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<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Can Such Things Be?, by Ambrose Bierce</div>
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<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: Can Such Things Be?</div>
<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Ambrose Bierce</div>
<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: August 14, 2019 [eBook #4366]<br />
[This file was first posted on January 17, 2002]<br />
[Most recently updated: March 29, 2022]</div>
<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div>
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<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: David
Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org from the 1918 Boni and Liveright edition</div>
<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CAN SUCH THINGS BE? ***</div>
<h1>CAN SUCH<br />
THINGS BE?</h1>
<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">BY</span><br
/>
AMBROSE BIERCE</p>
<p style="text-align: center">
<a href="images/tpb.jpg">
<img alt=
"Decorative graphic labelled B L"
title=
"Decorative graphic labelled B L"
src="images/tps.jpg" />
</a></p>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<p style="text-align: center">BONI & LIVERIGHT<br />
NEW YORK 1918</p>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<p style="text-align: center"><span
class="smcap">Copyright</span>, 1909, <span
class="smcap">by</span><br />
<span class="smcap">The Neale Publishing Company</span></p>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
<table>
<tr>
<td><p> </p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span
class="GutSmall">PAGE</span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">The Death of Halpin Frayser</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page13">13</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">The Secret of Macarger’s
Gulch</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page44">44</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">One Summer Night</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page58">58</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">The Moonlit Road</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page62">62</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">A Diagnosis of Death</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page81">81</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">Moxon’s Master</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page88">88</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">A Tough Tussle</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page106">106</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">One of Twins</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page121">121</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">The Haunted Valley</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page134">134</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">A Jug of Sirup</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page155">155</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">Staley Fleming’s
hallucination</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page169">169</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">A Resumed Identity</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page174">174</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">A Baby Tramp</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page185">185</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">The Night-doings at</span>
“<span class="smcap">Deadman’s</span>”</p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page194">194</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">Beyond the Wall</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page210">210</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">A Psychological Shipwreck</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page227">227</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">The Middle Toe of the Right
Foot</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page235">235</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">John Mortonson’s
Funeral</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page252">252</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">The Realm of the Unreal</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page255">255</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">John Bartine’s Watch</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page268">268</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">The Damned Thing</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page280">280</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">Haïta the Shepherd</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
href="#page297">297</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">An Inhabitant of Carcosa</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page308">308</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><p><span class="smcap">The Stranger</span></p>
</td>
<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page315">315</a></span></p>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<h2><a name="page13"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 13</span>THE
DEATH OF HALPIN FRAYSER</h2>
<h3>I</h3>
<blockquote><p>For by death is wrought greater change than hath
been shown. Whereas in general the spirit that removed
cometh back upon occasion, and is sometimes seen of those in
flesh (appearing in the form of the body it bore) yet it hath
happened that the veritable body without the spirit hath
walked. And it is attested of those encountering who have
lived to speak thereon that a lich so raised up hath no natural
affection, nor remembrance thereof, but only hate. Also, it
is known that some spirits which in life were benign become by
death evil altogether.—<i>Hali</i>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><span class="smcap">One</span> dark night in midsummer a man
waking from a dreamless sleep in a forest lifted his head from
the earth, and staring a few moments into the blackness, said:
“Catherine Larue.” He said nothing more; no
reason was known to him why he should have said so much.</p>
<p>The man was Halpin Frayser. He lived in St. Helena, but
where he lives now is uncertain, for he is dead. One who
practices sleeping in the woods with nothing under him but the
dry leaves and the damp earth, and nothing over him but the
branches from which the leaves have fallen and the sky from which
the earth has fallen, cannot hope for great longevity, and
Frayser had already attained the age of thirty-two. There
are persons in this world, millions of persons, and far and away
the best persons, who regard that as a very advanced age.
They are the children. To those who view the voyage of life
from the port of departure the bark that has accomplished any
considerable distance appears already in close approach to the
farther shore. However, it is not certain that Halpin
Frayser came to his death by exposure.</p>
<p>He had been all day in the hills west of the Napa Valley,
looking for doves and such small game as was in season.
Late in the afternoon it had come on to be cloudy, and he had
lost his bearings; and although he had only to go always
downhill—everywhere the way to safety when one is
lost—the absence of trails had so impeded him that he was
overtaken by night while still in the forest. Unable in the
darkness to penetrate the thickets of manzanita and other
undergrowth, utterly bewildered and overcome with fatigue, he had
lain down near the root of a large madroño and fallen into
a dreamless sleep. It was hours later, in the very middle
of the night, that one of God’s mysterious messengers,
gliding ahead of the incalculable host of his companions sweeping
westward with the dawn line, pronounced the awakening word in the
ear of the sleeper, who sat upright and spoke, he knew not why, a
name, he knew not whose.</p>
<p>Halpin Frayser was not much of a philosopher, nor a
scientist. The circumstance that, waking from a deep sleep
at night in the midst of a forest, he had spoken aloud a name
that he had not in memory and hardly had in mind did not arouse
an enlightened curiosity to investigate the phenomenon. He
thought it odd, and with a little perfunctory shiver, as if in
deference to a seasonal presumption that the night was chill, he
lay down again and went to sleep. But his sleep was no
longer dreamless.</p>
<p>He thought he was walking along a dusty road that showed white
in the gathering darkness of a summer night. Whence and
whither it led, and why he traveled it, he did not know, though
all seemed simple and natural, as is the way in dreams; for in
the Land Beyond the Bed surprises cease from troubling and the
judgment is at rest. Soon he came to a parting of the ways;
leading from the highway was a road less traveled, having the
appearance, indeed, of having been long abandoned, because, he
thought, it led to something evil; yet he turned into it without
hesitation, impelled by some imperious necessity.</p>
<p>As he pressed forward he became conscious that his way was
haunted by invisible existences whom he could not definitely
figure to his mind. From among the trees on either side he
caught broken and incoherent whispers in a strange tongue which
yet he partly understood. They seemed to him fragmentary
utterances of a monstrous conspiracy against his body and
soul.</p>
<p>It was now long after nightfall, yet the interminable forest
through which he journeyed was lit with a wan glimmer having no
point of diffusion, for in its mysterious lumination nothing cast
a shadow. A shallow pool in the guttered depression of an
old wheel rut, as from a recent rain, met his eye with a crimson
gleam. He stooped and plunged his hand into it. It
stained his fingers; it was blood! Blood, he then observed,
was about him everywhere. The weeds growing rankly by the
roadside showed it in blots and splashes on their big, broad
leaves. Patches of dry dust between the wheelways were
pitted and spattered as with a red rain. Defiling the
trunks of the trees were broad maculations of crimson, and blood
dripped like dew from their foliage.</p>
<p>All this he observed with a terror which seemed not
incompatible with the fulfillment of a natural expectation.
It seemed to him that it was all in expiation of some crime
which, though conscious of his guilt, he could not rightly
remember. To the menaces and mysteries of his surroundings
the consciousness was an added horror. Vainly he sought by
tracing life backward in memory, to reproduce the moment of his
sin; scenes and incidents came crowding tumultuously into his
mind, one picture effacing another, or commingling with it in
confusion and obscurity, but nowhere could he catch a glimpse of
what he sought. The failure augmented his terror; he felt
as one who has murdered in the dark, not knowing whom nor
why. So frightful was the situation—the mysterious
light burned with so silent and awful a menace; the noxious
plants, the trees that by common consent are invested with a
melancholy or baleful character, so openly in his sight conspired
against his peace; from overhead and all about came so audible
and startling whispers and the sighs of creatures so obviously
not of earth—that he could endure it no longer, and with a
great effort to break some malign spell that bound his faculties
to silence and inaction, he shouted with the full strength of his
lungs! His voice broken, it seemed, into an infinite
multitude of unfamiliar sounds, went babbling and stammering away
into the distant reaches of the forest, died into silence, and
all was as before. But he had made a beginning at
resistance and was encouraged. He said:</p>
<p>“I will not submit unheard. There may be powers
that are not malignant traveling this accursed road. I
shall leave them a record and an appeal. I shall relate my
wrongs, the persecutions that I endure—I, a helpless
mortal, a penitent, an unoffending poet!” Halpin
Frayser was a poet only as he was a penitent: in his dream.</p>
<p>Taking from his clothing a small red-leather pocketbook,
one-half of which was leaved for memoranda, he discovered that he
was without a pencil. He broke a twig from a bush, dipped
it into a pool of blood and wrote rapidly. He had hardly
touched the paper with the point of his twig when a low, wild
peal of laughter broke out at a measureless distance away, and
growing ever louder, seemed approaching ever nearer; a soulless,
heartless, and unjoyous laugh, like that of the loon, solitary by
the lakeside at midnight; a laugh which culminated in an
unearthly shout close at hand, then died away by slow gradations,
as if the accursed being that uttered it had withdrawn over the
verge of the world whence it had come. But the man felt
that this was not so—that it was near by and had not
moved.</p>
<p>A strange sensation began slowly to take possession of his
body and his mind. He could not have said which, if any, of
his senses was affected; he felt it rather as a
consciousness—a mysterious mental assurance of some
overpowering presence—some supernatural malevolence
different in kind from the invisible existences that swarmed
about him, and superior to them in power. He knew that it
had uttered that hideous laugh. And now it seemed to be
approaching him; from what direction he did not know—dared
not conjecture. All his former fears were forgotten or
merged in the gigantic terror that now held him in thrall.
Apart from that, he had but one thought: to complete his written
appeal to the benign powers who, traversing the haunted wood,
might some time rescue him if he should be denied the blessing of
annihilation. He wrote with terrible rapidity, the twig in
his fingers rilling blood without renewal; but in the middle of a
sentence his hands denied their service to his will, his arms
fell to his sides, the book to the earth; and powerless to move
or cry out, he found himself staring into the sharply drawn face
and blank, dead eyes of his own mother, standing white and silent
in the garments of the grave!</p>
<h3><a name="page21"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
21</span>II</h3>
<p><span class="smcap">In</span> his youth Halpin Frayser had
lived with his parents in Nashville, Tennessee. The
Fraysers were well-to-do, having a good position in such society
as had survived the wreck wrought by civil war. Their
children had the social and educational opportunities of their
time and place, and had responded to good associations and
instruction with agreeable manners and cultivated minds.
Halpin being the youngest and not over robust was perhaps a
trifle “spoiled.” He had the double
disadvantage of a mother’s assiduity and a father’s
neglect. Frayser père was what no Southern man of
means is not—a politician. His country, or rather his
section and State, made demands upon his time and attention so
exacting that to those of his family he was compelled to turn an
ear partly deafened by the thunder of the political captains and
the shouting, his own included.</p>
<p>Young Halpin was of a dreamy, indolent and rather romantic
turn, somewhat more addicted to literature than law, the
profession to which he was bred. Among those of his
relations who professed the modern faith of heredity it was well
understood that in him the character of the late Myron Bayne, a
maternal great-grandfather, had revisited the glimpses of the
moon—by which orb Bayne had in his lifetime been
sufficiently affected to be a poet of no small Colonial
distinction. If not specially observed, it was observable
that while a Frayser who was not the proud possessor of a
sumptuous copy of the ancestral “poetical works”
(printed at the family expense, and long ago withdrawn from an
inhospitable market) was a rare Frayser indeed, there was an
illogical indisposition to honor the great deceased in the person
of his spiritual successor. Halpin was pretty generally
deprecated as an intellectual black sheep who was likely at any
moment to disgrace the flock by bleating in meter. The
Tennessee Fraysers were a practical folk—not practical in
the popular sense of devotion to sordid pursuits, but having a
robust contempt for any qualities unfitting a man for the
wholesome vocation of politics.</p>
<p>In justice to young Halpin it should be said that while in him
were pretty faithfully reproduced most of the mental and moral
characteristics ascribed by history and family tradition to the
famous Colonial bard, his succession to the gift and faculty
divine was purely inferential. Not only had he never been
known to court the muse, but in truth he could not have written
correctly a line of verse to save himself from the Killer of the
Wise. Still, there was no knowing when the dormant faculty
might wake and smite the lyre.</p>
<p>In the meantime the young man was rather a loose fish,
anyhow. Between him and his mother was the most perfect
sympathy, for secretly the lady was herself a devout disciple of
the late and great Myron Bayne, though with the tact so generally
and justly admired in her sex (despite the hardy calumniators who
insist that it is essentially the same thing as cunning) she had
always taken care to conceal her weakness from all eyes but those
of him who shared it. Their common guilt in respect of that
was an added tie between them. If in Halpin’s youth
his mother had “spoiled” him, he had assuredly done
his part toward being spoiled. As he grew to such manhood
as is attainable by a Southerner who does not care which way
elections go the attachment between him and his beautiful
mother—whom from early childhood he had called
Katy—became yearly stronger and more tender. In these
two romantic natures was manifest in a signal way that neglected
phenomenon, the dominance of the sexual element in all the
relations of life, strengthening, softening, and beautifying even
those of consanguinity. The two were nearly inseparable,
and by strangers observing their manner were not infrequently
mistaken for lovers.</p>
<p>Entering his mother’s boudoir one day Halpin Frayser
kissed her upon the forehead, toyed for a moment with a lock of
her dark hair which had escaped from its confining pins, and
said, with an obvious effort at calmness:</p>
<p>“Would you greatly mind, Katy, if I were called away to
California for a few weeks?”</p>
<p>It was hardly needful for Katy to answer with her lips a
question to which her telltale cheeks had made instant
reply. Evidently she would greatly mind; and the tears,
too, sprang into her large brown eyes as corroborative
testimony.</p>
<p>“Ah, my son,” she said, looking up into his face
with infinite tenderness, “I should have known that this
was coming. Did I not lie awake a half of the night weeping
because, during the other half, Grandfather Bayne had come to me
in a dream, and standing by his portrait—young, too, and
handsome as that—pointed to yours on the same wall?
And when I looked it seemed that I could not see the features;
you had been painted with a face cloth, such as we put upon the
dead. Your father has laughed at me, but you and I, dear,
know that such things are not for nothing. And I saw below
the edge of the cloth the marks of hands on your
throat—forgive me, but we have not been used to keep such
things from each other. Perhaps you have another
interpretation. Perhaps it does not mean that you will go
to California. Or maybe you will take me with
you?”</p>
<p>It must be confessed that this ingenious interpretation of the
dream in the light of newly discovered evidence did not wholly
commend itself to the son’s more logical mind; he had, for
the moment at least, a conviction that it foreshadowed a more
simple and immediate, if less tragic, disaster than a visit to
the Pacific Coast. It was Halpin Frayser’s impression
that he was to be garroted on his native heath.</p>
<p>“Are there not medicinal springs in California?”
Mrs. Frayser resumed before he had time to give her the true
reading of the dream—“places where one recovers from
rheumatism and neuralgia? Look—my fingers feel so
stiff; and I am almost sure they have been giving me great pain
while I slept.”</p>
<p>She held out her hands for his inspection. What
diagnosis of her case the young man may have thought it best to
conceal with a smile the historian is unable to state, but for
himself he feels bound to say that fingers looking less stiff,
and showing fewer evidences of even insensible pain, have seldom
been submitted for medical inspection by even the fairest patient
desiring a prescription of unfamiliar scenes.</p>
<p>The outcome of it was that of these two odd persons having
equally odd notions of duty, the one went to California, as the
interest of his client required, and the other remained at home
in compliance with a wish that her husband was scarcely conscious
of entertaining.</p>
<p>While in San Francisco Halpin Frayser was walking one dark
night along the water front of the city, when, with a suddenness
that surprised and disconcerted him, he became a sailor. He
was in fact “shanghaied” aboard a gallant, gallant
ship, and sailed for a far countree. Nor did his
misfortunes end with the voyage; for the ship was cast ashore on
an island of the South Pacific, and it was six years afterward
when the survivors were taken off by a venturesome trading
schooner and brought back to San Francisco.</p>
<p>Though poor in purse, Frayser was no less proud in spirit than
he had been in the years that seemed ages and ages ago. He
would accept no assistance from strangers, and it was while
living with a fellow survivor near the town of St. Helena,
awaiting news and remittances from home, that he had gone gunning
and dreaming.</p>
<h3><a name="page28"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
28</span>III</h3>
<p><span class="smcap">The</span> apparition confronting the
dreamer in the haunted wood—the thing so like, yet so
unlike his mother—was horrible! It stirred no love
nor longing in his heart; it came unattended with pleasant
memories of a golden past—inspired no sentiment of any
kind; all the finer emotions were swallowed up in fear. He
tried to turn and run from before it, but his legs were as lead;
he was unable to lift his feet from the ground. His arms
hung helpless at his sides; of his eyes only he retained control,
and these he dared not remove from the lusterless orbs of the
apparition, which he knew was not a soul without a body, but that
most dreadful of all existences infesting that haunted
wood—a body without a soul! In its blank stare was
neither love, nor pity, nor intelligence—nothing to which
to address an appeal for mercy. “An appeal will not
lie,” he thought, with an absurd reversion to professional
slang, making the situation more horrible, as the fire of a cigar
might light up a tomb.</p>
<p>For a time, which seemed so long that the world grew gray with
age and sin, and the haunted forest, having fulfilled its purpose
in this monstrous culmination of its terrors, vanished out of his
consciousness with all its sights and sounds, the apparition
stood within a pace, regarding him with the mindless malevolence
of a wild brute; then thrust its hands forward and sprang upon
him with appalling ferocity! The act released his physical
energies without unfettering his will; his mind was still
spellbound, but his powerful body and agile limbs, endowed with a
blind, insensate life of their own, resisted stoutly and
well. For an instant he seemed to see this unnatural
contest between a dead intelligence and a breathing mechanism
only as a spectator—such fancies are in dreams; then he
regained his identity almost as if by a leap forward into his
body, and the straining automaton had a directing will as alert
and fierce as that of its hideous antagonist.</p>
<p>But what mortal can cope with a creature of his dream?
The imagination creating the enemy is already vanquished; the
combat’s result is the combat’s cause. Despite
his struggles—despite his strength and activity, which
seemed wasted in a void, he felt the cold fingers close upon his
throat. Borne backward to the earth, he saw above him the
dead and drawn face within a hand’s breadth of his own, and
then all was black. A sound as of the beating of distant
drums—a murmur of swarming voices, a sharp, far cry signing
all to silence, and Halpin Frayser dreamed that he was dead.</p>
<h3><a name="page31"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
31</span>IV</h3>
<p>A <span class="smcap">warm</span>, clear night had been
followed by a morning of drenching fog. At about the middle
of the afternoon of the preceding day a little whiff of light
vapor—a mere thickening of the atmosphere, the ghost of a
cloud—had been observed clinging to the western side of
Mount St. Helena, away up along the barren altitudes near the
summit. It was so thin, so diaphanous, so like a fancy made
visible, that one would have said: “Look quickly! in a
moment it will be gone.”</p>
<p>In a moment it was visibly larger and denser. While with
one edge it clung to the mountain, with the other it reached
farther and farther out into the air above the lower
slopes. At the same time it extended itself to north and
south, joining small patches of mist that appeared to come out of
the mountainside on exactly the same level, with an intelligent
design to be absorbed. And so it grew and grew until the
summit was shut out of view from the valley, and over the valley
itself was an ever-extending canopy, opaque and gray. At
Calistoga, which lies near the head of the valley and the foot of
the mountain, there were a starless night and a sunless
morning. The fog, sinking into the valley, had reached
southward, swallowing up ranch after ranch, until it had blotted
out the town of St. Helena, nine miles away. The dust in
the road was laid; trees were adrip with moisture; birds sat
silent in their coverts; the morning light was wan and ghastly,
with neither color nor fire.</p>
<p>Two men left the town of St. Helena at the first glimmer of
dawn, and walked along the road northward up the valley toward
Calistoga. They carried guns on their shoulders, yet no one
having knowledge of such matters could have mistaken them for
hunters of bird or beast. They were a deputy sheriff from
Napa and a detective from San Francisco—Holker and
Jaralson, respectively. Their business was man-hunting.</p>
<p>“How far is it?” inquired Holker, as they strode
along, their feet stirring white the dust beneath the damp
surface of the road.</p>
<p>“The White Church? Only a half mile
farther,” the other answered. “By the
way,” he added, “it is neither white nor a church; it
is an abandoned schoolhouse, gray with age and neglect.
