"'What is it?' I asked.
"'Go to bed,' said my brother.
"'No.' I said. 'Tell me, is it Fanie?'
"My brother looked at me and threw up his hand like a man who can do no more. 'Yes,' he said.
"Then I knew, as though he had shouted it out, that Fanie was dead. I cannot say how, but I knew it.
"'He is dead,' I said. 'Bring him in here.'
"So they went out and carried Fanie in with his clothes all draggled and his beard full of mud. They laid him on the table, and I saw his face. . . . Dear God! . . There was terror on that face, carven and set in dead flesh, that set my blood screaming in my body. Sometimes even now I wake in the night all shrinking with fear of the very memory of it.
"But there is one thing more. We went about to put everything in order and lay the poor corpse in decency, and when we started to pull off his veldschoen, as I hope to die in my bed, there was a little drop of blood still wet on the toe.
"I think God's right hand was on my head that night that I did not go mad.
"I heard the tale next morning. My brothers, coming home, found him … it . . . in a spruit, already quite dead. There was no horse by, but his spoor led back a mile to where the horse lay dead and stiff. When it fell he must have run on, … screaming, perhaps, . . . till he fell in the spruit. I would like to think peace came to him at the last; but there was no peace in the dead face."