hat was a drop of rain."

The sky, which was cloudy when they started, had now become overcast,
and a few large drops fell around them. Little enough they minded that
though.

"Are you afraid of ghosts, Cetchy?" said Haviland.

"Ghosts? No--why?"

"See that wood over there? Well, that's Hangman's Wood, and we're going
through that. It's one of the very best nesting grounds in the whole
country--it's too far away, you see, for our fellows to get at unless
they get leave from call-over, which they precious seldom can."

He pointed to a line of dark wood about three-quarters of a mile away,
of irregular shape and some fifty acres in extent. It seemed to have
been laid out at different times, for about a third of it was a larch
plantation, the lighter green of which presented a marked contrast to
the dark firs which constituted the bulk of the larger portion.

"It's haunted," he went on. "Years and years ago they found a man
hanging from a bough right in the middle of it. The chap was one of the
keepers, but they never could make out exactly whether he had scragged
himself, or whether it was done by some fellows he'd caught poaching.
Anyway the yarn goes that they hung two or three on suspicion, and it's
quite likely, for in those days they managed things pretty much as they
seem to do in your country, eh, Cetchy--hang a chap first and try him
afterwards?"

"That's what Nick does," said the Zulu boy with a grin.

Haviland laughed.

"By Jove, you're right, Cetchy. You've taken the length of Nick's foot
and no mistake. Well, you see now why they call the place Hangman's
Wood, but that isn't all. They say the chap walks--his ghost, you
know--just as they found him hanging--all black in the face, with his
eyes starting out of his head, and round his neck a bit of the rope that
hung him. By the way, that would be a nice sort of thing for us to meet
stalking down the sides of the wood when we were in there, eh, Cetchy?"

The other made no reply. Wide-eyed, he was taking in every word of the
story. Haviland went on.

"It sounds like a lot of humbug, but the fact remains that more than one
of the keepers has met with a mortal scare in that very place, and I've
even heard of one chucking up his billet rather than go into the wood
anywhere near dusk even, and the rum thing about it too is that it never
gets poached: and you'd think if there was a safe place to poach that'd
be it. Yet it doesn't. Come on no