Religious services were once held in it—when it was white,
and there is a graveyard that would delight a poet. Can you
guess why I sent for you, and told you to come heeled?”</p>
<p>“Oh, I never have bothered you about things of that
kind. I’ve always found you communicative when the
time came. But if I may hazard a guess, you want me to help
you arrest one of the corpses in the graveyard.”</p>
<p>“You remember Branscom?” said Jaralson, treating
his companion’s wit with the inattention that it
deserved.</p>
<p>“The chap who cut his wife’s throat? I
ought; I wasted a week’s work on him and had my expenses
for my trouble. There is a reward of five hundred dollars,
but none of us ever got a sight of him. You don’t
mean to say—”</p>
<p>“Yes, I do. He has been under the noses of you
fellows all the time. He comes by night to the old
graveyard at the White Church.”</p>
<p>“The devil! That’s where they buried his
wife.”</p>
<p>“Well, you fellows might have had sense enough to
suspect that he would return to her grave some time.”</p>
<p>“The very last place that anyone would have expected him
to return to.”</p>
<p>“But you had exhausted all the other places.
Learning your failure at them, I ‘laid for him’
there.”</p>
<p>“And you found him?”</p>
<p>“Damn it! he found <i>me</i>. The rascal got the
drop on me—regularly held me up and made me travel.
It’s God’s mercy that he didn’t go through
me. Oh, he’s a good one, and I fancy the half of that
reward is enough for me if you’re needy.”</p>
<p>Holker laughed good humoredly, and explained that his
creditors were never more importunate.</p>
<p>“I wanted merely to show you the ground, and arrange a
plan with you,” the detective explained. “I
thought it as well for us to be heeled, even in
daylight.”</p>
<p>“The man must be insane,” said the deputy
sheriff. “The reward is for his capture and
conviction. If he’s mad he won’t be
convicted.”</p>
<p>Mr. Holker was so profoundly affected by that possible failure
of justice that he involuntarily stopped in the middle of the
road, then resumed his walk with abated zeal.</p>
<p>“Well, he looks it,” assented Jaralson.
“I’m bound to admit that a more unshaven, unshorn,
unkempt, and uneverything wretch I never saw outside the ancient
and honorable order of tramps. But I’ve gone in for
him, and can’t make up my mind to let go.
There’s glory in it for us, anyhow. Not another soul
knows that he is this side of the Mountains of the
Moon.”</p>
<p>“All right,” Holker said; “we will go and
view the ground,” and he added, in the words of a once
favorite inscription for tombstones: “‘where you must
shortly lie’—I mean, if old Branscom ever gets tired
of you and your impertinent intrusion. By the way, I heard
the other day that ‘Branscom’ was not his real
name.”</p>
<p>“What is?”</p>
<p>“I can’t recall it. I had lost all interest
in the wretch, and it did not fix itself in my
memory—something like Pardee. The woman whose throat
he had the bad taste to cut was a widow when he met her.
She had come to California to look up some relatives—there
are persons who will do that sometimes. But you know all
that.”</p>
<p>“Naturally.”</p>
<p>“But not knowing the right name, by what happy
inspiration did you find the right grave? The man who told
me what the name was said it had been cut on the
headboard.”</p>
<p>“I don’t know the right grave.”
Jaralson was apparently a trifle reluctant to admit his ignorance
of so important a point of his plan. “I have been
watching about the place generally. A part of our work this
morning will be to identify that grave. Here is the White
Church.”</p>
<p>For a long distance the road had been bordered by fields on
both sides, but now on the left there was a forest of oaks,
madroños, and gigantic spruces whose lower parts only
could be seen, dim and ghostly in the fog. The undergrowth
was, in places, thick, but nowhere impenetrable. For some
moments Holker saw nothing of the building, but as they turned
into the woods it revealed itself in faint gray outline through
the fog, looking huge and far away. A few steps more, and
it was within an arm’s length, distinct, dark with
moisture, and insignificant in size. It had the usual
country-schoolhouse form—belonged to the packing-box order
of architecture; had an underpinning of stones, a moss-grown
roof, and blank window spaces, whence both glass and sash had
long departed. It was ruined, but not a ruin—a
typical Californian substitute for what are known to
guide-bookers abroad as “monuments of the
past.” With scarcely a glance at this uninteresting
structure Jaralson moved on into the dripping undergrowth
beyond.</p>
<p>“I will show you where he held me up,” he
said. “This is the graveyard.”</p>
<p>Here and there among the bushes were small inclosures
containing graves, sometimes no more than one. They were
recognized as graves by the discolored stones or rotting boards
at head and foot, leaning at all angles, some prostrate; by the
ruined picket fences surrounding them; or, infrequently, by the
mound itself showing its gravel through the fallen leaves.
In many instances nothing marked the spot where lay the vestiges
of some poor mortal—who, leaving “a large circle of
sorrowing friends,” had been left by them in
turn—except a depression in the earth, more lasting than
that in the spirits of the mourners. The paths, if any
paths had been, were long obliterated; trees of a considerable
size had been permitted to grow up from the graves and thrust
aside with root or branch the inclosing fences. Over all
was that air of abandonment and decay which seems nowhere so fit
and significant as in a village of the forgotten dead.</p>
<p>As the two men, Jaralson leading, pushed their way through the
growth of young trees, that enterprising man suddenly stopped and
brought up his shotgun to the height of his breast, uttered a low
note of warning, and stood motionless, his eyes fixed upon
something ahead. As well as he could, obstructed by brush,
his companion, though seeing nothing, imitated the posture and so
stood, prepared for what might ensue. A moment later
Jaralson moved cautiously forward, the other following.</p>
<p>Under the branches of an enormous spruce lay the dead body of
a man. Standing silent above it they noted such particulars
as first strike the attention—the face, the attitude, the
clothing; whatever most promptly and plainly answers the unspoken
question of a sympathetic curiosity.</p>
<p>The body lay upon its back, the legs wide apart. One arm
was thrust upward, the other outward; but the latter was bent
acutely, and the hand was near the throat. Both hands were
tightly clenched. The whole attitude was that of desperate
but ineffectual resistance to—what?</p>
<p>Near by lay a shotgun and a game bag through the meshes of
which was seen the plumage of shot birds. All about were
evidences of a furious struggle; small sprouts of poison-oak were
bent and denuded of leaf and bark; dead and rotting leaves had
been pushed into heaps and ridges on both sides of the legs by
the action of other feet than theirs; alongside the hips were
unmistakable impressions of human knees.</p>
<p>The nature of the struggle was made clear by a glance at the
dead man’s throat and face. While breast and hands
were white, those were purple—almost black. The
shoulders lay upon a low mound, and the head was turned back at
an angle otherwise impossible, the expanded eyes staring blankly
backward in a direction opposite to that of the feet. From
the froth filling the open mouth the tongue protruded, black and
swollen. The throat showed horrible contusions; not mere
finger-marks, but bruises and lacerations wrought by two strong
hands that must have buried themselves in the yielding flesh,
maintaining their terrible grasp until long after death.
Breast, throat, face, were wet; the clothing was saturated; drops
of water, condensed from the fog, studded the hair and
mustache.</p>
<p>All this the two men observed without speaking—almost at
a glance. Then Holker said:</p>
<p>“Poor devil! he had a rough deal.”</p>
<p>Jaralson was making a vigilant circumspection of the forest,
his shotgun held in both hands and at full cock, his finger upon
the trigger.</p>
<p>“The work of a maniac,” he said, without
withdrawing his eyes from the inclosing wood. “It was
done by Branscom—Pardee.”</p>
<p>Something half hidden by the disturbed leaves on the earth
caught Holker’s attention. It was a red-leather
pocketbook. He picked it up and opened it. It
contained leaves of white paper for memoranda, and upon the first
leaf was the name “Halpin Frayser.” Written in
red on several succeeding leaves—scrawled as if in haste
and barely legible—were the following lines, which Holker
read aloud, while his companion continued scanning the dim gray
confines of their narrow world and hearing matter of apprehension
in the drip of water from every burdened branch:</p>
<blockquote><p>“Enthralled by some mysterious spell, I
stood<br />
In the lit gloom of an enchanted wood.<br />
The cypress there and myrtle twined their boughs,<br
/>
Significant, in baleful brotherhood.</p>
<p>“The brooding willow whispered to the yew;<br />
Beneath, the deadly nightshade and the rue,<br />
With immortelles self-woven into strange<br />
Funereal shapes, and horrid nettles grew.</p>
<p>“No song of bird nor any drone of bees,<br />
Nor light leaf lifted by the wholesome breeze:<br />
The air was stagnant all, and Silence was<br />
A living thing that breathed among the trees.</p>
<p>“Conspiring spirits whispered in the gloom,<br />
Half-heard, the stilly secrets of the tomb.<br />
With blood the trees were all adrip; the leaves<br
/>
Shone in the witch-light with a ruddy bloom.</p>
<p>“I cried aloud!—the spell, unbroken still,<br />
Rested upon my spirit and my will.<br />
Unsouled, unhearted, hopeless and forlorn,<br />
I strove with monstrous presages of ill!</p>
<p>“At last the viewless—”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Holker ceased reading; there was no more to read. The
manuscript broke off in the middle of a line.</p>
<p>“That sounds like Bayne,” said Jaralson, who was
something of a scholar in his way. He had abated his
vigilance and stood looking down at the body.</p>
<p>“Who’s Bayne?” Holker asked rather
incuriously.</p>
<p>“Myron Bayne, a chap who flourished in the early years
of the nation—more than a century ago. Wrote mighty
dismal stuff; I have his collected works. That poem is not
among them, but it must have been omitted by mistake.”</p>
<p>“It is cold,” said Holker; “let us leave
here; we must have up the coroner from Napa.”</p>
<p>Jaralson said nothing, but made a movement in
compliance. Passing the end of the slight elevation of
earth upon which the dead man’s head and shoulders lay, his
foot struck some hard substance under the rotting forest leaves,
and he took the trouble to kick it into view. It was a
fallen headboard, and painted on it were the hardly decipherable
words, “Catharine Larue.”</p>
<p>“Larue, Larue!” exclaimed Holker, with sudden
animation. “Why, that is the real name of
Branscom—not Pardee. And—bless my soul! how it
all comes to me—the murdered woman’s name had been
Frayser!”</p>
<p>“There is some rascally mystery here,” said
Detective Jaralson. “I hate anything of that
kind.”</p>
<p>There came to them out of the fog—seemingly from a great
distance—the sound of a laugh, a low, deliberate, soulless
laugh, which had no more of joy than that of a hyena
night-prowling in the desert; a laugh that rose by slow
gradation, louder and louder, clearer, more distinct and
terrible, until it seemed barely outside the narrow circle of
their vision; a laugh so unnatural, so unhuman, so devilish, that
it filled those hardy man-hunters with a sense of dread
unspeakable! They did not move their weapons nor think of
them; the menace of that horrible sound was not of the kind to be
met with arms. As it had grown out of silence, so now it
died away; from a culminating shout which had seemed almost in
their ears, it drew itself away into the distance, until its
failing notes, joyless and mechanical to the last, sank to
silence at a measureless remove.</p>
<h2><a name="page44"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 44</span>THE
SECRET OF MACARGER’S GULCH</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">Northwestwardly</span> from Indian Hill,
about nine miles as the crow flies, is Macarger’s
Gulch. It is not much of a gulch—a mere depression
between two wooded ridges of inconsiderable height. From
its mouth up to its head—for gulches, like rivers, have an
anatomy of their own—the distance does not exceed two
miles, and the width at bottom is at only one place more than a
dozen yards; for most of the distance on either side of the
little brook which drains it in winter, and goes dry in the early
spring, there is no level ground at all; the steep slopes of the
hills, covered with an almost impenetrable growth of manzanita
and chemisal, are parted by nothing but the width of the water
course. No one but an occasional enterprising hunter of the
vicinity ever goes into Macarger’s Gulch, and five miles
away it is unknown, even by name. Within that distance in
any direction are far more conspicuous topographical features
without names, and one might try in vain to ascertain by local
inquiry the origin of the name of this one.</p>
<p>About midway between the head and the mouth of
Macarger’s Gulch, the hill on the right as you ascend is
cloven by another gulch, a short dry one, and at the junction of
the two is a level space of two or three acres, and there a few
years ago stood an old board house containing one small
room. How the component parts of the house, few and simple
as they were, had been assembled at that almost inaccessible
point is a problem in the solution of which there would be
greater satisfaction than advantage. Possibly the creek bed
is a reformed road. It is certain that the gulch was at one
time pretty thoroughly prospected by miners, who must have had
some means of getting in with at least pack animals carrying
tools and supplies; their profits, apparently, were not such as
would have justified any considerable outlay to connect
Macarger’s Gulch with any center of civilization enjoying
the distinction of a sawmill. The house, however, was
there, most of it. It lacked a door and a window frame, and
the chimney of mud and stones had fallen into an unlovely heap,
overgrown with rank weeds. Such humble furniture as there
may once have been and much of the lower weatherboarding, had
served as fuel in the camp fires of hunters; as had also,
probably, the curbing of an old well, which at the time I write
of existed in the form of a rather wide but not very deep
depression near by.</p>
<p>One afternoon in the summer of 1874, I passed up
Macarger’s Gulch from the narrow valley into which it
opens, by following the dry bed of the brook. I was
quail-shooting and had made a bag of about a dozen birds by the
time I had reached the house described, of whose existence I was
until then unaware. After rather carelessly inspecting the
ruin I resumed my sport, and having fairly good success prolonged
it until near sunset, when it occurred to me that I was a long
way from any human habitation—too far to reach one by
nightfall. But in my game bag was food, and the old house
would afford shelter, if shelter were needed on a warm and
dewless night in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, where one
may sleep in comfort on the pine needles, without covering.
I am fond of solitude and love the night, so my resolution to
“camp out” was soon taken, and by the time that it
was dark I had made my bed of boughs and grasses in a corner of
the room and was roasting a quail at a fire that I had kindled on
the hearth. The smoke escaped out of the ruined chimney,
the light illuminated the room with a kindly glow, and as I ate
my simple meal of plain bird and drank the remains of a bottle of
red wine which had served me all the afternoon in place of the
water, which the region did not supply, I experienced a sense of
comfort which better fare and accommodations do not always
give.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, there was something lacking. I had a sense
of comfort, but not of security. I detected myself staring
more frequently at the open doorway and blank window than I could
find warrant for doing. Outside these apertures all was
black, and I was unable to repress a certain feeling of
apprehension as my fancy pictured the outer world and filled it
with unfriendly entities, natural and supernatural—chief
among which, in their respective classes, were the grizzly bear,
which I knew was occasionally still seen in that region, and the
ghost, which I had reason to think was not. Unfortunately,
our feelings do not always respect the law of probabilities, and
to me that evening, the possible and the impossible were equally
disquieting.</p>
<p>Everyone who has had experience in the matter must have
observed that one confronts the actual and imaginary perils of
the night with far less apprehension in the open air than in a
house with an open doorway. I felt this now as I lay on my
leafy couch in a corner of the room next to the chimney and
permitted my fire to die out. So strong became my sense of
the presence of something malign and menacing in the place, that
I found myself almost unable to withdraw my eyes from the
opening, as in the deepening darkness it became more and more
indistinct. And when the last little flame flickered and
went out I grasped the shotgun which I had laid at my side and
actually turned the muzzle in the direction of the now invisible
entrance, my thumb on one of the hammers, ready to cock the
piece, my breath suspended, my muscles rigid and tense. But
later I laid down the weapon with a sense of shame and
mortification. What did I fear, and why?—I, to whom
the night had been</p>
<blockquote><p> a
more familiar face<br />
Than that of man—</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I, in whom that element of hereditary superstition from which
none of us is altogether free had given to solitude and darkness
and silence only a more alluring interest and charm! I was
unable to comprehend my folly, and losing in the conjecture the
thing conjectured of, I fell asleep. And then I
dreamed.</p>
<p>I was in a great city in a foreign land—a city whose
people were of my own race, with minor differences of speech and
costume; yet precisely what these were I could not say; my sense
of them was indistinct. The city was dominated by a great
castle upon an overlooking height whose name I knew, but could
not speak. I walked through many streets, some broad and
straight with high, modern buildings, some narrow, gloomy, and
tortuous, between the gables of quaint old houses whose
overhanging stories, elaborately ornamented with carvings in wood
and stone, almost met above my head.</p>
<p>I sought someone whom I had never seen, yet knew that I should
recognize when found. My quest was not aimless and
fortuitous; it had a definite method. I turned from one
street into another without hesitation and threaded a maze of
intricate passages, devoid of the fear of losing my way.</p>
<p>Presently I stopped before a low door in a plain stone house
which might have been the dwelling of an artisan of the better
sort, and without announcing myself, entered. The room,
rather sparely furnished, and lighted by a single window with
small diamond-shaped panes, had but two occupants; a man and a
woman. They took no notice of my intrusion, a circumstance
which, in the manner of dreams, appeared entirely natural.
They were not conversing; they sat apart, unoccupied and
sullen.</p>
<p>The woman was young and rather stout, with fine large eyes and
a certain grave beauty; my memory of her expression is
exceedingly vivid, but in dreams one does not observe the details
of faces. About her shoulders was a plaid shawl. The
man was older, dark, with an evil face made more forbidding by a
long scar extending from near the left temple diagonally downward
into the black mustache; though in my dreams it seemed rather to
haunt the face as a thing apart—I can express it no
otherwise—than to belong to it. The moment that I
found the man and woman I knew them to be husband and wife.</p>
<p>What followed, I remember indistinctly; all was confused and
inconsistent—made so, I think, by gleams of
consciousness. It was as if two pictures, the scene of my
dream, and my actual surroundings, had been blended, one
overlying the other, until the former, gradually fading,
disappeared, and I was broad awake in the deserted cabin,
entirely and tranquilly conscious of my situation.</p>
<p>My foolish fear was gone, and opening my eyes I saw that my
fire, not altogether burned out, had revived by the falling of a
stick and was again lighting the room. I had probably slept
only a few minutes, but my commonplace dream had somehow so
strongly impressed me that I was no longer drowsy; and after a
little while I rose, pushed the embers of my fire together, and
lighting my pipe proceeded in a rather ludicrously methodical way
to meditate upon my vision.</p>
<p>It would have puzzled me then to say in what respect it was
worth attention. In the first moment of serious thought
that I gave to the matter I recognized the city of my dream as
Edinburgh, where I had never been; so if the dream was a memory
it was a memory of pictures and description. The
recognition somehow deeply impressed me; it was as if something
in my mind insisted rebelliously against will and reason on the
importance of all this. And that faculty, whatever it was,
asserted also a control of my speech. “Surely,”
I said aloud, quite involuntarily, “the MacGregors must
have come here from Edinburgh.”</p>
<p>At the moment, neither the substance of this remark nor the
fact of my making it, surprised me in the least; it seemed
entirely natural that I should know the name of my dreamfolk and
something of their history. But the absurdity of it all
soon dawned upon me: I laughed aloud, knocked the ashes from my
pipe and again stretched myself upon my bed of boughs and grass,
where I lay staring absently into my failing fire, with no
further thought of either my dream or my surroundings.
Suddenly the single remaining flame crouched for a moment, then,
springing upward, lifted itself clear of its embers and expired
in air. The darkness was absolute.</p>
<p>At that instant—almost, it seemed, before the gleam of
the blaze had faded from my eyes—there was a dull, dead
sound, as of some heavy body falling upon the floor, which shook
beneath me as I lay. I sprang to a sitting posture and
groped at my side for my gun; my notion was that some wild beast
had leaped in through the open window. While the flimsy
structure was still shaking from the impact I heard the sound of
blows, the scuffling of feet upon the floor, and then—it
seemed to come from almost within reach of my hand, the sharp
shrieking of a woman in mortal agony. So horrible a cry I
had never heard nor conceived; it utterly unnerved me; I was
conscious for a moment of nothing but my own terror!
