Show ed ADVENTURERS' ADVENTURERS CLUB CLUB I IH HEADLINES H E A D L I N E S FROM THE LIVES L I V E S OF PEOPLE LIKE YOURSELF Terrible Resurrection By FLOYD GIBBONS Famous Headline Hunter you know boys and girls there are all kinds of fear Some of ot A them are worse than others and the fear that comes on you you youw when w en death is staring you right in the eye comes pretty close to t being the worst of them all But there is one kind of fear that ia is L worse than even the terror of approaching destruction Martin artin J J. J Colbert Chicago had a n taste of that sort of terror once once- the kind of fear that has been known to make mens men's minds crack and ancl turn them into gibbering idiots Mart had an experience with the ghastly unknown He saw the impossible ble happen He saw something that couldn't be explained except as the horrible manifestation of some ghostly supernatural hand He lie saw a row of or dead and buried corpses start stan rising from their grave gravel It was a thing terrifying enough to make hardened men drop sense sense- senseless senseless senseless less from sheer fright It shook Mart Colbert to the very marrow of his bones All this happened in 1902 along about the end of June For sev sev- several several eral years Mart had been in South Africa fighting with the British forces hi in m the Boer war Solemn Duty Precedes Big Celebration i When peace was declared at the end of May 1902 he was a soldier in hi the Fifth R. R I. I Lancers a cavalry regiment stationed about fifty miles from its depot at Cape Colony When the good news was received the Lancers packed up and started back to their depot and when they arrived there it was announced that they had two weeks in which to clean up and rest and get ready for one on last job they would have to do before returning to England That job QT was to bring in hi the dead scattered in hi temporary graves throughout the tho country for tor reburial in a military cemetery The week two-week rest period passed all too quickly and Mart was de detailed de- de detailed tailed to a squad consisting of himself three other privates and a ser sergeant ser ser- sergeant geant commanded by Lieutenant Cooper They proceeded to a point about fifteen miles from where hero the Lancers had been in action some time tune before and where a number of their men had fallen and were buried The Kind of Work Vork That Raises Goose Arriving at the spot the men started to work at their grisly and unpleasant job It was open country and there was an abandoned farm farm- farmhouse farmhouse house about a quarter of a mile away The lieutenant carried a rough map made in the field which showed where all the dead of the regiment were buried and he pointed out the tho graves which were to be dug up It was the sort of work that gave the men the jitters They dug dag up the bodies of two of their old buddies but none of them relished the job jo 9 oG Corpses began pushing their way way up out of the ground As they took the second man out of his grave one of the men discovered a third grave close by It was a wide grave much grave much wider than the other When it was pointed out to the lieutenant he be said it looked as if il several bodies were buried there together He looked on his map but this grave didn't appear on it Whatever was underneath that broad mound it was evident that it contained none nono of the Lancers' Lancers dead But in order to be on the safe side the lieutenant lieutenan ordered the men to dig up that grave as ns they had dug up the others Their Eyes Couldn't Believe What They Saw It was that grave which was to t give Mart and his buddies the most terrible fright of their lives The men were taking turns with the spades Two men at a timo time went down into the graves to do the digging Mart and another fellow had dug down the first couple of feet and now two other men were in there digging Mart another private Sergeant Kirby and the lieutenant were standing stand stand- standing standing ing at the edge of the pit watching the others work The two diggers had bad worked their way down to about a level of four feet below the ground Their spades were working rhythmically tossing out one scooping of 01 earth after another Mart was looking at the bottom of the grave when suddenly his whole body stiffened The other men saw it too The earth at the bottom of the grave began to move Dirt and stones fell aside and a row of long buried corpses hardly corpses hardly more than skeletons tons tons began began pushing their way up out of the ground I Strong Men Fainted in Terror Down in the grave the two diggers dropped unconscious dropped unconscious from sheer terror Mart with the icy hand of fear clutching at him turned and ran r The rest of the men did likewise No sensation Mart has ever known could quite equal that strange horrible feeling that came over him at the sight of those long-dead long skeletons skeletons tons pushing their way up through the earth at the bottom of their com com- common common mon gravel They ran full fall tilt for about fifty feet feet and and then they stopped looking at each other in fear and wonder They looked back at the grave but there was no other sign of life lite there Then they got a grip on themselves What about the two men who had been digging the digging the men who were now lying senseless in that ghastly pit with its row of moving corpses They had to get them out of ot there Explanation Is a n Satisfactory One They went back slowly slowly reluctantly The men were still lying there unconscious The corpses corpses-a a row of bones clad in rotted clothing and topped by grinning skulls were where they had been when they last las lassaw saw them They had moved upward a few inches and then stopped They went down and pulled out the two unconscious men men and and found out the explanation of the whole grisly business The corpses had been buried burled on a bed spring It bad had collapsed with wits with the weight of the earth that was piled on It but as the men dug down the pressure was relieved until when the thc earth was almost all aU shoveled sho away the spring rebounded again pushing the bodies upward We found that this was a Boers Boer's grave probably grave probably people from the abandoned farmhouse a n quarter of a mile away says Mart We could tell that by the remains of civilian clothing that still clung to the bodies The lieutenant ordered us to put the bones back in place and fill up the tho grave again But afterward we did no more digging for the rest of the day Service C |