rug, and there on pillows on the cart lay a dead young Boer.
'Are you sure he's dead?' Mortimer said. The hands, though wet with rain, were hardly stiff, the body had some faint warmth.
The girl was helping him to lift.
'He is quite dead,' she said. 'He was wounded and going down by train to a Hospital. But as he passed this place, his home, he made them put him out on the station, and send for us to take him home. We brought the cart and pillows, but he had died in the waiting-shed before we got there. We are taking him home to bury.' The other girls shrilled loudly again. 'Anna, Emma,' she said, with more sharp words in Dutch. Then, excusingly, to Stevenson, and with pity in her voice, 'He was to have married one of them, the other is his sister.'
Mortimer got the dead man up before him, held him with one arm and rode slowly, the girls and the old man hurrying by his side. The farm lay about a quarter of a mile away. The English-speaking girl opened the gate.
'There is a ditch all the way up; don't stumble in it,' she said. 'I must go on and warn his mother.' She ran forward in the darkness. A turn in the path, and the lamplight from the farmhouse sent out its rays into the night. Some children, small boys chiefly, clustered at the door; in front of them stood the girl and another woman, fifty or sixty years old.
Mortimer with their aid lifted his burden down, and laid it on a bed in an inner room. He gave a fearful glance at the elder woman, the man's mother. She was a big woman, not fat, like the Boer women generally are, but of angular outline, and with sharp high cheek-bones, and brown piercing eyes.