Fortunately my hand now found the weapon of which it was in
search, and the familiar touch somewhat restored me. I
leaped to my feet, straining my eyes to pierce the
darkness. The violent sounds had ceased, but more terrible
than these, I heard, at what seemed long intervals, the faint
intermittent gasping of some living, dying thing!</p>
<p>As my eyes grew accustomed to the dim light of the coals in
the fireplace, I saw first the shapes of the door and window,
looking blacker than the black of the walls. Next, the
distinction between wall and floor became discernible, and at
last I was sensible to the form and full expanse of the floor
from end to end and side to side. Nothing was visible and
the silence was unbroken.</p>
<p>With a hand that shook a little, the other still grasping my
gun, I restored my fire and made a critical examination of the
place. There was nowhere any sign that the cabin had been
entered. My own tracks were visible in the dust covering
the floor, but there were no others. I relit my pipe,
provided fresh fuel by ripping a thin board or two from the
inside of the house—I did not care to go into the darkness
out of doors—and passed the rest of the night smoking and
thinking, and feeding my fire; not for added years of life would
I have permitted that little flame to expire again.</p>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<p>Some years afterward I met in Sacramento a man named Morgan,
to whom I had a note of introduction from a friend in San
Francisco. Dining with him one evening at his home I
observed various “trophies” upon the wall, indicating
that he was fond of shooting. It turned out that he was,
and in relating some of his feats he mentioned having been in the
region of my adventure.</p>
<p>“Mr. Morgan,” I asked abruptly, “do you know
a place up there called Macarger’s Gulch?”</p>
<p>“I have good reason to,” he replied; “it was
I who gave to the newspapers, last year, the accounts of the
finding of the skeleton there.”</p>
<p>I had not heard of it; the accounts had been published, it
appeared, while I was absent in the East.</p>
<p>“By the way,” said Morgan, “the name of the
gulch is a corruption; it should have been called
‘MacGregor’s.’ My dear,” he added,
speaking to his wife, “Mr. Elderson has upset his
wine.”</p>
<p>That was hardly accurate—I had simply dropped it, glass
and all.</p>
<p>“There was an old shanty once in the gulch,”
Morgan resumed when the ruin wrought by my awkwardness had been
repaired, “but just previously to my visit it had been
blown down, or rather blown away, for its <i>débris</i>
was scattered all about, the very floor being parted, plank from
plank. Between two of the sleepers still in position I and
my companion observed the remnant of a plaid shawl, and examining
it found that it was wrapped about the shoulders of the body of a
woman, of which but little remained besides the bones, partly
covered with fragments of clothing, and brown dry skin. But
we will spare Mrs. Morgan,” he added with a smile.
The lady had indeed exhibited signs of disgust rather than
sympathy.</p>
<p>“It is necessary to say, however,” he went on,
“that the skull was fractured in several places, as by
blows of some blunt instrument; and that instrument
itself—a pick-handle, still stained with blood—lay
under the boards near by.”</p>
<p>Mr. Morgan turned to his wife. “Pardon me, my
dear,” he said with affected solemnity, “for
mentioning these disagreeable particulars, the natural though
regrettable incidents of a conjugal quarrel—resulting,
doubtless, from the luckless wife’s
insubordination.”</p>
<p>“I ought to be able to overlook it,” the lady
replied with composure; “you have so many times asked me to
in those very words.”</p>
<p>I thought he seemed rather glad to go on with his story.</p>
<p>“From these and other circumstances,” he said,
“the coroner’s jury found that the deceased, Janet
MacGregor, came to her death from blows inflicted by some person
to the jury unknown; but it was added that the evidence pointed
strongly to her husband, Thomas MacGregor, as the guilty
person. But Thomas MacGregor has never been found nor heard
of. It was learned that the couple came from Edinburgh, but
not—my dear, do you not observe that Mr. Elderson’s
boneplate has water in it?”</p>
<p>I had deposited a chicken bone in my finger bowl.</p>
<p>“In a little cupboard I found a photograph of MacGregor,
but it did not lead to his capture.”</p>
<p>“Will you let me see it?” I said.</p>
<p>The picture showed a dark man with an evil face made more
forbidding by a long scar extending from near the temple
diagonally downward into the black mustache.</p>
<p>“By the way, Mr. Elderson,” said my affable host,
“may I know why you asked about ‘Macarger’s
Gulch’?”</p>
<p>“I lost a mule near there once,” I replied,
“and the mischance has—has quite—upset
me.”</p>
<p>“My dear,” said Mr. Morgan, with the mechanical
intonation of an interpreter translating, “the loss of Mr.
Elderson’s mule has peppered his coffee.”</p>
<h2><a name="page58"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 58</span>ONE
SUMMER NIGHT</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">The</span> fact that Henry Armstrong was
buried did not seem to him to prove that he was dead: he had
always been a hard man to convince. That he really was
buried, the testimony of his senses compelled him to admit.
His posture—flat upon his back, with his hands crossed upon
his stomach and tied with something that he easily broke without
profitably altering the situation—the strict confinement of
his entire person, the black darkness and profound silence, made
a body of evidence impossible to controvert and he accepted it
without cavil.</p>
<p>But dead—no; he was only very, very ill. He had,
withal, the invalid’s apathy and did not greatly concern
himself about the uncommon fate that had been allotted to
him. No philosopher was he—just a plain, commonplace
person gifted, for the time being, with a pathological
indifference: the organ that he feared consequences with was
torpid. So, with no particular apprehension for his
immediate future, he fell asleep and all was peace with Henry
Armstrong.</p>
<p>But something was going on overhead. It was a dark
summer night, shot through with infrequent shimmers of lightning
silently firing a cloud lying low in the west and portending a
storm. These brief, stammering illuminations brought out
with ghastly distinctness the monuments and headstones of the
cemetery and seemed to set them dancing. It was not a night
in which any credible witness was likely to be straying about a
cemetery, so the three men who were there, digging into the grave
of Henry Armstrong, felt reasonably secure.</p>
<p>Two of them were young students from a medical college a few
miles away; the third was a gigantic negro known as Jess.
For many years Jess had been employed about the cemetery as a
man-of-all-work and it was his favorite pleasantry that he knew
“every soul in the place.” From the nature of
what he was now doing it was inferable that the place was not so
populous as its register may have shown it to be.</p>
<p>Outside the wall, at the part of the grounds farthest from the
public road, were a horse and a light wagon, waiting.</p>
<p>The work of excavation was not difficult: the earth with which
the grave had been loosely filled a few hours before offered
little resistance and was soon thrown out. Removal of the
casket from its box was less easy, but it was taken out, for it
was a perquisite of Jess, who carefully unscrewed the cover and
laid it aside, exposing the body in black trousers and white
shirt. At that instant the air sprang to flame, a cracking
shock of thunder shook the stunned world and Henry Armstrong
tranquilly sat up. With inarticulate cries the men fled in
terror, each in a different direction. For nothing on earth
could two of them have been persuaded to return. But Jess
was of another breed.</p>
<p>In the gray of the morning the two students, pallid and
haggard from anxiety and with the terror of their adventure still
beating tumultuously in their blood, met at the medical
college.</p>
<p>“You saw it?” cried one.</p>
<p>“God! yes—what are we to do?”</p>
<p>They went around to the rear of the building, where they saw a
horse, attached to a light wagon, hitched to a gatepost near the
door of the dissecting-room. Mechanically they entered the
room. On a bench in the obscurity sat the negro Jess.
He rose, grinning, all eyes and teeth.</p>
<p>“I’m waiting for my pay,” he said.</p>
<p>Stretched naked on a long table lay the body of Henry
Armstrong, the head defiled with blood and clay from a blow with
a spade.</p>
<h2><a name="page62"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 62</span>THE
MOONLIT ROAD</h2>
<h3>I<br />
STATEMENT OF JOEL HETMAN, JR.</h3>
<p>I <span class="smcap">am</span> the most unfortunate of
men. Rich, respected, fairly well educated and of sound
health—with many other advantages usually valued by those
having them and coveted by those who have them not—I
sometimes think that I should be less unhappy if they had been
denied me, for then the contrast between my outer and my inner
life would not be continually demanding a painful
attention. In the stress of privation and the need of
effort I might sometimes forget the somber secret ever baffling
the conjecture that it compels.</p>
<p>I am the only child of Joel and Julia Hetman. The one
was a well-to-do country gentleman, the other a beautiful and
accomplished woman to whom he was passionately attached with what
I now know to have been a jealous and exacting devotion.
The family home was a few miles from Nashville, Tennessee, a
large, irregularly built dwelling of no particular order of
architecture, a little way off the road, in a park of trees and
shrubbery.</p>
<p>At the time of which I write I was nineteen years old, a
student at Yale. One day I received a telegram from my
father of such urgency that in compliance with its unexplained
demand I left at once for home. At the railway station in
Nashville a distant relative awaited me to apprise me of the
reason for my recall: my mother had been barbarously
murdered—why and by whom none could conjecture, but the
circumstances were these: My father had gone to Nashville,
intending to return the next afternoon. Something prevented
his accomplishing the business in hand, so he returned on the
same night, arriving just before the dawn. In his testimony
before the coroner he explained that having no latchkey and not
caring to disturb the sleeping servants, he had, with no clearly
defined intention, gone round to the rear of the house. As
he turned an angle of the building, he heard a sound as of a door
gently closed, and saw in the darkness, indistinctly, the figure
of a man, which instantly disappeared among the trees of the
lawn. A hasty pursuit and brief search of the grounds in
the belief that the trespasser was some one secretly visiting a
servant proving fruitless, he entered at the unlocked door and
mounted the stairs to my mother’s chamber. Its door
was open, and stepping into black darkness he fell headlong over
some heavy object on the floor. I may spare myself the
details; it was my poor mother, dead of strangulation by human
hands!</p>
<p>Nothing had been taken from the house, the servants had heard
no sound, and excepting those terrible finger-marks upon the dead
woman’s throat—dear God! that I might forget
them!—no trace of the assassin was ever found.</p>
<p>I gave up my studies and remained with my father, who,
naturally, was greatly changed. Always of a sedate,
taciturn disposition, he now fell into so deep a dejection that
nothing could hold his attention, yet anything—a footfall,
the sudden closing of a door—aroused in him a fitful
interest; one might have called it an apprehension. At any
small surprise of the senses he would start visibly and sometimes
turn pale, then relapse into a melancholy apathy deeper than
before. I suppose he was what is called a “nervous
wreck.” As to me, I was younger then than
now—there is much in that. Youth is Gilead, in which
is balm for every wound. Ah, that I might again dwell in
that enchanted land! Unacquainted with grief, I knew not
how to appraise my bereavement; I could not rightly estimate the
strength of the stroke.</p>
<p>One night, a few months after the dreadful event, my father
and I walked home from the city. The full moon was about
three hours above the eastern horizon; the entire countryside had
the solemn stillness of a summer night; our footfalls and the
ceaseless song of the katydids were the only sound aloof.
Black shadows of bordering trees lay athwart the road, which, in
the short reaches between, gleamed a ghostly white. As we
approached the gate to our dwelling, whose front was in shadow,
and in which no light shone, my father suddenly stopped and
clutched my arm, saying, hardly above his breath:</p>
<p>“God! God! what is that?”</p>
<p>“I hear nothing,” I replied.</p>
<p>“But see—see!” he said, pointing along the
road, directly ahead.</p>
<p>I said: “Nothing is there. Come, father, let us go
in—you are ill.”</p>
<p>He had released my arm and was standing rigid and motionless
in the center of the illuminated roadway, staring like one bereft
of sense. His face in the moonlight showed a pallor and
fixity inexpressibly distressing. I pulled gently at his
sleeve, but he had forgotten my existence. Presently he
began to retire backward, step by step, never for an instant
removing his eyes from what he saw, or thought he saw. I
turned half round to follow, but stood irresolute. I do not
recall any feeling of fear, unless a sudden chill was its
physical manifestation. It seemed as if an icy wind had
touched my face and enfolded my body from head to foot; I could
feel the stir of it in my hair.</p>
<p>At that moment my attention was drawn to a light that suddenly
streamed from an upper window of the house: one of the servants,
awakened by what mysterious premonition of evil who can say, and
in obedience to an impulse that she was never able to name, had
lit a lamp. When I turned to look for my father he was
gone, and in all the years that have passed no whisper of his
fate has come across the borderland of conjecture from the realm
of the unknown.</p>
<h3><a name="page67"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 67</span>II<br
/>
STATEMENT OF CASPAR GRATTAN</h3>
<p>To-day I am said to live; to-morrow, here in this room, will
lie a senseless shape of clay that all too long was I. If
anyone lift the cloth from the face of that unpleasant thing it
will be in gratification of a mere morbid curiosity. Some,
doubtless, will go further and inquire, “Who was
he?” In this writing I supply the only answer that I
am able to make—Caspar Grattan. Surely, that should
be enough. The name has served my small need for more than
twenty years of a life of unknown length. True, I gave it
to myself, but lacking another I had the right. In this
world one must have a name; it prevents confusion, even when it
does not establish identity. Some, though, are known by
numbers, which also seem inadequate distinctions.</p>
<p>One day, for illustration, I was passing along a street of a
city, far from here, when I met two men in uniform, one of whom,
half pausing and looking curiously into my face, said to his
companion, “That man looks like 767.” Something
in the number seemed familiar and horrible. Moved by an
uncontrollable impulse, I sprang into a side street and ran until
I fell exhausted in a country lane.</p>
<p>I have never forgotten that number, and always it comes to
memory attended by gibbering obscenity, peals of joyless
laughter, the clang of iron doors. So I say a name, even if
self-bestowed, is better than a number. In the register of
the potter’s field I shall soon have both. What
wealth!</p>
<p>Of him who shall find this paper I must beg a little
consideration. It is not the history of my life; the
knowledge to write that is denied me. This is only a record
of broken and apparently unrelated memories, some of them as
distinct and sequent as brilliant beads upon a thread, others
remote and strange, having the character of crimson dreams with
interspaces blank and black—witch-fires glowing still and
red in a great desolation.</p>
<p>Standing upon the shore of eternity, I turn for a last look
landward over the course by which I came. There are twenty
years of footprints fairly distinct, the impressions of bleeding
feet. They lead through poverty and pain, devious and
unsure, as of one staggering beneath a burden—</p>
<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">Remote, unfriended,
melancholy, slow.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ah, the poet’s prophecy of Me—how admirable, how
dreadfully admirable!</p>
<p>Backward beyond the beginning of this <i>via
dolorosa</i>—this epic of suffering with episodes of
sin—I see nothing clearly; it comes out of a cloud. I
know that it spans only twenty years, yet I am an old man.</p>
<p>One does not remember one’s birth—one has to be
told. But with me it was different; life came to me
full-handed and dowered me with all my faculties and
powers. Of a previous existence I know no more than others,
for all have stammering intimations that may be memories and may
be dreams. I know only that my first consciousness was of
maturity in body and mind—a consciousness accepted without
surprise or conjecture. I merely found myself walking in a
forest, half-clad, footsore, unutterably weary and hungry.
Seeing a farmhouse, I approached and asked for food, which was
given me by one who inquired my name. I did not know, yet
knew that all had names. Greatly embarrassed, I retreated,
and night coming on, lay down in the forest and slept.</p>
<p>The next day I entered a large town which I shall not
name. Nor shall I recount further incidents of the life
that is now to end—a life of wandering, always and
everywhere haunted by an overmastering sense of crime in
punishment of wrong and of terror in punishment of crime.
Let me see if I can reduce it to narrative.</p>
<p>I seem once to have lived near a great city, a prosperous
planter, married to a woman whom I loved and distrusted. We
had, it sometimes seems, one child, a youth of brilliant parts
and promise. He is at all times a vague figure, never
clearly drawn, frequently altogether out of the picture.</p>
<p>One luckless evening it occurred to me to test my wife’s
fidelity in a vulgar, commonplace way familiar to everyone who
has acquaintance with the literature of fact and fiction. I
went to the city, telling my wife that I should be absent until
the following afternoon. But I returned before daybreak and
went to the rear of the house, purposing to enter by a door with
which I had secretly so tampered that it would seem to lock, yet
not actually fasten. As I approached it, I heard it gently
open and close, and saw a man steal away into the darkness.
With murder in my heart, I sprang after him, but he had vanished
without even the bad luck of identification. Sometimes now
I cannot even persuade myself that it was a human being.</p>
<p>Crazed with jealousy and rage, blind and bestial with all the
elemental passions of insulted manhood, I entered the house and
sprang up the stairs to the door of my wife’s
chamber. It was closed, but having tampered with its lock
also, I easily entered and despite the black darkness soon stood
by the side of her bed. My groping hands told me that
although disarranged it was unoccupied.</p>
<p>“She is below,” I thought, “and terrified by
my entrance has evaded me in the darkness of the hall.”</p>
<p>With the purpose of seeking her I turned to leave the room,
but took a wrong direction—the right one! My foot
struck her, cowering in a corner of the room. Instantly my
hands were at her throat, stifling a shriek, my knees were upon
her struggling body; and there in the darkness, without a word of
accusation or reproach, I strangled her till she died!</p>
<p>There ends the dream. I have related it in the past
tense, but the present would be the fitter form, for again and
again the somber tragedy reenacts itself in my
consciousness—over and over I lay the plan, I suffer the
confirmation, I redress the wrong. Then all is blank; and
afterward the rains beat against the grimy window-panes, or the
snows fall upon my scant attire, the wheels rattle in the squalid
streets where my life lies in poverty and mean employment.
If there is ever sunshine I do not recall it; if there are birds
they do not sing.</p>
<p>There is another dream, another vision of the night. I
stand among the shadows in a moonlit road. I am aware of
another presence, but whose I cannot rightly determine. In
the shadow of a great dwelling I catch the gleam of white
garments; then the figure of a woman confronts me in the
road—my murdered wife! There is death in the face;
there are marks upon the throat. The eyes are fixed on mine
with an infinite gravity which is not reproach, nor hate, nor
menace, nor anything less terrible than recognition. Before
this awful apparition I retreat in terror—a terror that is
upon me as I write. I can no longer rightly shape the
words. See! they—</p>
<p>Now I am calm, but truly there is no more to tell: the
incident ends where it began—in darkness and in doubt.</p>
<p>Yes, I am again in control of myself: “the captain of my
soul.” But that is not respite; it is another stage
and phase of expiation. My penance, constant in degree, is
mutable in kind: one of its variants is tranquillity. After
all, it is only a life-sentence. “To Hell for
life”—that is a foolish penalty: the culprit chooses
the duration of his punishment. To-day my term expires.</p>
<p>To each and all, the peace that was not mine.</p>
<h3><a name="page74"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 74</span>III<br
/>
STATEMENT OF THE LATE JULIA HETMAN,<br />
THROUGH THE MEDIUM BAYROLLES</h3>
<p>I had retired early and fallen almost immediately into a
peaceful sleep, from which I awoke with that indefinable sense of
peril which is, I think, a common experience in that other,
earlier life. Of its unmeaning character, too, I was
entirely persuaded, yet that did not banish it. My husband,
Joel Hetman, was away from home; the servants slept in another
part of the house. But these were familiar conditions; they
had never before distressed me. Nevertheless, the strange
terror grew so insupportable that conquering my reluctance to
move I sat up and lit the lamp at my bedside. Contrary to
my expectation this gave me no relief; the light seemed rather an
added danger, for I reflected that it would shine out under the
door, disclosing my presence to whatever evil thing might lurk
outside. You that are still in the flesh, subject to
horrors of the imagination, think what a monstrous fear that must
be which seeks in darkness security from malevolent existences of
the night. That is to spring to close quarters with an
unseen enemy—the strategy of despair!</p>
<p>Extinguishing the lamp I pulled the bed-clothing about my head
and lay trembling and silent, unable to shriek, forgetful to
pray. In this pitiable state I must have lain for what you
call hours—with us there are no hours, there is no
time.</p>
<p>At last it came—a soft, irregular sound of footfalls on
the stairs! They were slow, hesitant, uncertain, as of
something that did not see its way; to my disordered reason all
the more terrifying for that, as the approach of some blind and
mindless malevolence to which is no appeal. I even thought
that I must have left the hall lamp burning and the groping of
this creature proved it a monster of the night. This was
foolish and inconsistent with my previous dread of the light, but
what would you have? Fear has no brains; it is an
idiot. The dismal witness that it bears and the cowardly
counsel that it whispers are unrelated. We know this well,
we who have passed into the Realm of Terror, who skulk in eternal
dusk among the scenes of our former lives, invisible even to
ourselves and one another, yet hiding forlorn in lonely places;
yearning for speech with our loved ones, yet dumb, and as fearful
of them as they of us. Sometimes the disability is removed,
the law suspended: by the deathless power of love or hate we
break the spell—we are seen by those whom we would warn,
console, or punish. What form we seem to them to bear we
know not; we know only that we terrify even those whom we most
wish to comfort, and from whom we most crave tenderness and
sympathy.</p>
<p>Forgive, I pray you, this inconsequent digression by what was
once a woman. You who consult us in this imperfect
way—you do not understand. You ask foolish questions
about things unknown and things forbidden. Much that we
know and could impart in our speech is meaningless in
yours. We must communicate with you through a stammering
intelligence in that small fraction of our language that you
yourselves can speak. You think that we are of another
world. No, we have knowledge of no world but yours, though
for us it holds no sunlight, no warmth, no music, no laughter, no
song of birds, nor any companionship. O God! what a thing
it is to be a ghost, cowering and shivering in an altered world,
a prey to apprehension and despair!</p>
<p>No, I did not die of fright: the Thing turned and went
away. I heard it go down the stairs, hurriedly, I thought,
as if itself in sudden fear. Then I rose to call for
help. Hardly had my shaking hand found the doorknob
when—merciful heaven!—I heard it returning. Its
footfalls as it remounted the stairs were rapid, heavy and loud;
they shook the house. I fled to an angle of the wall and
crouched upon the floor. I tried to pray. I tried to
call the name of my dear husband. Then I heard the door
thrown open. There was an interval of unconsciousness, and
when I revived I felt a strangling clutch upon my
throat—felt my arms feebly beating against something that
bore me backward—felt my tongue thrusting itself from
between my teeth! And then I passed into this life.</p>
<p>No, I have no knowledge of what it was. The sum of what
we knew at death is the measure of what we know afterward of all
that went before. Of this existence we know many things,
but no new light falls upon any page of that; in memory is
written all of it that we can read. Here are no heights of
truth overlooking the confused landscape of that dubitable
domain. We still dwell in the Valley of the Shadow, lurk in
its desolate places, peering from brambles and thickets at its
mad, malign inhabitants. How should we have new knowledge
of that fading past?</p>
<p>What I am about to relate happened on a night. We know
when it is night, for then you retire to your houses and we can
venture from our places of concealment to move unafraid about our
old homes, to look in at the windows, even to enter and gaze upon
your faces as you sleep. I had lingered long near the
dwelling where I had been so cruelly changed to what I am, as we
do while any that we love or hate remain. Vainly I had
sought some method of manifestation, some way to make my
continued existence and my great love and poignant pity
understood by my husband and son. Always if they slept they
would wake, or if in my desperation I dared approach them when
they were awake, would turn toward me the terrible eyes of the
living, frightening me by the glances that I sought from the
purpose that I held.</p>
<p>On this night I had searched for them without success, fearing
to find them; they were nowhere in the house, nor about the
moonlit lawn. For, although the sun is lost to us forever,
the moon, full-orbed or slender, remains to us. Sometimes
it shines by night, sometimes by day, but always it rises and
sets, as in that other life.</p>
<p>I left the lawn and moved in the white light and silence along
the road, aimless and sorrowing. Suddenly I heard the voice
of my poor husband in exclamations of astonishment, with that of
my son in reassurance and dissuasion; and there by the shadow of
a group of trees they stood—near, so near! Their
faces were toward me, the eyes of the elder man fixed upon
mine. He saw me—at last, at last, he saw me! In
the consciousness of that, my terror fled as a cruel dream.
The death-spell was broken: Love had conquered Law! Mad
with exultation I shouted—I <i>must</i> have shouted,
“He sees, he sees: he will understand!” Then,
controlling myself, I moved forward, smiling and consciously
beautiful, to offer myself to his arms, to comfort him with
endearments, and, with my son’s hand in mine, to speak
words that should restore the broken bonds between the living and
the dead.</p>
<p>Alas! alas! his face went white with fear, his eyes were as
those of a hunted animal. He backed away from me, as I
advanced, and at last turned and fled into the
wood—whither, it is not given to me to know.</p>
<p>To my poor boy, left doubly desolate, I have never been able
to impart a sense of my presence. Soon he, too, must pass
to this Life Invisible and be lost to me forever.</p>
<h2><a name="page81"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 81</span>A
DIAGNOSIS OF DEATH</h2>
<p>“I am not so superstitious as some of your
physicians—men of science, as you are pleased to be
called,” said Hawver, replying to an accusation that had
not been made. “Some of you—only a few, I
confess—believe in the immortality of the soul, and in
apparitions which you have not the honesty to call ghosts.
I go no further than a conviction that the living are sometimes
seen where they are not, but have been—where they have
lived so long, perhaps so intensely, as to have left their
impress on everything about them. I know, indeed, that
one’s environment may be so affected by one’s
personality as to yield, long afterward, an image of one’s
self to the eyes of another. Doubtless the impressing
personality has to be the right kind of personality as the
perceiving eyes have to be the right kind of eyes—mine, for
example.”</p>
<p>“Yes, the right kind of eyes, conveying sensations to
the wrong kind of brain,” said Dr. Frayley, smiling.</p>
<p>“Thank you; one likes to have an expectation gratified;
that is about the reply that I supposed you would have the
civility to make.”</p>
<p>“Pardon me. But you say that you know. That
is a good deal to say, don’t you think? Perhaps you
will not mind the trouble of saying how you learned.”</p>
<p>“You will call it an hallucination,” Hawver said,
“but that does not matter.” And he told the
story.</p>
<p>“Last summer I went, as you know, to pass the hot
weather term in the town of Meridian. The relative at whose
house I had intended to stay was ill, so I sought other
quarters. After some difficulty I succeeded in renting a
vacant dwelling that had been occupied by an eccentric doctor of
the name of Mannering, who had gone away years before, no one
knew where, not even his agent. He had built the house
himself and had lived in it with an old servant for about ten
years. His practice, never very extensive, had after a few
years been given up entirely. Not only so, but he had
withdrawn himself almost altogether from social life and become a
recluse. I was told by the village doctor, about the only
person with whom he held any relations, that during his
retirement he had devoted himself to a single line of study, the
result of which he had expounded in a book that did not commend
itself to the approval of his professional brethren, who, indeed,
considered him not entirely sane. I have not seen the book
and cannot now recall the title of it, but I am told that it
expounded a rather startling theory. He held that it was
possible in the case of many a person in good health to forecast
his death with precision, several months in advance of the
event. The limit, I think, was eighteen months. There
were local tales of his having exerted his powers of prognosis,
or perhaps you would say diagnosis; and it was said that in every
instance the person whose friends he had warned had died suddenly
at the appointed time, and from no assignable cause. All
this, however, has nothing to do with what I have to tell; I
thought it might amuse a physician.</p>
<p>“The house was furnished, just as he had lived in
it. It was a rather gloomy dwelling for one who was neither
a recluse nor a student, and I think it gave something of its
character to me—perhaps some of its former occupant’s
character; for always I felt in it a certain melancholy that was
not in my natural disposition, nor, I think, due to
loneliness. I had no servants that slept in the house, but
I have always been, as you know, rather fond of my own society,
being much addicted to reading, though little to study.
Whatever was the cause, the effect was dejection and a sense of
impending evil; this was especially so in Dr. Mannering’s
study, although that room was the lightest and most airy in the
house. The doctor’s life-size portrait in oil hung in
that room, and seemed completely to dominate it. There was
nothing unusual in the picture; the man was evidently rather good
looking, about fifty years old, with iron-gray hair, a
smooth-shaven face and dark, serious eyes. Something in the
picture always drew and held my attention. The man’s
appearance became familiar to me, and rather
‘haunted’ me.</p>
<p>“One evening I was passing through this room to my
bedroom, with a lamp—there is no gas in Meridian. I
stopped as usual before the portrait, which seemed in the
lamplight to have a new expression, not easily named, but
distinctly uncanny. It interested but did not disturb
me. I moved the lamp from one side to the other and
observed the effects of the altered light. While so engaged
I felt an impulse to turn round. As I did so I saw a man
moving across the room directly toward me! As soon as he
came near enough for the lamplight to illuminate the face I saw
that it was Dr. Mannering himself; it was as if the portrait were
walking!</p>
<p>“‘I beg your pardon,’ I said, somewhat
coldly, ‘but if you knocked I did not hear.’</p>
<p>“He passed me, within an arm’s length, lifted his
right forefinger, as in warning, and without a word went on out
of the room, though I observed his exit no more than I had
observed his entrance.</p>
<p>“Of course, I need not tell you that this was what you
will call an hallucination and I call an apparition. That
room had only two doors, of which one was locked; the other led
into a bedroom, from which there was no exit. My feeling on
realizing this is not an important part of the incident.</p>
<p>“Doubtless this seems to you a very commonplace
‘ghost story’—one constructed on the regular
lines laid down by the old masters of the art. If that were
so I should not have related it, even if it were true. The
man was not dead; I met him to-day in Union street. He
passed me in a crowd.”</p>
<p>Hawver had finished his story and both men were silent.
Dr. Frayley absently drummed on the table with his fingers.</p>
<p>“Did he say anything to-day?” he
asked—“anything from which you inferred that he was
not dead?”</p>
<p>Hawver stared and did not reply.</p>
<p>“Perhaps,” continued Frayley, “he made a
sign, a gesture—lifted a finger, as in warning.
It’s a trick he had—a habit when saying something
serious—announcing the result of a diagnosis, for
example.”</p>
<p>“Yes, he did—just as his apparition had
done. But, good God! did you ever know him?”</p>
<p>Hawver was apparently growing nervous.</p>
<p>“I knew him. I have read his book, as will every
physician some day. It is one of the most striking and
important of the century’s contributions to medical
science. Yes, I knew him; I attended him in an illness
three years ago. He died.”</p>
<p>Hawver sprang from his chair, manifestly disturbed. He
strode forward and back across the room; then approached his
friend, and in a voice not altogether steady, said:
“Doctor, have you anything to say to me—as a
physician?”</p>
<p>“No, Hawver; you are the healthiest man I ever
knew. As a friend I advise you to go to your room.
You play the violin like an angel. Play it; play something
light and lively. Get this cursed bad business off your
mind.”</p>
<p>The next day Hawver was found dead in his room, the violin at
his neck, the bow upon the strings, his music open before him at
Chopin’s funeral march.</p>
<h2><a name="page88"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
88</span>MOXON’S MASTER</h2>
<p>“<span class="smcap">Are</span> you serious?—do
you really believe that a machine thinks?”</p>
<p>I got no immediate reply; Moxon was apparently intent upon the
coals in the grate, touching them deftly here and there with the
fire-poker till they signified a sense of his attention by a
brighter glow. For several weeks I had been observing in
him a growing habit of delay in answering even the most trivial
of commonplace questions. His air, however, was that of
preoccupation rather than deliberation: one might have said that
he had “something on his mind.”</p>
<p>Presently he said:</p>
<p>“What is a ‘machine’? The word has
been variously defined. Here is one definition from a
popular dictionary: ‘Any instrument or organization by
which power is applied and made effective, or a desired effect
produced.’ Well, then, is not a man a machine?
And you will admit that he thinks—or thinks he
thinks.”</p>
<p>“If you do not wish to answer my question,” I
said, rather testily, “why not say so?—all that you
say is mere evasion. You know well enough that when I say
‘machine’ I do not mean a man, but something that man
has made and controls.”</p>
<p>“When it does not control him,” he said, rising
abruptly and looking out of a window, whence nothing was visible
in the blackness of a stormy night. A moment later he
turned about and with a smile said: “I beg your pardon; I
had no thought of evasion. I considered the dictionary
man’s unconscious testimony suggestive and worth something
in the discussion. I can give your question a direct answer
easily enough: I do believe that a machine thinks about the work
that it is doing.”</p>
<p>That was direct enough, certainly. It was not altogether
pleasing, for it tended to confirm a sad suspicion that
Moxon’s devotion to study and work in his machine-shop had
not been good for him. I knew, for one thing, that he
suffered from insomnia, and that is no light affliction.
Had it affected his mind? His reply to my question seemed
to me then evidence that it had; perhaps I should think
differently about it now. I was younger then, and among the
blessings that are not denied to youth is ignorance.
Incited by that great stimulant to controversy, I said:</p>
<p>“And what, pray, does it think with—in the absence
of a brain?”</p>
<p>The reply, coming with less than his customary delay, took his
favorite form of counter-interrogation:</p>
<p>“With what does a plant think—in the absence of a
brain?”</p>
<p>“Ah, plants also belong to the philosopher class!
I should be pleased to know some of their conclusions; you may
omit the premises.”</p>
<p>“Perhaps,” he replied, apparently unaffected by my
foolish irony, “you may be able to infer their convictions
from their acts. I will spare you the familiar examples of
the sensitive mimosa, the several insectivorous flowers and those
whose stamens bend down and shake their pollen upon the entering
bee in order that he may fertilize their distant mates. But
observe this. In an open spot in my garden I planted a
climbing vine. When it was barely above the surface I set a
stake into the soil a yard away. The vine at once made for
it, but as it was about to reach it after several days I removed
it a few feet. The vine at once altered its course, making
an acute angle, and again made for the stake. This
manœuvre was repeated several times, but finally, as if
discouraged, the vine abandoned the pursuit and ignoring further
attempts to divert it traveled to a small tree, further away,
which it climbed.</p>
<p>“Roots of the eucalyptus will prolong themselves
incredibly in search of moisture. A well-known
horticulturist relates that one entered an old drain pipe and
followed it until it came to a break, where a section of the pipe
had been removed to make way for a stone wall that had been built
across its course. The root left the drain and followed the
wall until it found an opening where a stone had fallen
out. It crept through and following the other side of the
wall back to the drain, entered the unexplored part and resumed
its journey.”</p>
<p>“And all this?”</p>
<p>“Can you miss the significance of it? It shows the
consciousness of plants. It proves that they
think.”</p>
<p>“Even if it did—what then? We were speaking,
not of plants, but of machines. They may be composed partly
of wood—wood that has no longer vitality—or wholly of
metal. Is thought an attribute also of the mineral
kingdom?”</p>
<p>“How else do you explain the phenomena, for example, of
crystallization?”</p>
<p>“I do not explain them.”</p>
<p>“Because you cannot without affirming what you wish to
deny, namely, intelligent cooperation among the constituent
elements of the crystals. When soldiers form lines, or
hollow squares, you call it reason. When wild geese in
flight take the form of a letter V you say instinct. When
the homogeneous atoms of a mineral, moving freely in solution,
arrange themselves into shapes mathematically perfect, or
particles of frozen moisture into the symmetrical and beautiful
forms of snowflakes, you have nothing to say. You have not
even invented a name to conceal your heroic unreason.”</p>
<p>Moxon was speaking with unusual animation and
earnestness. As he paused I heard in an adjoining room
known to me as his “machine-shop,” which no one but
himself was permitted to enter, a singular thumping sound, as of
some one pounding upon a table with an open hand. Moxon
heard it at the same moment and, visibly agitated, rose and
hurriedly passed into the room whence it came. I thought it
odd that any one else should be in there, and my interest in my
friend—with doubtless a touch of unwarrantable
curiosity—led me to listen intently, though, I am happy to
say, not at the keyhole. There were confused sounds, as of
a struggle or scuffle; the floor shook. I distinctly heard
hard breathing and a hoarse whisper which said “Damn
you!” Then all was silent, and presently Moxon
reappeared and said, with a rather sorry smile:</p>
<p>“Pardon me for leaving you so abruptly. I have a
machine in there that lost its temper and cut up
rough.”</p>
<p>Fixing my eyes steadily upon his left cheek, which was
traversed by four parallel excoriations showing blood, I
said:</p>
<p>“How would it do to trim its nails?”</p>
<p>I could have spared myself the jest; he gave it no attention,
but seated himself in the chair that he had left and resumed the
interrupted monologue as if nothing had occurred:</p>
<p>“Doubtless you do not hold with those (I need not name
them to a man of your reading) who have taught that all matter is
sentient, that every atom is a living, feeling, conscious
being. <i>I</i> do. There is no such thing as dead,
inert matter: it is all alive; all instinct with force, actual
and potential; all sensitive to the same forces in its
environment and susceptible to the contagion of higher and
subtler ones residing in such superior organisms as it may be
brought into relation with, as those of man when he is fashioning
it into an instrument of his will. It absorbs something of
his intelligence and purpose—more of them in proportion to
the complexity of the resulting machine and that of its work.</p>
<p>“Do you happen to recall Herbert Spencer’s
definition of ‘Life’? I read it thirty years
ago. He may have altered it afterward, for anything I know,
but in all that time I have been unable to think of a single word
that could profitably be changed or added or removed. It
seems to me not only the best definition, but the only possible
one.</p>
<p>“‘Life,’ he says, ‘is a definite
combination of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and
successive, in correspondence with external coexistences and
sequences.’”</p>
<p>“That defines the phenomenon,” I said, “but
gives no hint of its cause.”</p>
<p>“That,” he replied, “is all that any
definition can do. As Mill points out, we know nothing of
cause except as an antecedent—nothing of effect except as a
consequent. Of certain phenomena, one never occurs without
another, which is dissimilar: the first in point of time we call
cause, the second, effect. One who had many times seen a
rabbit pursued by a dog, and had never seen rabbits and dogs
otherwise, would think the rabbit the cause of the dog.</p>
<p>“But I fear,” he added, laughing naturally enough,
“that my rabbit is leading me a long way from the track of
my legitimate quarry: I’m indulging in the pleasure of the
chase for its own sake. What I want you to observe is that
in Herbert Spencer’s definition of ‘life’ the
activity of a machine is included—there is nothing in the
definition that is not applicable to it. According to this
sharpest of observers and deepest of thinkers, if a man during
his period of activity is alive, so is a machine when in
operation. As an inventor and constructor of machines I
know that to be true.”</p>
<p>Moxon was silent for a long time, gazing absently into the
fire. It was growing late and I thought it time to be
going, but somehow I did not like the notion of leaving him in
that isolated house, all alone except for the presence of some
person of whose nature my conjectures could go no further than
that it was unfriendly, perhaps malign. Leaning toward him
and looking earnestly into his eyes while making a motion with my
hand through the door of his workshop, I said:</p>
<p>“Moxon, whom have you in there?”</p>
<p>Somewhat to my surprise he laughed lightly and answered
without hesitation:</p>
<p>“Nobody; the incident that you have in mind was caused
by my folly in leaving a machine in action with nothing to act
upon, while I undertook the interminable task of enlightening
your understanding. Do you happen to know that
Consciousness is the creature of Rhythm?”</p>
<p>“O bother them both!” I replied, rising and laying
hold of my overcoat. “I’m going to wish you
good night; and I’ll add the hope that the machine which
you inadvertently left in action will have her gloves on the next
time you think it needful to stop her.”</p>
<p>Without waiting to observe the effect of my shot I left the
house.</p>
<p>Rain was falling, and the darkness was intense. In the
sky beyond the crest of a hill toward which I groped my way along
precarious plank sidewalks and across miry, unpaved streets I
could see the faint glow of the city’s lights, but behind
me nothing was visible but a single window of Moxon’s
house. It glowed with what seemed to me a mysterious and
fateful meaning. I knew it was an uncurtained aperture in
my friend’s “machine-shop,” and I had little
doubt that he had resumed the studies interrupted by his duties
as my instructor in mechanical consciousness and the fatherhood
of Rhythm. Odd, and in some degree humorous, as his
convictions seemed to me at that time, I could not wholly divest
myself of the feeling that they had some tragic relation to his
life and character—perhaps to his destiny—although I
no longer entertained the notion that they were the vagaries of a
disordered mind. Whatever might be thought of his views,
his exposition of them was too logical for that. Over and
over, his last words came back to me: “Consciousness is the
creature of Rhythm.” Bald and terse as the statement
was, I now found it infinitely alluring. At each recurrence
it broadened in meaning and deepened in suggestion. Why,
here, (I thought) is something upon which to found a
philosophy. If consciousness is the product of rhythm all
things <i>are</i> conscious, for all have motion, and all motion
is rhythmic. I wondered if Moxon knew the significance and
breadth of his thought—the scope of this momentous
generalization; or had he arrived at his philosophic faith by the
tortuous and uncertain road of observation?</p>
<p>That faith was then new to me, and all Moxon’s
expounding had failed to make me a convert; but now it seemed as
if a great light shone about me, like that which fell upon Saul
of Tarsus; and out there in the storm and darkness and solitude I
experienced what Lewes calls “The endless variety and
excitement of philosophic thought.” I exulted in a
new sense of knowledge, a new pride of reason. My feet
seemed hardly to touch the earth; it was as if I were uplifted
and borne through the air by invisible wings.</p>
<p>Yielding to an impulse to seek further light from him whom I
now recognized as my master and guide, I had unconsciously turned
about, and almost before I was aware of having done so found
myself again at Moxon’s door. I was drenched with
rain, but felt no discomfort. Unable in my excitement to
find the doorbell I instinctively tried the knob. It turned
and, entering, I mounted the stairs to the room that I had so
recently left. All was dark and silent; Moxon, as I had
supposed, was in the adjoining room—the
“machine-shop.” Groping along the wall until I
found the communicating door I knocked loudly several times, but
got no response, which I attributed to the uproar outside, for
the wind was blowing a gale and dashing the rain against the thin
walls in sheets. The drumming upon the shingle roof
spanning the unceiled room was loud and incessant.</p>
<p>I had never been invited into the machine-shop—had,
indeed, been denied admittance, as had all others, with one
exception, a skilled metal worker, of whom no one knew anything
except that his name was Haley and his habit silence. But
in my spiritual exaltation, discretion and civility were alike
forgotten and I opened the door. What I saw took all
philosophical speculation out of me in short order.</p>
<p>Moxon sat facing me at the farther side of a small table upon
which a single candle made all the light that was in the
room. Opposite him, his back toward me, sat another
person. On the table between the two was a chessboard; the
men were playing. I knew little of chess, but as only a few
pieces were on the board it was obvious that the game was near
its close. Moxon was intensely interested—not so
much, it seemed to me, in the game as in his antagonist, upon
whom he had fixed so intent a look that, standing though I did
directly in the line of his vision, I was altogether
unobserved. His face was ghastly white, and his eyes
glittered like diamonds. Of his antagonist I had only a
back view, but that was sufficient; I should not have cared to
see his face.</p>
<p>He was apparently not more than five feet in height, with
proportions suggesting those of a gorilla—a tremendous
breadth of shoulders, thick, short neck and broad, squat head,
which had a tangled growth of black hair and was topped with a
crimson fez. A tunic of the same color, belted tightly to
the waist, reached the seat—apparently a box—upon
which he sat; his legs and feet were not seen. His left
forearm appeared to rest in his lap; he moved his pieces with his
right hand, which seemed disproportionately long.</p>
<p>I had shrunk back and now stood a little to one side of the
doorway and in shadow. If Moxon had looked farther than the
face of his opponent he could have observed nothing now, except
that the door was open. Something forbade me either to
enter or to retire, a feeling—I know not how it
came—that I was in the presence of an imminent tragedy and
might serve my friend by remaining. With a scarcely
conscious rebellion against the indelicacy of the act I
remained.</p>
<p>The play was rapid. Moxon hardly glanced at the board
before making his moves, and to my unskilled eye seemed to move
the piece most convenient to his hand, his motions in doing so
being quick, nervous and lacking in precision. The response
of his antagonist, while equally prompt in the inception, was
made with a slow, uniform, mechanical and, I thought, somewhat
theatrical movement of the arm, that was a sore trial to my
patience. There was something unearthly about it all, and I
caught myself shuddering. But I was wet and cold.</p>
<p>Two or three times after moving a piece the stranger slightly
inclined his head, and each time I observed that Moxon shifted
his king. All at once the thought came to me that the man
was dumb. And then that he was a machine—an automaton
chess-player! Then I remembered that Moxon had once spoken
to me of having invented such a piece of mechanism, though I did
not understand that it had actually been constructed. Was
all his talk about the consciousness and intelligence of machines
merely a prelude to eventual exhibition of this device—only
a trick to intensify the effect of its mechanical action upon me
in my ignorance of its secret?</p>
<p>A fine end, this, of all my intellectual transports—my
“endless variety and excitement of philosophic
thought!” I was about to retire in disgust when
something occurred to hold my curiosity. I observed a shrug
of the thing’s great shoulders, as if it were irritated:
and so natural was this—so entirely human—that in my
new view of the matter it startled me. Nor was that all,
for a moment later it struck the table sharply with its clenched
hand. At that gesture Moxon seemed even more startled than
I: he pushed his chair a little backward, as in alarm.</p>
<p>Presently Moxon, whose play it was, raised his hand high above
the board, pounced upon one of his pieces like a sparrow-hawk and
with the exclamation “checkmate!” rose quickly to his
feet and stepped behind his chair. The automaton sat
motionless.</p>
<p>The wind had now gone down, but I heard, at lessening
intervals and progressively louder, the rumble and roll of
thunder. In the pauses between I now became conscious of a
low humming or buzzing which, like the thunder, grew momentarily
louder and more distinct. It seemed to come from the body
of the automaton, and was unmistakably a whirring of
wheels. It gave me the impression of a disordered mechanism
which had escaped the repressive and regulating action of some
controlling part—an effect such as might be expected if a
pawl should be jostled from the teeth of a ratchet-wheel.
But before I had time for much conjecture as to its nature my
attention was taken by the strange motions of the automaton
itself. A slight but continuous convulsion appeared to have
possession of it. In body and head it shook like a man with
palsy or an ague chill, and the motion augmented every moment
until the entire figure was in violent agitation. Suddenly
it sprang to its feet and with a movement almost too quick for
the eye to follow shot forward across table and chair, with both
arms thrust forth to their full length—the posture and
lunge of a diver. Moxon tried to throw himself backward out
of reach, but he was too late: I saw the horrible thing’s
hands close upon his throat, his own clutch its wrists.
Then the table was overturned, the candle thrown to the floor and
extinguished, and all was black dark. But the noise of the
struggle was dreadfully distinct, and most terrible of all were
the raucous, squawking sounds made by the strangled man’s
efforts to breathe. Guided by the infernal hubbub, I sprang
to the rescue of my friend, but had hardly taken a stride in the
darkness when the whole room blazed with a blinding white light
that burned into my brain and heart and memory a vivid picture of
the combatants on the floor, Moxon underneath, his throat still
in the clutch of those iron hands, his head forced backward, his
eyes protruding, his mouth wide open and his tongue thrust out;
and—horrible contrast!—upon the painted face of his
assassin an expression of tranquil and profound thought, as in
the solution of a problem in chess! This I observed, then
all was blackness and silence.</p>
<p>Three days later I recovered consciousness in a
hospital. As the memory of that tragic night slowly evolved
in my ailing brain recognized in my attendant Moxon’s
confidential workman, Haley. Responding to a look he
approached, smiling.</p>
<p>“Tell me about it,” I managed to say,
faintly—“all about it.”</p>
<p>“Certainly,” he said; “you were carried
unconscious from a burning house—Moxon’s.
Nobody knows how you came to be there. You may have to do a
little explaining. The origin of the fire is a bit
mysterious, too. My own notion is that the house was struck
by lightning.”</p>
<p>“And Moxon?”</p>
<p>“Buried yesterday—what was left of him.”</p>
<p>Apparently this reticent person could unfold himself on
occasion. When imparting shocking intelligence to the sick
he was affable enough. After some moments of the keenest
mental suffering I ventured to ask another question:</p>
<p>“Who rescued me?”</p>
<p>“Well, if that interests you—I did.”</p>
<p>“Thank you, Mr. Haley, and may God bless you for
it. Did you rescue, also, that charming product of your
skill, the automaton chess-player that murdered its
inventor?”</p>
<p>The man was silent a long time, looking away from me.
Presently he turned and gravely said:</p>
<p>“Do you know that?”</p>
<p>“I do,” I replied; “I saw it
done.”</p>
<p>That was many years ago. If asked to-day I should answer
less confidently.</p>
<h2><a name="page106"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 106</span>A
TOUGH TUSSLE</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">One</span> night in the autumn of 1861 a
man sat alone in the heart of a forest in western Virginia.
The region was one of the wildest on the continent—the
Cheat Mountain country. There was no lack of people close
at hand, however; within a mile of where the man sat was the now
silent camp of a whole Federal brigade. Somewhere
about—it might be still nearer—was a force of the
enemy, the numbers unknown. It was this uncertainty as to
its numbers and position that accounted for the man’s
presence in that lonely spot; he was a young officer of a Federal
infantry regiment and his business there was to guard his
sleeping comrades in the camp against a surprise. He was in
command of a detachment of men constituting a picket-guard.
These men he had stationed just at nightfall in an irregular
line, determined by the nature of the ground, several hundred
yards in front of where he now sat. The line ran through
the forest, among the rocks and laurel thickets, the men fifteen
or twenty paces apart, all in concealment and under injunction of
strict silence and unremitting vigilance. In four hours, if
nothing occurred, they would be relieved by a fresh detachment
from the reserve now resting in care of its captain some distance
away to the left and rear. Before stationing his men the
young officer of whom we are writing had pointed out to his two
sergeants the spot at which he would be found if it should be
necessary to consult him, or if his presence at the front line
should be required.</p>
<p>It was a quiet enough spot—the fork of an old wood-road,
on the two branches of which, prolonging themselves deviously
forward in the dim moonlight, the sergeants were themselves
stationed, a few paces in rear of the line. If driven
sharply back by a sudden onset of the enemy—and pickets are
not expected to make a stand after firing—the men would
come into the converging roads and naturally following them to
their point of intersection could be rallied and
“formed.” In his small way the author of these
dispositions was something of a strategist; if Napoleon had
planned as intelligently at Waterloo he would have won that
memorable battle and been overthrown later.</p>
<p>Second-Lieutenant Brainerd Byring was a brave and efficient
officer, young and comparatively inexperienced as he was in the
business of killing his fellow-men. He had enlisted in the
very first days of the war as a private, with no military
knowledge whatever, had been made first-sergeant of his company
on account of his education and engaging manner, and had been
lucky enough to lose his captain by a Confederate bullet; in the
resulting promotions he had gained a commission. He had
been in several engagements, such as they were—at Philippi,
Rich Mountain, Carrick’s Ford and Greenbrier—and had
borne himself with such gallantry as not to attract the attention
of his superior officers. The exhilaration of battle was
agreeable to him, but the sight of the dead, with their clay
faces, blank eyes and stiff bodies, which when not unnaturally
shrunken were unnaturally swollen, had always intolerably
affected him. He felt toward them a kind of reasonless
antipathy that was something more than the physical and spiritual
repugnance common to us all. Doubtless this feeling was due
to his unusually acute sensibilities—his keen sense of the
beautiful, which these hideous things outraged. Whatever
may have been the cause, he could not look upon a dead body
without a loathing which had in it an element of
resentment. What others have respected as the dignity of
death had to him no existence—was altogether
unthinkable. Death was a thing to be hated. It was
not picturesque, it had no tender and solemn side—a dismal
thing, hideous in all its manifestations and suggestions.
Lieutenant Byring was a braver man than anybody knew, for nobody
knew his horror of that which he was ever ready to incur.</p>
<p>Having posted his men, instructed his sergeants and retired to
his station, he seated himself on a log, and with senses all
alert began his vigil. For greater ease he loosened his
sword-belt and taking his heavy revolver from his holster laid it
on the log beside him. He felt very comfortable, though he
hardly gave the fact a thought, so intently did he listen for any
sound from the front which might have a menacing
significance—a shout, a shot, or the footfall of one of his
sergeants coming to apprise him of something worth knowing.
From the vast, invisible ocean of moonlight overhead fell, here
and there, a slender, broken stream that seemed to plash against
the intercepting branches and trickle to earth, forming small
white pools among the clumps of laurel. But these leaks
were few and served only to accentuate the blackness of his
environment, which his imagination found it easy to people with
all manner of unfamiliar shapes, menacing, uncanny, or merely
grotesque.</p>
<p>He to whom the portentous conspiracy of night and solitude and
silence in the heart of a great forest is not an unknown
experience needs not to be told what another world it all
is—how even the most commonplace and familiar objects take
on another character. The trees group themselves
differently; they draw closer together, as if in fear. The
very silence has another quality than the silence of the
day. And it is full of half-heard whispers—whispers
that startle—ghosts of sounds long dead. There are
living sounds, too, such as are never heard under other
conditions: notes of strange night-birds, the cries of small
animals in sudden encounters with stealthy foes or in their
dreams, a rustling in the dead leaves—it may be the leap of
a wood-rat, it may be the footfall of a panther. What
caused the breaking of that twig?—what the low, alarmed
twittering in that bushful of birds? There are sounds
without a name, forms without substance, translations in space of
objects which have not been seen to move, movements wherein
nothing is observed to change its place. Ah, children of
the sunlight and the gaslight, how little you know of the world
in which you live!</p>
<p>Surrounded at a little distance by armed and watchful friends,
Byring felt utterly alone. Yielding himself to the solemn
and mysterious spirit of the time and place, he had forgotten the
nature of his connection with the visible and audible aspects and
phases of the night. The forest was boundless; men and the
habitations of men did not exist. The universe was one
primeval mystery of darkness, without form and void, himself the
sole, dumb questioner of its eternal secret. Absorbed in
thoughts born of this mood, he suffered the time to slip away
unnoted. Meantime the infrequent patches of white light
lying amongst the tree-trunks had undergone changes of size, form
and place. In one of them near by, just at the roadside,
his eye fell upon an object that he had not previously
observed. It was almost before his face as he sat; he could
have sworn that it had not before been there. It was partly
covered in shadow, but he could see that it was a human
figure. Instinctively he adjusted the clasp of his
sword-belt and laid hold of his pistol—again he was in a
world of war, by occupation an assassin.</p>
<p>The figure did not move. Rising, pistol in hand, he
approached. The figure lay upon its back, its upper part in
shadow, but standing above it and looking down upon the face, he
saw that it was a dead body. He shuddered and turned from
it with a feeling of sickness and disgust, resumed his seat upon
the log, and forgetting military prudence struck a match and lit
a cigar. In the sudden blackness that followed the
extinction of the flame he felt a sense of relief; he could no
longer see the object of his aversion. Nevertheless, he
kept his eyes set in that direction until it appeared again with
growing distinctness. It seemed to have moved a trifle
nearer.</p>
<p>“Damn the thing!” he muttered. “What
does it want?”</p>
<p>It did not appear to be in need of anything but a soul.</p>
<p>Byring turned away his eyes and began humming a tune, but he
broke off in the middle of a bar and looked at the dead
body. Its presence annoyed him, though he could hardly have
had a quieter neighbor. He was conscious, too, of a vague,
indefinable feeling that was new to him. It was not fear,
but rather a sense of the supernatural—in which he did not
at all believe.</p>
<p>“I have inherited it,” he said to himself.
“I suppose it will require a thousand ages—perhaps
ten thousand—for humanity to outgrow this feeling.
Where and when did it originate? Away back, probably, in
what is called the cradle of the human race—the plains of
Central Asia. What we inherit as a superstition our
barbarous ancestors must have held as a reasonable
conviction. Doubtless they believed themselves justified by
facts whose nature we cannot even conjecture in thinking a dead
body a malign thing endowed with some strange power of mischief,
with perhaps a will and a purpose to exert it. Possibly
they had some awful form of religion of which that was one of the
chief doctrines, sedulously taught by their priesthood, as ours
teach the immortality of the soul. As the Aryans moved
slowly on, to and through the Caucasus passes, and spread over
Europe, new conditions of life must have resulted in the
formulation of new religions. The old belief in the
malevolence of the dead body was lost from the creeds and even
perished from tradition, but it left its heritage of terror,
which is transmitted from generation to generation—is as
much a part of us as are our blood and bones.”</p>
<p>In following out his thought he had forgotten that which
suggested it; but now his eye fell again upon the corpse.
The shadow had now altogether uncovered it. He saw the
sharp profile, the chin in the air, the whole face, ghastly white
in the moonlight. The clothing was gray, the uniform of a
Confederate soldier. The coat and waistcoat, unbuttoned,
had fallen away on each side, exposing the white shirt. The
chest seemed unnaturally prominent, but the abdomen had sunk in,
leaving a sharp projection at the line of the lower ribs.
The arms were extended, the left knee was thrust upward.
The whole posture impressed Byring as having been studied with a
view to the horrible.</p>
<p>“Bah!” he exclaimed; “he was an
actor—he knows how to be dead.”</p>
<p>He drew away his eyes, directing them resolutely along one of
the roads leading to the front, and resumed his philosophizing
where he had left off.</p>
<p>“It may be that our Central Asian ancestors had not the
custom of burial. In that case it is easy to understand
their fear of the dead, who really were a menace and an
evil. They bred pestilences. Children were taught to
avoid the places where they lay, and to run away if by
inadvertence they came near a corpse. I think, indeed,
I’d better go away from this chap.”</p>
<p>He half rose to do so, then remembered that he had told his
men in front and the officer in the rear who was to relieve him
that he could at any time be found at that spot. It was a
matter of pride, too. If he abandoned his post he feared
they would think he feared the corpse. He was no coward and
he was unwilling to incur anybody’s ridicule. So he
again seated himself, and to prove his courage looked boldly at
the body. The right arm—the one farthest from
him—was now in shadow. He could barely see the hand
which, he had before observed, lay at the root of a clump of
laurel. There had been no change, a fact which gave him a
certain comfort, he could not have said why. He did not at
once remove his eyes; that which we do not wish to see has a
strange fascination, sometimes irresistible. Of the woman
who covers her eyes with her hands and looks between the fingers
let it be said that the wits have dealt with her not altogether
justly.</p>
<p>Byring suddenly became conscious of a pain in his right
hand. He withdrew his eyes from his enemy and looked at
it. He was grasping the hilt of his drawn sword so tightly
that it hurt him. He observed, too, that he was leaning
forward in a strained attitude—crouching like a gladiator
ready to spring at the throat of an antagonist. His teeth
were clenched and he was breathing hard. This matter was
soon set right, and as his muscles relaxed and he drew a long
breath he felt keenly enough the ludicrousness of the
incident. It affected him to laughter. Heavens! what
sound was that? what mindless devil was uttering an unholy glee
in mockery of human merriment? He sprang to his feet and
looked about him, not recognizing his own laugh.</p>
<p>He could no longer conceal from himself the horrible fact of
his cowardice; he was thoroughly frightened! He would have
run from the spot, but his legs refused their office; they gave
way beneath him and he sat again upon the log, violently
trembling. His face was wet, his whole body bathed in a
chill perspiration. He could not even cry out.
Distinctly he heard behind him a stealthy tread, as of some wild
animal, and dared not look over his shoulder. Had the
soulless living joined forces with the soulless dead?—was
it an animal? Ah, if he could but be assured of that!
But by no effort of will could he now unfix his gaze from the
face of the dead man.</p>
<p>I repeat that Lieutenant Byring was a brave and intelligent
man. But what would you have? Shall a man cope,
single-handed, with so monstrous an alliance as that of night and
solitude and silence and the dead,—while an incalculable
host of his own ancestors shriek into the ear of his spirit their
coward counsel, sing their doleful death-songs in his heart, and
disarm his very blood of all its iron? The odds are too
great—courage was not made for so rough use as that.</p>
<p>One sole conviction now had the man in possession: that the
body had moved. It lay nearer to the edge of its plot of
light—there could be no doubt of it. It had also
moved its arms, for, look, they are both in the shadow! A
breath of cold air struck Byring full in the face; the boughs of
trees above him stirred and moaned. A strongly defined
shadow passed across the face of the dead, left it luminous,
passed back upon it and left it half obscured. The horrible
thing was visibly moving! At that moment a single shot rang
out upon the picket-line—a lonelier and louder, though more
distant, shot than ever had been heard by mortal ear! It
broke the spell of that enchanted man; it slew the silence and
the solitude, dispersed the hindering host from Central Asia and
released his modern manhood. With a cry like that of some
great bird pouncing upon its prey he sprang forward, hot-hearted
for action!</p>
<p>Shot after shot now came from the front. There were
shoutings and confusion, hoof-beats and desultory cheers.
Away to the rear, in the sleeping camp, were a singing of bugles
and grumble of drums. Pushing through the thickets on
either side the roads came the Federal pickets, in full retreat,
firing backward at random as they ran. A straggling group
that had followed back one of the roads, as instructed, suddenly
sprang away into the bushes as half a hundred horsemen thundered
by them, striking wildly with their sabres as they passed.
At headlong speed these mounted madmen shot past the spot where
Byring had sat, and vanished round an angle of the road, shouting
and firing their pistols. A moment later there was a roar
of musketry, followed by dropping shots—they had
encountered the reserve-guard in line; and back they came in dire
confusion, with here and there an empty saddle and many a
maddened horse, bullet-stung, snorting and plunging with
pain. It was all over—“an affair of
outposts.”</p>
<p>The line was reëstablished with fresh men, the roll
called, the stragglers were reformed. The Federal commander
with a part of his staff, imperfectly clad, appeared upon the
scene, asked a few questions, looked exceedingly wise and
retired. After standing at arms for an hour the brigade in
camp “swore a prayer or two” and went to bed.</p>
<p>Early the next morning a fatigue-party, commanded by a captain
and accompanied by a surgeon, searched the ground for dead and
wounded. At the fork of the road, a little to one side,
they found two bodies lying close together—that of a
Federal officer and that of a Confederate private. The
officer had died of a sword-thrust through the heart, but not,
apparently, until he had inflicted upon his enemy no fewer than
five dreadful wounds. The dead officer lay on his face in a
pool of blood, the weapon still in his breast. They turned
him on his back and the surgeon removed it.</p>
<p>“Gad!” said the captain—“It is
Byring!”—adding, with a glance at the other,
“They had a tough tussle.”</p>
<p>The surgeon was examining the sword. It was that of a
line officer of Federal infantry—exactly like the one worn
by the captain. It was, in fact, Byring’s own.
The only other weapon discovered was an undischarged revolver in
the dead officer’s belt.</p>
<p>The surgeon laid down the sword and approached the other
body. It was frightfully gashed and stabbed, but there was
no blood. He took hold of the left foot and tried to
straighten the leg. In the effort the body was
displaced. The dead do not wish to be moved—it
protested with a faint, sickening odor. Where it had lain
were a few maggots, manifesting an imbecile activity.</p>
<p>The surgeon looked at the captain. The captain looked at
the surgeon.</p>
<h2><a name="page121"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 121</span>ONE
OF TWINS</h2>
<p style="text-align: center">A LETTER FOUND AMONG THE PAPERS OF
THE LATE MORTIMER BARR</p>
<p><span class="smcap">You</span> ask me if in my experience as
one of a pair of twins I ever observed anything unaccountable by
the natural laws with which we have acquaintance. As to
that you shall judge; perhaps we have not all acquaintance with
the same natural laws. You may know some that I do not, and
what is to me unaccountable may be very clear to you.</p>
<p>You knew my brother John—that is, you knew him when you
knew that I was not present; but neither you nor, I believe, any
human being could distinguish between him and me if we chose to
seem alike. Our parents could not; ours is the only
instance of which I have any knowledge of so close resemblance as
that. I speak of my brother John, but I am not at all sure
that his name was not Henry and mine John. We were
regularly christened, but afterward, in the very act of tattooing
us with small distinguishing marks, the operator lost his
reckoning; and although I bear upon my forearm a small
“H” and he bore a “J,” it is by no means
certain that the letters ought not to have been transposed.
During our boyhood our parents tried to distinguish us more
obviously by our clothing and other simple devices, but we would
so frequently exchange suits and otherwise circumvent the enemy
that they abandoned all such ineffectual attempts, and during all
the years that we lived together at home everybody recognized the
difficulty of the situation and made the best of it by calling us
both “Jehnry.” I have often wondered at my
father’s forbearance in not branding us conspicuously upon
our unworthy brows, but as we were tolerably good boys and used
our power of embarrassment and annoyance with commendable
moderation, we escaped the iron. My father was, in fact, a
singularly good-natured man, and I think quietly enjoyed
nature’s practical joke.</p>
<p>Soon after we had come to California, and settled at San Jose
(where the only good fortune that awaited us was our meeting with
so kind a friend as you) the family, as you know, was broken up
by the death of both my parents in the same week. My father
died insolvent and the homestead was sacrificed to pay his
debts. My sisters returned to relatives in the East, but
owing to your kindness John and I, then twenty-two years of age,
obtained employment in San Francisco, in different quarters of
the town. Circumstances did not permit us to live together,
and we saw each other infrequently, sometimes not oftener than
once a week. As we had few acquaintances in common, the
fact of our extraordinary likeness was little known. I come
now to the matter of your inquiry.</p>
<p>One day soon after we had come to this city I was walking down
Market street late in the afternoon, when I was accosted by a
well-dressed man of middle age, who after greeting me cordially
said: “Stevens, I know, of course, that you do not go out
much, but I have told my wife about you, and she would be glad to
see you at the house. I have a notion, too, that my girls
are worth knowing. Suppose you come out to-morrow at six
and dine with us, <i>en famille</i>; and then if the ladies
can’t amuse you afterward I’ll stand in with a few
games of billiards.”</p>
<p>This was said with so bright a smile and so engaging a manner
that I had not the heart to refuse, and although I had never seen
the man in my life I promptly replied: “You are very good,
sir, and it will give me great pleasure to accept the
invitation. Please present my compliments to Mrs. Margovan
and ask her to expect me.”</p>
<p>With a shake of the hand and a pleasant parting word the man
passed on. That he had mistaken me for my brother was plain
enough. That was an error to which I was accustomed and
which it was not my habit to rectify unless the matter seemed
important. But how had I known that this man’s name
was Margovan? It certainly is not a name that one would
apply to a man at random, with a probability that it would be
right. In point of fact, the name was as strange to me as
the man.</p>
<p>The next morning I hastened to where my brother was employed
and met him coming out of the office with a number of bills that
he was to collect. I told him how I had
“committed” him and added that if he didn’t
care to keep the engagement I should be delighted to continue the
impersonation.</p>
<p>“That’s queer,” he said thoughtfully.
“Margovan is the only man in the office here whom I know
well and like. When he came in this morning and we had
passed the usual greetings some singular impulse prompted me to
say: ‘Oh, I beg your pardon, Mr. Margovan, but I neglected
to ask your address.’ I got the address, but what
under the sun I was to do with it, I did not know until
now. It’s good of you to offer to take the
consequence of your impudence, but I’ll eat that dinner
myself, if you please.”</p>
<p>He ate a number of dinners at the same place—more than
were good for him, I may add without disparaging their quality;
for he fell in love with Miss Margovan, proposed marriage to her
and was heartlessly accepted.</p>
<p>Several weeks after I had been informed of the engagement, but
before it had been convenient for me to make the acquaintance of
the young woman and her family, I met one day on Kearney street a
handsome but somewhat dissipated-looking man whom something
prompted me to follow and watch, which I did without any scruple
whatever. He turned up Geary street and followed it until
he came to Union square. There he looked at his watch, then
entered the square. He loitered about the paths for some
time, evidently waiting for someone. Presently he was
joined by a fashionably dressed and beautiful young woman and the
two walked away up Stockton street, I following. I now felt
the necessity of extreme caution, for although the girl was a
stranger it seemed to me that she would recognize me at a
glance. They made several turns from one street to another
and finally, after both had taken a hasty look all
about—which I narrowly evaded by stepping into a
doorway—they entered a house of which I do not care to
state the location. Its location was better than its
character.</p>
<p>I protest that my action in playing the spy upon these two
strangers was without assignable motive. It was one of
which I might or might not be ashamed, according to my estimate
of the character of the person finding it out. As an
essential part of a narrative educed by your question it is
related here without hesitancy or shame.</p>
<p>A week later John took me to the house of his prospective
father-in-law, and in Miss Margovan, as you have already
surmised, but to my profound astonishment, I recognized the
heroine of that discreditable adventure. A gloriously
beautiful heroine of a discreditable adventure I must in justice
admit that she was; but that fact has only this importance: her
beauty was such a surprise to me that it cast a doubt upon her
identity with the young woman I had seen before; how could the
marvelous fascination of her face have failed to strike me at
that time? But no—there was no possibility of error;
the difference was due to costume, light and general
surroundings.</p>
<p>John and I passed the evening at the house, enduring, with the
fortitude of long experience, such delicate enough banter as our
likeness naturally suggested. When the young lady and I
were left alone for a few minutes I looked her squarely in the
face and said with sudden gravity:</p>
<p>“You, too, Miss Margovan, have a double: I saw her last
Tuesday afternoon in Union square.”</p>
<p>She trained her great gray eyes upon me for a moment, but her
glance was a trifle less steady than my own and she withdrew it,
fixing it on the tip of her shoe.</p>
<p>“Was she very like me?” she asked, with an
indifference which I thought a little overdone.</p>
<p>“So like,” said I, “that I greatly admired
her, and being unwilling to lose sight of her I confess that I
followed her until—Miss Margovan, are you sure that you
understand?”</p>
<p>She was now pale, but entirely calm. She again raised
her eyes to mine, with a look that did not falter.</p>
<p>“What do you wish me to do?” she asked.
“You need not fear to name your terms. I accept
them.”</p>
<p>It was plain, even in the brief time given me for reflection,
that in dealing with this girl ordinary methods would not do, and
ordinary exactions were needless.</p>
<p>“Miss Margovan,” I said, doubtless with something
of the compassion in my voice that I had in my heart, “it
is impossible not to think you the victim of some horrible
compulsion. Rather than impose new embarrassments upon you
I would prefer to aid you to regain your freedom.”</p>
<p>She shook her head, sadly and hopelessly, and I continued,
with agitation:</p>
<p>“Your beauty unnerves me. I am disarmed by your
frankness and your distress. If you are free to act upon
conscience you will, I believe, do what you conceive to be best;
if you are not—well, Heaven help us all! You have
nothing to fear from me but such opposition to this marriage as I
can try to justify on—on other grounds.”</p>
<p>These were not my exact words, but that was the sense of them,
as nearly as my sudden and conflicting emotions permitted me to
express it. I rose and left her without another look at
her, met the others as they reentered the room and said, as
calmly as I could: “I have been bidding Miss Margovan good
evening; it is later than I thought.”</p>
<p>John decided to go with me. In the street he asked if I
had observed anything singular in Julia’s manner.</p>
<p>“I thought her ill,” I replied; “that is why
I left.” Nothing more was said.</p>
<p>The next evening I came late to my lodgings. The events
of the previous evening had made me nervous and ill; I had tried
to cure myself and attain to clear thinking by walking in the
open air, but I was oppressed with a horrible presentiment of
evil—a presentiment which I could not formulate. It
was a chill, foggy night; my clothing and hair were damp and I
shook with cold. In my dressing-gown and slippers before a
blazing grate of coals I was even more uncomfortable. I no
longer shivered but shuddered—there is a difference.
The dread of some impending calamity was so strong and
dispiriting that I tried to drive it away by inviting a real
sorrow—tried to dispel the conception of a terrible future
by substituting the memory of a painful past. I recalled
the death of my parents and endeavored to fix my mind upon the
last sad scenes at their bedsides and their graves. It all
seemed vague and unreal, as having occurred ages ago and to
another person. Suddenly, striking through my thought and
parting it as a tense cord is parted by the stroke of
steel—I can think of no other comparison—I heard a
sharp cry as of one in mortal agony! The voice was that of
my brother and seemed to come from the street outside my
window. I sprang to the window and threw it open. A
street lamp directly opposite threw a wan and ghastly light upon
the wet pavement and the fronts of the houses. A single
policeman, with upturned collar, was leaning against a gatepost,
quietly smoking a cigar. No one else was in sight. I
closed the window and pulled down the shade, seated myself before
the fire and tried to fix my mind upon my surroundings. By
way of assisting, by performance of some familiar act, I looked
at my watch; it marked half-past eleven. Again I heard that
awful cry! It seemed in the room—at my side. I
was frightened and for some moments had not the power to
move. A few minutes later—I have no recollection of
the intermediate time—I found myself hurrying along an
unfamiliar street as fast as I could walk. I did not know
where I was, nor whither I was going, but presently sprang up the
steps of a house before which were two or three carriages and in
which were moving lights and a subdued confusion of voices.
It was the house of Mr. Margovan.</p>
<p>You know, good friend, what had occurred there. In one
chamber lay Julia Margovan, hours dead by poison; in another John
Stevens, bleeding from a pistol wound in the chest, inflicted by
his own hand. As I burst into the room, pushed aside the
physicians and laid my hand upon his forehead he unclosed his
eyes, stared blankly, closed them slowly and died without a
sign.</p>
<p>I knew no more until six weeks afterward, when I had been
nursed back to life by your own saintly wife in your own
beautiful home. All of that you know, but what you do not
know is this—which, however, has no bearing upon the
subject of your psychological researches—at least not upon
that branch of them in which, with a delicacy and consideration
all your own, you have asked for less assistance than I think I
have given you:</p>
<p>One moonlight night several years afterward I was passing
through Union square. The hour was late and the square
deserted. Certain memories of the past naturally came into
my mind as I came to the spot where I had once witnessed that
fateful assignation, and with that unaccountable perversity which
prompts us to dwell upon thoughts of the most painful character I
seated myself upon one of the benches to indulge them. A
man entered the square and came along the walk toward me.
His hands were clasped behind him, his head was bowed; he seemed
to observe nothing. As he approached the shadow in which I
sat I recognized him as the man whom I had seen meet Julia
Margovan years before at that spot. But he was terribly
altered—gray, worn and haggard. Dissipation and vice
were in evidence in every look; illness was no less
apparent. His clothing was in disorder, his hair fell
across his forehead in a derangement which was at once uncanny
and picturesque. He looked fitter for restraint than
liberty—the restraint of a hospital.</p>
<p>With no defined purpose I rose and confronted him. He
raised his head and looked me full in the face. I have no
words to describe the ghastly change that came over his own; it
was a look of unspeakable terror—he thought himself eye to
eye with a ghost. But he was a courageous man.
“Damn you, John Stevens!” he cried, and lifting his
trembling arm he dashed his fist feebly at my face and fell
headlong upon the gravel as I walked away.</p>
<p>Somebody found him there, stone-dead. Nothing more is
known of him, not even his name. To know of a man that he
is dead should be enough.</p>
<h2><a name="page134"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 134</span>THE
HAUNTED VALLEY</h2>
<h3>I<br />
HOW TREES ARE FELLED IN CHINA</h3>
<p>A <span class="smcap">half-mile</span> north from Jo.
Dunfer’s, on the road from Hutton’s to Mexican Hill,
the highway dips into a sunless ravine which opens out on either
hand in a half-confidential manner, as if it had a secret to
impart at some more convenient season. I never used to ride
through it without looking first to the one side and then to the
other, to see if the time had arrived for the revelation.
If I saw nothing—and I never did see anything—there
was no feeling of disappointment, for I knew the disclosure was
merely withheld temporarily for some good reason which I had no
right to question. That I should one day be taken into full
confidence I no more doubted than I doubted the existence of Jo.
Dunfer himself, through whose premises the ravine ran.</p>
<p>It was said that Jo. had once undertaken to erect a cabin in
some remote part of it, but for some reason had abandoned the
enterprise and constructed his present hermaphrodite habitation,
half residence and half groggery, at the roadside, upon an
extreme corner of his estate; as far away as possible, as if on
purpose to show how radically he had changed his mind.</p>
<p>This Jo. Dunfer—or, as he was familiarly known in the
neighborhood, Whisky Jo.—was a very important personage in
those parts. He was apparently about forty years of age, a
long, shock-headed fellow, with a corded face, a gnarled arm and
a knotty hand like a bunch of prison-keys. He was a hairy
man, with a stoop in his walk, like that of one who is about to
spring upon something and rend it.</p>
<p>Next to the peculiarity to which he owed his local
appellation, Mr. Dunfer’s most obvious characteristic was a
deep-seated antipathy to the Chinese. I saw him once in a
towering rage because one of his herdsmen had permitted a
travel-heated Asian to slake his thirst at the horse-trough in
front of the saloon end of Jo.’s establishment. I
ventured faintly to remonstrate with Jo. for his unchristian
spirit, but he merely explained that there was nothing about
Chinamen in the New Testament, and strode away to wreak his
displeasure upon his dog, which also, I suppose, the inspired
scribes had overlooked.</p>
<p>Some days afterward, finding him sitting alone in his barroom,
I cautiously approached the subject, when, greatly to my relief,
the habitual austerity of his expression visibly softened into
something that I took for condescension.</p>
<p>“You young Easterners,” he said, “are a
mile-and-a-half too good for this country, and you don’t
catch on to our play. People who don’t know a
Chileño from a Kanaka can afford to hang out liberal ideas
about Chinese immigration, but a fellow that has to fight for his
bone with a lot of mongrel coolies hasn’t any time for
foolishness.”</p>
<p>This long consumer, who had probably never done an honest
day’s-work in his life, sprung the lid of a Chinese
tobacco-box and with thumb and forefinger forked out a wad like a
small haycock. Holding this reinforcement within supporting
distance he fired away with renewed confidence.</p>
<p>“They’re a flight of devouring locusts, and
they’re going for everything green in this God blest land,
if you want to know.”</p>
<p>Here he pushed his reserve into the breach and when his
gabble-gear was again disengaged resumed his uplifting
discourse.</p>
<p>“I had one of them on this ranch five years ago, and
I’ll tell you about it, so that you can see the nub of this
whole question. I didn’t pan out particularly well
those days—drank more whisky than was prescribed for me and
didn’t seem to care for my duty as a patriotic American
citizen; so I took that pagan in, as a kind of cook. But
when I got religion over at the Hill and they talked of running
me for the Legislature it was given to me to see the light.
But what was I to do? If I gave him the go somebody else
would take him, and mightn’t treat him white.
<i>What</i> was I to do? What would any good Christian do,
especially one new to the trade and full to the neck with the
brotherhood of Man and the fatherhood of God?”</p>
<p>Jo. paused for a reply, with an expression of unstable
satisfaction, as of one who has solved a problem by a distrusted
method. Presently he rose and swallowed a glass of whisky
from a full bottle on the counter, then resumed his story.</p>
<p>“Besides, he didn’t count for
much—didn’t know anything and gave himself
airs. They all do that. I said him nay, but he muled
it through on that line while he lasted; but after turning the
other cheek seventy and seven times I doctored the dice so that
he didn’t last forever. And I’m almighty glad I
had the sand to do it.”</p>
<p>Jo.’s gladness, which somehow did not impress me, was
duly and ostentatiously celebrated at the bottle.</p>
<p>“About five years ago I started in to stick up a
shack. That was before this one was built, and I put it in
another place. I set Ah Wee and a little cuss named Gopher
to cutting the timber. Of course I didn’t expect Ah
Wee to help much, for he had a face like a day in June and big
black eyes—I guess maybe they were the damn’dest eyes
in this neck o’ woods.”</p>
<p>While delivering this trenchant thrust at common sense Mr.
Dunfer absently regarded a knot-hole in the thin board partition
separating the bar from the living-room, as if that were one of
the eyes whose size and color had incapacitated his servant for
good service.</p>
<p>“Now you Eastern galoots won’t believe anything
against the yellow devils,” he suddenly flamed out with an
appearance of earnestness not altogether convincing, “but I
tell you that Chink was the perversest scoundrel outside San
Francisco. The miserable pigtail Mongolian went to hewing
away at the saplings all round the stems, like a worm o’
the dust gnawing a radish. I pointed out his error as
patiently as I knew how, and showed him how to cut them on two
sides, so as to make them fall right; but no sooner would I turn
my back on him, like this”—and he turned it on me,
amplifying the illustration by taking some more
liquor—“than he was at it again. It was just
this way: while I looked at him, <i>so</i>”—regarding
me rather unsteadily and with evident complexity of
vision—“he was all right; but when I looked away,
<i>so</i>”—taking a long pull at the
bottle—“he defied me. Then I’d gaze at
him reproachfully, <i>so</i>, and butter wouldn’t have
melted in his mouth.”</p>
<p>Doubtless Mr. Dunfer honestly intended the look that he fixed
upon me to be merely reproachful, but it was singularly fit to
arouse the gravest apprehension in any unarmed person incurring
it; and as I had lost all interest in his pointless and
interminable narrative, I rose to go. Before I had fairly
risen, he had again turned to the counter, and with a barely
audible “so,” had emptied the bottle at a gulp.</p>
<p>Heavens! what a yell! It was like a Titan in his last,
strong agony. Jo. staggered back after emitting it, as a
cannon recoils from its own thunder, and then dropped into his
chair, as if he had been “knocked in the head” like a
beef—his eyes drawn sidewise toward the wall, with a stare
of terror. Looking in the same direction, I saw that the
knot-hole in the wall had indeed become a human eye—a full,
black eye, that glared into my own with an entire lack of
expression more awful than the most devilish glitter. I
think I must have covered my face with my hands to shut out the
horrible illusion, if such it was, and Jo.’s little white
man-of-all-work coming into the room broke the spell, and I
walked out of the house with a sort of dazed fear that
<i>delirium tremens</i> might be infectious. My horse was
hitched at the watering-trough, and untying him I mounted and
gave him his head, too much troubled in mind to note whither he
took me.</p>
<p>I did not know what to think of all this, and like every one
who does not know what to think I thought a great deal, and to
little purpose. The only reflection that seemed at all
satisfactory, was, that on the morrow I should be some miles
away, with a strong probability of never returning.</p>
<p>A sudden coolness brought me out of my abstraction, and
looking up I found myself entering the deep shadows of the
ravine. The day was stifling; and this transition from the
pitiless, visible heat of the parched fields to the cool gloom,
heavy with pungency of cedars and vocal with twittering of the
birds that had been driven to its leafy asylum, was exquisitely
refreshing. I looked for my mystery, as usual, but not
finding the ravine in a communicative mood, dismounted, led my
sweating animal into the undergrowth, tied him securely to a tree
and sat down upon a rock to meditate.</p>
<p>I began bravely by analyzing my pet superstition about the
place. Having resolved it into its constituent elements I
arranged them in convenient troops and squadrons, and collecting
all the forces of my logic bore down upon them from impregnable
premises with the thunder of irresistible conclusions and a great
noise of chariots and general intellectual shouting. Then,
when my big mental guns had overturned all opposition, and were
growling almost inaudibly away on the horizon of pure
speculation, the routed enemy straggled in upon their rear,
massed silently into a solid phalanx, and captured me, bag and
baggage. An indefinable dread came upon me. I rose to
shake it off, and began threading the narrow dell by an old,
grass-grown cow-path that seemed to flow along the bottom, as a
substitute for the brook that Nature had neglected to
provide.</p>
<p>The trees among which the path straggled were ordinary,
well-behaved plants, a trifle perverted as to trunk and eccentric
as to bough, but with nothing unearthly in their general
aspect. A few loose bowlders, which had detached themselves
from the sides of the depression to set up an independent
existence at the bottom, had dammed up the pathway, here and
there, but their stony repose had nothing in it of the stillness
of death. There was a kind of death-chamber hush in the
valley, it is true, and a mysterious whisper above: the wind was
just fingering the tops of the trees—that was all.</p>
<p>I had not thought of connecting Jo. Dunfer’s drunken
narrative with what I now sought, and only when I came into a
clear space and stumbled over the level trunks of some small
trees did I have the revelation. This was the site of the
abandoned “shack.” The discovery was verified
by noting that some of the rotting stumps were hacked all round,
in a most unwoodmanlike way, while others were cut straight
across, and the butt ends of the corresponding trunks had the
blunt wedge-form given by the axe of a master.</p>
<p>The opening among the trees was not more than thirty paces
across. At one side was a little knoll—a natural
hillock, bare of shrubbery but covered with wild grass, and on
this, standing out of the grass, the headstone of a grave!</p>
<p>I do not remember that I felt anything like surprise at this
discovery. I viewed that lonely grave with something of the
feeling that Columbus must have had when he saw the hills and
headlands of the new world. Before approaching it I
leisurely completed my survey of the surroundings. I was
even guilty of the affectation of winding my watch at that
unusual hour, and with needless care and deliberation. Then
I approached my mystery.</p>
<p>The grave—a rather short one—was in somewhat
better repair than was consistent with its obvious age and
isolation, and my eyes, I dare say, widened a trifle at a clump
of unmistakable garden flowers showing evidence of recent
watering. The stone had clearly enough done duty once as a
doorstep. In its front was carved, or rather dug, an
inscription. It read thus:</p>
<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">AH
WEE—CHINAMAN.<br />
Age unknown. Worked for Jo. Dunfer.<br />
This monument is erected by him to keep the Chink’s<br />
memory green. Likewise as a warning to Celestials<br />
not to take on airs. Devil take ’em!<br />
She Was a Good Egg.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I cannot adequately relate my astonishment at this uncommon
inscription! The meagre but sufficient identification of
the deceased; the impudent candor of confession; the brutal
anathema; the ludicrous change of sex and sentiment—all
marked this record as the work of one who must have been at least
as much demented as bereaved. I felt that any further
disclosure would be a paltry anti-climax, and with an unconscious
regard for dramatic effect turned squarely about and walked
away. Nor did I return to that part of the county for four
years.</p>
<h3><a name="page145"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
145</span>II<br />
WHO DRIVES SANE OXEN SHOULD HIMSELF BE SANE</h3>
<p>“Gee-up, there, old Fuddy-Duddy!”</p>
<p>This unique adjuration came from the lips of a queer little
man perched upon a wagonful of firewood, behind a brace of oxen
that were hauling it easily along with a simulation of mighty
effort which had evidently not imposed on their lord and
master. As that gentleman happened at the moment to be
staring me squarely in the face as I stood by the roadside it was
not altogether clear whether he was addressing me or his beasts;
nor could I say if they were named Fuddy and Duddy and were both
subjects of the imperative verb “to gee-up.”
Anyhow the command produced no effect on us, and the queer little
man removed his eyes from mine long enough to spear Fuddy and
Duddy alternately with a long pole, remarking, quietly but with
feeling: “Dern your skin,” as if they enjoyed that
integument in common. Observing that my request for a ride
took no attention, and finding myself falling slowly astern, I
placed one foot upon the inner circumference of a hind wheel and
was slowly elevated to the level of the hub, whence I boarded the
concern, <i>sans cérémonie</i>, and scrambling
forward seated myself beside the driver—who took no notice
of me until he had administered another indiscriminate
castigation to his cattle, accompanied with the advice to
“buckle down, you derned Incapable!” Then, the
master of the outfit (or rather the former master, for I could
not suppress a whimsical feeling that the entire establishment
was my lawful prize) trained his big, black eyes upon me with an
expression strangely, and somewhat unpleasantly, familiar, laid
down his rod—which neither blossomed nor turned into a
serpent, as I half expected—folded his arms, and gravely
demanded, “W’at did you do to
W’isky?”</p>
<p>My natural reply would have been that I drank it, but there
was something about the query that suggested a hidden
significance, and something about the man that did not invite a
shallow jest. And so, having no other answer ready, I
merely held my tongue, but felt as if I were resting under an
imputation of guilt, and that my silence was being construed into
a confession.</p>
<p>Just then a cold shadow fell upon my cheek, and caused me to
look up. We were descending into my ravine! I cannot
describe the sensation that came upon me: I had not seen it since
it unbosomed itself four years before, and now I felt like one to
whom a friend has made some sorrowing confession of crime long
past, and who has basely deserted him in consequence. The
old memories of Jo. Dunfer, his fragmentary revelation, and the
unsatisfying explanatory note by the headstone, came back with
singular distinctness. I wondered what had become of Jo.,
and—I turned sharply round and asked my prisoner. He
was intently watching his cattle, and without withdrawing his
eyes replied:</p>
<p>“Gee-up, old Terrapin! He lies aside of Ah Wee up
the gulch. Like to see it? They always come back to
the spot—I’ve been expectin’ you.
H-woa!”</p>
<p>At the enunciation of the aspirate, Fuddy-Duddy, the incapable
terrapin, came to a dead halt, and before the vowel had died away
up the ravine had folded up all his eight legs and lain down in
the dusty road, regardless of the effect upon his derned
skin. The queer little man slid off his seat to the ground
and started up the dell without deigning to look back to see if I
was following. But I was.</p>
<p>It was about the same season of the year, and at near the same
hour of the day, of my last visit. The jays clamored
loudly, and the trees whispered darkly, as before; and I somehow
traced in the two sounds a fanciful analogy to the open
boastfulness of Mr. Jo. Dunfer’s mouth and the mysterious
reticence of his manner, and to the mingled hardihood and
tenderness of his sole literary production—the
epitaph. All things in the valley seemed unchanged,
excepting the cow-path, which was almost wholly overgrown with
weeds. When we came out into the “clearing,”
however, there was change enough. Among the stumps and
trunks of the fallen saplings, those that had been hacked
“China fashion” were no longer distinguishable from
those that were cut “’Melican way.” It
was as if the Old-World barbarism and the New-World civilization
had reconciled their differences by the arbitration of an
impartial decay—as is the way of civilizations. The
knoll was there, but the Hunnish brambles had overrun and all but
obliterated its effete grasses; and the patrician garden-violet
had capitulated to his plebeian brother—perhaps had merely
reverted to his original type. Another grave—a long,
robust mound—had been made beside the first, which seemed
to shrink from the comparison; and in the shadow of a new
headstone the old one lay prostrate, with its marvelous
inscription illegible by accumulation of leaves and soil.
In point of literary merit the new was inferior to the
old—was even repulsive in its terse and savage
jocularity:</p>
<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">JO. DUNFER. DONE
FOR.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I turned from it with indifference, and brushing away the
leaves from the tablet of the dead pagan restored to light the
mocking words which, fresh from their long neglect, seemed to
have a certain pathos. My guide, too, appeared to take on
an added seriousness as he read it, and I fancied that I could
detect beneath his whimsical manner something of manliness,
almost of dignity. But while I looked at him his former
aspect, so subtly inhuman, so tantalizingly familiar, crept back
into his big eyes, repellant and attractive. I resolved to
make an end of the mystery if possible.</p>
<p>“My friend,” I said, pointing to the smaller
grave, “did Jo. Dunfer murder that Chinaman?”</p>
<p>He was leaning against a tree and looking across the open
space into the top of another, or into the blue sky beyond.
He neither withdrew his eyes, nor altered his posture as he
slowly replied:</p>
<p>“No, sir; he justifiably homicided him.”</p>
<p>“Then he really did kill him.”</p>
<p>“Kill ’im? I should say he did,
rather. Doesn’t everybody know that?
Didn’t he stan’ up before the coroner’s jury
and confess it? And didn’t they find a verdict of
‘Came to ’is death by a wholesome Christian sentiment
workin’ in the Caucasian breast’? An’
didn’t the church at the Hill turn W’isky down for
it? And didn’t the sovereign people elect him Justice
of the Peace to get even on the gospelers? I don’t
know where you were brought up.”</p>
<p>“But did Jo. do that because the Chinaman did not, or
would n’ot, learn to cut down trees like a white
man?”</p>
<p>“Sure!—it stan’s so on the record, which
makes it true an’ legal. My knowin’ better
doesn’t make any difference with legal truth; it
wasn’t my funeral and I wasn’t invited to deliver an
oration. But the fact is, W’isky was jealous o’
<i>me</i>”—and the little wretch actually swelled out
like a turkeycock and made a pretense of adjusting an imaginary
neck-tie, noting the effect in the palm of his hand, held up
before him to represent a mirror.</p>
<p>“Jealous of <i>you</i>!” I repeated with
ill-mannered astonishment.</p>
<p>“That’s what I said. Why
not?—don’t I look all right?”</p>
<p>He assumed a mocking attitude of studied grace, and twitched
the wrinkles out of his threadbare waistcoat. Then,
suddenly dropping his voice to a low pitch of singular sweetness,
he continued:</p>
<p>“W’isky thought a lot o’ that Chink; nobody
but me knew how ’e doted on ’im. Couldn’t
bear ’im out of ’is sight, the derned
protoplasm! And w’en ’e came down to this
clear-in’ one day an’ found him an’ me
neglectin’ our work—him asleep an’ me grapplin
a tarantula out of ’is sleeve—W’isky laid hold
of my axe and let us have it, good an’ hard! I dodged
just then, for the spider bit me, but Ah Wee got it bad in the
side an’ tumbled about like anything. W’isky
was just weigh-in’ me out one w’en ’e saw the
spider fastened on my finger; then ’e knew he’d made
a jack ass of ’imself. He threw away the axe and got
down on ’is knees alongside of Ah Wee, who gave a last
little kick and opened ’is eyes—he had eyes like
mine—an’ puttin’ up ’is hands drew down
W’isky’s ugly head and held it there w’ile
’e stayed. That wasn’t long, for a
tremblin’ ran through ’im and ’e gave a bit of
a moan an’ beat the game.”</p>
<p>During the progress of the story the narrator had become
transfigured. The comic, or rather, the sardonic element
was all out of him, and as he painted that strange scene it was
with difficulty that I kept my composure. And this
consummate actor had somehow so managed me that the sympathy due
to his <i>dramatis personæ</i> was given to himself.
I stepped forward to grasp his hand, when suddenly a broad grin
danced across his face and with a light, mocking laugh he
continued:</p>
<p>“W’en W’isky got ’is nut out o’
that ’e was a sight to see! All his fine
clothes—he dressed mighty blindin’ those
days—were spoiled everlastin’! ’Is hair
was towsled and his face—what I could see of it—was
whiter than the ace of lilies. ’E stared once at me,
and looked away as if I didn’t count; an’ then there
were shootin’ pains chasin’ one another from my
bitten finger into my head, and it was Gopher to the dark.
That’s why I wasn’t at the inquest.”</p>
<p>“But why did you hold your tongue afterward?” I
asked.</p>
<p>“It’s that kind of tongue,” he replied, and
not another word would he say about it.</p>
<p>“After that W’isky took to drinkin’ harder
an’ harder, and was rabider an’ rabider anti-coolie,
but I don’t think ’e was ever particularly glad that
’e dispelled Ah Wee. He didn’t put on so much
dog about it w’en we were alone as w’en he had the
ear of a derned Spectacular Extravaganza like you. ’E
put up that headstone and gouged the inscription accordin’
to his varyin’ moods. It took ’im three weeks,
workin’ between drinks. I gouged his in one
day.”</p>
<p>“When did Jo. die?” I asked rather absently.
The answer took my breath:</p>
<p>“Pretty soon after I looked at him through that
knot-hole, w’en you had put something in his w’isky,
you derned Borgia!”</p>
<p>Recovering somewhat from my surprise at this astounding
charge, I was half-minded to throttle the audacious accuser, but
was restrained by a sudden conviction that came to me in the
light of a revelation. I fixed a grave look upon him and
asked, as calmly as I could: “And when did you go
luny?”</p>
<p>“Nine years ago!” he shrieked, throwing out his
clenched hands—“nine years ago, w’en that big
brute killed the woman who loved him better than she did
me!—me who had followed ’er from San Francisco, where
’e won ’er at draw poker!—me who had watched
over ’er for years w’en the scoundrel she belonged to
was ashamed to acknowledge ’er and treat ’er
white!—me who for her sake kept ’is cussed secret
till it ate ’im up!—me who w’en you poisoned
the beast fulfilled ’is last request to lay ’im
alongside ’er and give ’im a stone to the head of
’im! And I’ve never since seen ’er grave
till now, for I didn’t want to meet ’im
here.”</p>
<p>“Meet him? Why, Gopher, my poor fellow, he is
dead!”</p>
<p>“That’s why I’m afraid of
’im.”</p>
<p>I followed the little wretch back to his wagon and wrung his
hand at parting. It was now nightfall, and as I stood there
at the roadside in the deepening gloom, watching the blank
outlines of the receding wagon, a sound was borne to me on the
evening wind—a sound as of a series of vigorous
thumps—and a voice came out of the night:</p>
<p>“Gee-up, there, you derned old Geranium.”</p>
<h2><a name="page155"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 155</span>A
JUG OF SIRUP</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">This</span> narrative begins with the
death of its hero. Silas Deemer died on the 16th day of
July, 1863, and two days later his remains were buried. As
he had been personally known to every man, woman and well-grown
child in the village, the funeral, as the local newspaper phrased
it, “was largely attended.” In accordance with
a custom of the time and place, the coffin was opened at the
graveside and the entire assembly of friends and neighbors filed
past, taking a last look at the face of the dead. And then,
before the eyes of all, Silas Deemer was put into the
ground. Some of the eyes were a trifle dim, but in a
general way it may be said that at that interment there was lack
of neither observance nor observation; Silas was indubitably
dead, and none could have pointed out any ritual delinquency that
would have justified him in coming back from the grave. Yet
if human testimony is good for anything (and certainly it once
put an end to witchcraft in and about Salem) he came back.</p>
<p>I forgot to state that the death and burial of Silas Deemer
occurred in the little village of Hillbrook, where he had lived
for thirty-one years. He had been what is known in some
parts of the Union (which is admittedly a free country) as a
“merchant”; that is to say, he kept a retail shop for
the sale of such things as are commonly sold in shops of that
character. His honesty had never been questioned, so far as
is known, and he was held in high esteem by all. The only
thing that could be urged against him by the most censorious was
a too close attention to business. It was not urged against
him, though many another, who manifested it in no greater degree,
was less leniently judged. The business to which Silas was
devoted was mostly his own—that, possibly, may have made a
difference.</p>
<p>At the time of Deemer’s death nobody could recollect a
single day, Sundays excepted, that he had not passed in his
“store,” since he had opened it more than a
quarter-century before. His health having been perfect
during all that time, he had been unable to discern any validity
in whatever may or might have been urged to lure him astray from
his counter and it is related that once when he was summoned to
the county seat as a witness in an important law case and did not
attend, the lawyer who had the hardihood to move that he be
“admonished” was solemnly informed that the Court
regarded the proposal with “surprise.” Judicial
surprise being an emotion that attorneys are not commonly
ambitious to arouse, the motion was hastily withdrawn and an
agreement with the other side effected as to what Mr. Deemer
would have said if he had been there—the other side pushing
its advantage to the extreme and making the supposititious
testimony distinctly damaging to the interests of its
proponents. In brief, it was the general feeling in all
that region that Silas Deemer was the one immobile verity of
Hillbrook, and that his translation in space would precipitate
some dismal public ill or strenuous calamity.</p>
<p>Mrs. Deemer and two grown daughters occupied the upper rooms
of the building, but Silas had never been known to sleep
elsewhere than on a cot behind the counter of the store.
And there, quite by accident, he was found one night, dying, and
passed away just before the time for taking down the
shutters. Though speechless, he appeared conscious, and it
was thought by those who knew him best that if the end had
unfortunately been delayed beyond the usual hour for opening the
store the effect upon him would have been deplorable.</p>
<p>Such had been Silas Deemer—such the fixity and invariety
of his life and habit, that the village humorist (who had once
attended college) was moved to bestow upon him the sobriquet of
“Old Ibidem,” and, in the first issue of the local
newspaper after the death, to explain without offence that Silas
had taken “a day off.” It was more than a day,
but from the record it appears that well within a month Mr.
Deemer made it plain that he had not the leisure to be dead.</p>
<p>One of Hillbrook’s most respected citizens was Alvan
Creede, a banker. He lived in the finest house in town,
kept a carriage and was a most estimable man variously. He
knew something of the advantages of travel, too, having been
frequently in Boston, and once, it was thought, in New York,
though he modestly disclaimed that glittering distinction.
The matter is mentioned here merely as a contribution to an
understanding of Mr. Creede’s worth, for either way it is
creditable to him—to his intelligence if he had put
himself, even temporarily, into contact with metropolitan
culture; to his candor if he had not.</p>
<p>One pleasant summer evening at about the hour of ten Mr.
Creede, entering at his garden gate, passed up the gravel walk,
which looked very white in the moonlight, mounted the stone steps
of his fine house and pausing a moment inserted his latchkey in
the door. As he pushed this open he met his wife, who was
crossing the passage from the parlor to the library. She
greeted him pleasantly and pulling the door further back held it
for him to enter. Instead he turned and, looking about his
feet in front of the threshold, uttered an exclamation of
surprise.</p>
<p>“Why!—what the devil,” he said, “has
become of that jug?”</p>
<p>“What jug, Alvan?” his wife inquired, not very
sympathetically.</p>
<p>“A jug of maple sirup—I brought it along from the
store and set it down here to open the door. What
the—”</p>
<p>“There, there, Alvan, please don’t swear
again,” said the lady, interrupting. Hillbrook, by
the way, is not the only place in Christendom where a vestigial
polytheism forbids the taking in vain of the Evil One’s
name.</p>
<p>The jug of maple sirup which the easy ways of village life had
permitted Hillbrook’s foremost citizen to carry home from
the store was not there.</p>
<p>“Are you quite sure, Alvan?”</p>
<p>“My dear, do you suppose a man does not know when he is
carrying a jug? I bought that sirup at Deemer’s as I
was passing. Deemer himself drew it and lent me the jug,
and I—”</p>
<p>The sentence remains to this day unfinished. Mr. Creede
staggered into the house, entered the parlor and dropped into an
armchair, trembling in every limb. He had suddenly
remembered that Silas Deemer was three weeks dead.</p>
<p>Mrs. Creede stood by her husband, regarding him with surprise
and anxiety.</p>
<p>“For Heaven’s sake,” she said, “what
ails you?”</p>
<p>Mr. Creede’s ailment having no obvious relation to the
interests of the better land he did not apparently deem it
necessary to expound it on that demand; he said
nothing—merely stared. There were long moments of
silence broken by nothing but the measured ticking of the clock,
which seemed somewhat slower than usual, as if it were civilly
granting them an extension of time in which to recover their
wits.</p>
<p>“Jane, I have gone mad—that is it.” He
spoke thickly and hurriedly. “You should have told
me; you must have observed my symptoms before they became so
pronounced that I have observed them myself. I thought I
was passing Deemer’s store; it was open and lit
up—that is what I thought; of course it is never open
now. Silas Deemer stood at his desk behind the
counter. My God, Jane, I saw him as distinctly as I see
you. Remembering that you had said you wanted some maple
sirup, I went in and bought some—that is all—I bought
two quarts of maple sirup from Silas Deemer, who is dead and
underground, but nevertheless drew that sirup from a cask and
handed it to me in a jug. He talked with me, too, rather
gravely, I remember, even more so than was his way, but not a
word of what he said can I now recall. But I saw
him—good Lord, I saw and talked with him—and he is
dead! So I thought, but I’m mad, Jane, I’m as
crazy as a beetle; and you have kept it from me.”</p>
<p>This monologue gave the woman time to collect what faculties
she had.</p>
<p>“Alvan,” she said, “you have given no
evidence of insanity, believe me. This was undoubtedly an
illusion—how should it be anything else? That would
be too terrible! But there is no insanity; you are working
too hard at the bank. You should not have attended the
meeting of directors this evening; any one could see that you
were ill; I knew something would occur.”</p>
<p>It may have seemed to him that the prophecy had lagged a bit,
awaiting the event, but he said nothing of that, being concerned
with his own condition. He was calm now, and could think
coherently.</p>
<p>“Doubtless the phenomenon was subjective,” he
said, with a somewhat ludicrous transition to the slang of
science. “Granting the possibility of spiritual
apparition and even materialization, yet the apparition and
materialization of a half-gallon brown clay jug—a piece of
coarse, heavy pottery evolved from nothing—that is hardly
thinkable.”</p>
<p>As he finished speaking, a child ran into the room—his
little daughter. She was clad in a bedgown. Hastening
to her father she threw her arms about his neck, saying:
“You naughty papa, you forgot to come in and kiss me.
We heard you open the gate and got up and looked out. And,
papa dear, Eddy says mayn’t he have the little jug when it
is empty?”</p>
<p>As the full import of that revelation imparted itself to Alvan
Creede’s understanding he visibly shuddered. For the
child could not have heard a word of the conversation.</p>
<p>The estate of Silas Deemer being in the hands of an
administrator who had thought it best to dispose of the
“business” the store had been closed ever since the
owner’s death, the goods having been removed by another
“merchant” who had purchased them <i>en
bloc</i>. The rooms above were vacant as well, for the
widow and daughters had gone to another town.</p>
<p>On the evening immediately after Alvan Creede’s
adventure (which had somehow “got out”) a crowd of
men, women and children thronged the sidewalk opposite the
store. That the place was haunted by the spirit of the late
Silas Deemer was now well known to every resident of Hillbrook,
though many affected disbelief. Of these the hardiest, and
in a general way the youngest, threw stones against the front of
the building, the only part accessible, but carefully missed the
unshuttered windows. Incredulity had not grown to
malice. A few venturesome souls crossed the street and
rattled the door in its frame; struck matches and held them near
the window; attempted to view the black interior. Some of
the spectators invited attention to their wit by shouting and
groaning and challenging the ghost to a footrace.</p>
<p>After a considerable time had elapsed without any
manifestation, and many of the crowd had gone away, all those
remaining began to observe that the interior of the store was
suffused with a dim, yellow light. At this all
demonstrations ceased; the intrepid souls about the door and
windows fell back to the opposite side of the street and were
merged in the crowd; the small boys ceased throwing stones.
Nobody spoke above his breath; all whispered excitedly and
pointed to the now steadily growing light. How long a time
had passed since the first faint glow had been observed none
could have guessed, but eventually the illumination was bright
enough to reveal the whole interior of the store; and there,
standing at his desk behind the counter, Silas Deemer was
distinctly visible!</p>
<p>The effect upon the crowd was marvelous. It began
rapidly to melt away at both flanks, as the timid left the
place. Many ran as fast as their legs would let them;
others moved off with greater dignity, turning occasionally to
look backward over the shoulder. At last a score or more,
mostly men, remained where they were, speechless, staring,
excited. The apparition inside gave them no attention; it
was apparently occupied with a book of accounts.</p>
<p>Presently three men left the crowd on the sidewalk as if by a
common impulse and crossed the street. One of them, a heavy
man, was about to set his shoulder against the door when it
opened, apparently without human agency, and the courageous
investigators passed in. No sooner had they crossed the
threshold than they were seen by the awed observers outside to be
acting in the most unaccountable way. They thrust out their
hands before them, pursued devious courses, came into violent
collision with the counter, with boxes and barrels on the floor,
and with one another. They turned awkwardly hither and
thither and seemed trying to escape, but unable to retrace their
steps. Their voices were heard in exclamations and
curses. But in no way did the apparition of Silas Deemer
manifest an interest in what was going on.</p>
<p>By what impulse the crowd was moved none ever recollected, but
the entire mass—men, women, children, dogs—made a
simultaneous and tumultuous rush for the entrance. They
congested the doorway, pushing for precedence—resolving
themselves at length into a line and moving up step by
step. By some subtle spiritual or physical alchemy
observation had been transmuted into action—the sightseers
had become participants in the spectacle—the audience had
usurped the stage.</p>
<p>To the only spectator remaining on the other side of the
street—Alvan Creede, the banker—the interior of the
store with its inpouring crowd continued in full illumination;
all the strange things going on there were clearly visible.
To those inside all was black darkness. It was as if each
person as he was thrust in at the door had been stricken blind,
and was maddened by the mischance. They groped with aimless
imprecision, tried to force their way out against the current,
pushed and elbowed, struck at random, fell and were trampled,
rose and trampled in their turn. They seized one another by
the garments, the hair, the beard—fought like animals,
cursed, shouted, called one another opprobrious and obscene
names. When, finally, Alvan Creede had seen the last person
of the line pass into that awful tumult the light that had
illuminated it was suddenly quenched and all was as black to him
as to those within. He turned away and left the place.</p>
<p>In the early morning a curious crowd had gathered about
“Deemer’s.” It was composed partly of
those who had run away the night before, but now had the courage
of sunshine, partly of honest folk going to their daily
toil. The door of the store stood open; the place was
vacant, but on the walls, the floor, the furniture, were shreds
of clothing and tangles of hair. Hillbrook militant had
managed somehow to pull itself out and had gone home to medicine
its hurts and swear that it had been all night in bed. On
the dusty desk, behind the counter, was the sales-book. The
entries in it, in Deemer’s handwriting, had ceased on the
16th day of July, the last of his life. There was no record
of a later sale to Alvan Creede.</p>
<p>That is the entire story—except that men’s
passions having subsided and reason having resumed its immemorial
sway, it was confessed in Hillbrook that, considering the
harmless and honorable character of his first commercial
transaction under the new conditions, Silas Deemer, deceased,
might properly have been suffered to resume business at the old
stand without mobbing. In that judgment the local historian
from whose unpublished work these facts are compiled had the
thoughtfulness to signify his concurrence.</p>
<h2><a name="page169"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
169</span>STALEY FLEMING’S HALLUCINATION</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">Of</span> two men who were talking one was
a physician.</p>
<p>“I sent for you, Doctor,” said the other,
“but I don’t think you can do me any good. May
be you can recommend a specialist in psychopathy. I fancy
I’m a bit loony.”</p>
<p>“You look all right,” the physician said.</p>
<p>“You shall judge—I have hallucinations. I
wake every night and see in my room, intently watching me, a big
black Newfoundland dog with a white forefoot.”</p>
<p>“You say you wake; are you sure about that?
‘Hallucinations’ are sometimes only
dreams.”</p>
<p>“Oh, I wake, all right. Sometimes I lie still a
long time, looking at the dog as earnestly as the dog looks at
me—I always leave the light going. When I can’t
endure it any longer I sit up in bed—and nothing is
there!”</p>
<p>“’M, ’m—what is the beast’s
expression?”</p>
<p>“It seems to me sinister. Of course I know that,
except in art, an animal’s face in repose has always the
same expression. But this is not a real animal.
Newfoundland dogs are pretty mild looking, you know; what’s
the matter with this one?”</p>
<p>“Really, my diagnosis would have no value: I am not
going to treat the dog.”</p>
<p>The physician laughed at his own pleasantry, but narrowly
watched his patient from the corner of his eye. Presently
he said: “Fleming, your description of the beast fits the
dog of the late Atwell Barton.”</p>
<p>Fleming half-rose from his chair, sat again and made a visible
attempt at indifference. “I remember Barton,”
he said; “I believe he was—it was reported
that—wasn’t there something suspicious in his
death?”</p>
<p>Looking squarely now into the eyes of his patient, the
physician said: “Three years ago the body of your old
enemy, Atwell Barton, was found in the woods near his house and
yours. He had been stabbed to death. There have been
no arrests; there was no clew. Some of us had
‘theories.’ I had one. Have
you?”</p>
<p>“I? Why, bless your soul, what could I know about
it? You remember that I left for Europe almost immediately
afterward—a considerable time afterward. In the few
weeks since my return you could not expect me to construct a
‘theory.’ In fact, I have not given the matter
a thought. What about his dog?”</p>
<p>“It was first to find the body. It died of
starvation on his grave.”</p>
<p>We do not know the inexorable law underlying
coincidences. Staley Fleming did not, or he would perhaps
not have sprung to his feet as the night wind brought in through
the open window the long wailing howl of a distant dog. He
strode several times across the room in the steadfast gaze of the
physician; then, abruptly confronting him, almost shouted:
“What has all this to do with my trouble, Dr.
Halderman? You forget why you were sent for.”</p>
<p>Rising, the physician laid his hand upon his patient’s
arm and said, gently: “Pardon me. I cannot diagnose
your disorder off-hand—to-morrow, perhaps. Please go
to bed, leaving your door unlocked; I will pass the night here
with your books. Can you call me without rising?”</p>
<p>“Yes, there is an electric bell.”</p>
<p>“Good. If anything disturbs you push the button
without sitting up. Good night.”</p>
<p>Comfortably installed in an armchair the man of medicine
stared into the glowing coals and thought deeply and long, but
apparently to little purpose, for he frequently rose and opening
a door leading to the staircase, listened intently; then resumed
his seat. Presently, however, he fell asleep, and when he
woke it was past midnight. He stirred the failing fire,
lifted a book from the table at his side and looked at the
title. It was Denneker’s
“Meditations.” He opened it at random and began
to read:</p>
<p>“Forasmuch as it is ordained of God that all flesh hath
spirit and thereby taketh on spiritual powers, so, also, the
spirit hath powers of the flesh, even when it is gone out of the
flesh and liveth as a thing apart, as many a violence performed
by wraith and lemure sheweth. And there be who say that man
is not single in this, but the beasts have the like evil
inducement, and—”</p>
<p>The reading was interrupted by a shaking of the house, as by
the fall of a heavy object. The reader flung down the book,
rushed from the room and mounted the stairs to Fleming’s
bed-chamber. He tried the door, but contrary to his
instructions it was locked. He set his shoulder against it
with such force that it gave way. On the floor near the
disordered bed, in his night clothes, lay Fleming gasping away
his life.</p>
<p>The physician raised the dying man’s head from the floor
and observed a wound in the throat. “I should have
thought of this,” he said, believing it suicide.</p>
<p>When the man was dead an examination disclosed the
unmistakable marks of an animal’s fangs deeply sunken into
the jugular vein.</p>
<p>But there was no animal.</p>
<h2><a name="page174"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 174</span>A
RESUMED IDENTITY</h2>
<h3>I<br />
THE REVIEW AS A FORM OF WELCOME</h3>
<p><span class="smcap">One</span> summer night a man stood on a
low hill overlooking a wide expanse of forest and field. By
the full moon hanging low in the west he knew what he might not
have known otherwise: that it was near the hour of dawn. A
light mist lay along the earth, partly veiling the lower features
of the landscape, but above it the taller trees showed in
well-defined masses against a clear sky. Two or three
farmhouses were visible through the haze, but in none of them,
naturally, was a light. Nowhere, indeed, was any sign or
suggestion of life except the barking of a distant dog, which,
repeated with mechanical iteration, served rather to accentuate
than dispel the loneliness of the scene.</p>
<p>The man looked curiously about him on all sides, as one who
among familiar surroundings is unable to determine his exact
place and part in the scheme of things. It is so, perhaps,
that we shall act when, risen from the dead, we await the call to
judgment.</p>
<p>A hundred yards away was a straight road, showing white in the
moonlight. Endeavoring to orient himself, as a surveyor or
navigator might say, the man moved his eyes slowly along its
visible length and at a distance of a quarter-mile to the south
of his station saw, dim and gray in the haze, a group of horsemen
riding to the north. Behind them were men afoot, marching
in column, with dimly gleaming rifles aslant above their
shoulders. They moved slowly and in silence. Another
group of horsemen, another regiment of infantry, another and
another—all in unceasing motion toward the man’s
point of view, past it, and beyond. A battery of artillery
followed, the cannoneers riding with folded arms on limber and
caisson. And still the interminable procession came out of
the obscurity to south and passed into the obscurity to north,
with never a sound of voice, nor hoof, nor wheel.</p>
<p>The man could not rightly understand: he thought himself deaf;
said so, and heard his own voice, although it had an unfamiliar
quality that almost alarmed him; it disappointed his ear’s
expectancy in the matter of <i>timbre</i> and resonance.
But he was not deaf, and that for the moment sufficed.</p>
<p>Then he remembered that there are natural phenomena to which
some one has given the name “acoustic shadows.”
If you stand in an acoustic shadow there is one direction from
which you will hear nothing. At the battle of
Gaines’s Mill, one of the fiercest conflicts of the Civil
War, with a hundred guns in play, spectators a mile and a half
away on the opposite side of the Chickahominy valley heard
nothing of what they clearly saw. The bombardment of Port
Royal, heard and felt at St. Augustine, a hundred and fifty miles
to the south, was inaudible two miles to the north in a still
atmosphere. A few days before the surrender at Appomattox a
thunderous engagement between the commands of Sheridan and
Pickett was unknown to the latter commander, a mile in the rear
of his own line.</p>
<p>These instances were not known to the man of whom we write,
but less striking ones of the same character had not escaped his
observation. He was profoundly disquieted, but for another
reason than the uncanny silence of that moonlight march.</p>
<p>“Good Lord!” he said to himself—and again it
was as if another had spoken his thought—“if those
people are what I take them to be we have lost the battle and
they are moving on Nashville!”</p>
<p>Then came a thought of self—an apprehension—a
strong sense of personal peril, such as in another we call
fear. He stepped quickly into the shadow of a tree.
And still the silent battalions moved slowly forward in the
haze.</p>
<p>The chill of a sudden breeze upon the back of his neck drew
his attention to the quarter whence it came, and turning to the
east he saw a faint gray light along the horizon—the first
sign of returning day. This increased his apprehension.</p>
<p>“I must get away from here,” he thought, “or
I shall be discovered and taken.”</p>
<p>He moved out of the shadow, walking rapidly toward the graying
east. From the safer seclusion of a clump of cedars he
looked back. The entire column had passed out of sight: the
straight white road lay bare and desolate in the moonlight!</p>
<p>Puzzled before, he was now inexpressibly astonished. So
swift a passing of so slow an army!—he could not comprehend
it. Minute after minute passed unnoted; he had lost his
sense of time. He sought with a terrible earnestness a
solution of the mystery, but sought in vain. When at last
he roused himself from his abstraction the sun’s rim was
visible above the hills, but in the new conditions he found no
other light than that of day; his understanding was involved as
darkly in doubt as before.</p>
<p>On every side lay cultivated fields showing no sign of war and
war’s ravages. From the chimneys of the farmhouses
thin ascensions of blue smoke signaled preparations for a
day’s peaceful toil. Having stilled its immemorial
allocution to the moon, the watch-dog was assisting a negro who,
prefixing a team of mules to the plow, was flatting and sharping
contentedly at his task. The hero of this tale stared
stupidly at the pastoral picture as if he had never seen such a
thing in all his life; then he put his hand to his head, passed
it through his hair and, withdrawing it, attentively considered
the palm—a singular thing to do. Apparently reassured
by the act, he walked confidently toward the road.</p>
<h3>II<br />
WHEN YOU HAVE LOST YOUR LIFE CONSULT A PHYSICIAN</h3>
<p>Dr. Stilling Malson, of Murfreesboro, having visited a patient
six or seven miles away, on the Nashville road, had remained with
him all night. At daybreak he set out for home on
horseback, as was the custom of doctors of the time and
region. He had passed into the neighborhood of
Stone’s River battlefield when a man approached him from
the roadside and saluted in the military fashion, with a movement
of the right hand to the hat-brim. But the hat was not a
military hat, the man was not in uniform and had not a martial
bearing. The doctor nodded civilly, half thinking that the
stranger’s uncommon greeting was perhaps in deference to
the historic surroundings. As the stranger evidently
desired speech with him he courteously reined in his horse and
waited.</p>
<p>“Sir,” said the stranger, “although a
civilian, you are perhaps an enemy.”</p>
<p>“I am a physician,” was the non-committal
reply.</p>
<p>“Thank you,” said the other. “I am a
lieutenant, of the staff of General Hazen.” He paused
a moment and looked sharply at the person whom he was addressing,
then added, “Of the Federal army.”</p>
<p>The physician merely nodded.</p>
<p>“Kindly tell me,” continued the other, “what
has happened here. Where are the armies? Which has
won the battle?”</p>
<p>The physician regarded his questioner curiously with half-shut
eyes. After a professional scrutiny, prolonged to the limit
of politeness, “Pardon me,” he said; “one
asking information should be willing to impart it. Are you
wounded?” he added, smiling.</p>
<p>“Not seriously—it seems.”</p>
<p>The man removed the unmilitary hat, put his hand to his head,
passed it through his hair and, withdrawing it, attentively
considered the palm.</p>
<p>“I was struck by a bullet and have been
unconscious. It must have been a light, glancing blow: I
find no blood and feel no pain. I will not trouble you for
treatment, but will you kindly direct me to my command—to
any part of the Federal army—if you know?”</p>
<p>Again the doctor did not immediately reply: he was recalling
much that is recorded in the books of his
profession—something about lost identity and the effect of
familiar scenes in restoring it. At length he looked the
man in the face, smiled, and said:</p>
<p>“Lieutenant, you are not wearing the uniform of your
rank and service.”</p>
<p>At this the man glanced down at his civilian attire, lifted
his eyes, and said with hesitation:</p>
<p>“That is true. I—I don’t quite
understand.”</p>
<p>Still regarding him sharply but not unsympathetically the man
of science bluntly inquired:</p>
<p>“How old are you?”</p>
<p>“Twenty-three—if that has anything to do with
it.”</p>
<p>“You don’t look it; I should hardly have guessed
you to be just that.”</p>
<p>The man was growing impatient. “We need not
discuss that,” he said; “I want to know about the
army. Not two hours ago I saw a column of troops moving
northward on this road. You must have met them. Be
good enough to tell me the color of their clothing, which I was
unable to make out, and I’ll trouble you no
more.”</p>
<p>“You are quite sure that you saw them?”</p>
<p>“Sure? My God, sir, I could have counted
them!”</p>
<p>“Why, really,” said the physician, with an amusing
consciousness of his own resemblance to the loquacious barber of
the Arabian Nights, “this is very interesting. I met
no troops.”</p>
<p>The man looked at him coldly, as if he had himself observed
the likeness to the barber. “It is plain,” he
said, “that you do not care to assist me. Sir, you
may go to the devil!”</p>
<p>He turned and strode away, very much at random, across the
dewy fields, his half-penitent tormentor quietly watching him
from his point of vantage in the saddle till he disappeared
beyond an array of trees.</p>
<h3>III<br />
THE DANGER OF LOOKING INTO A POOL OF WATER</h3>
<p>After leaving the road the man slackened his pace, and now
went forward, rather deviously, with a distinct feeling of
fatigue. He could not account for this, though truly the
interminable loquacity of that country doctor offered itself in
explanation. Seating himself upon a rock, he laid one hand
upon his knee, back upward, and casually looked at it. It
was lean and withered. He lifted both hands to his
face. It was seamed and furrowed; he could trace the lines
with the tips of his fingers. How strange!—a mere
bullet-stroke and a brief unconsciousness should not make one a
physical wreck.</p>
<p>“I must have been a long time in hospital,” he
said aloud. “Why, what a fool I am! The battle
was in December, and it is now summer!” He laughed.
“No wonder that fellow thought me an escaped lunatic.
He was wrong: I am only an escaped patient.”</p>
<p>At a little distance a small plot of ground enclosed by a
stone wall caught his attention. With no very definite
intent he rose and went to it. In the center was a square,
solid monument of hewn stone. It was brown with age,
weather-worn at the angles, spotted with moss and lichen.
Between the massive blocks were strips of grass the leverage of
whose roots had pushed them apart. In answer to the
challenge of this ambitious structure Time had laid his
destroying hand upon it, and it would soon be “one with
Nineveh and Tyre.” In an inscription on one side his
eye caught a familiar name. Shaking with excitement, he
craned his body across the wall and read:</p>
<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">HAZEN’S
BRIGADE<br />
to<br />
The Memory of Its Soldiers<br />
who fell at<br />
Stone River, Dec. 31, 1862.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The man fell back from the wall, faint and sick. Almost
within an arm’s length was a little depression in the
earth; it had been filled by a recent rain—a pool of clear
water. He crept to it to revive himself, lifted the upper
part of his body on his trembling arms, thrust forward his head
and saw the reflection of his face, as in a mirror. He
uttered a terrible cry. His arms gave way; he fell, face
downward, into the pool and yielded up the life that had spanned
another life.</p>
<h2><a name="page185"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 185</span>A
BABY TRAMP</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">If</span> you had seen little Jo standing
at the street corner in the rain, you would hardly have admired
him. It was apparently an ordinary autumn rainstorm, but
the water which fell upon Jo (who was hardly old enough to be
either just or unjust, and so perhaps did not come under the law
of impartial distribution) appeared to have some property
peculiar to itself: one would have said it was dark and
adhesive—sticky. But that could hardly be so, even in
Blackburg, where things certainly did occur that were a good deal
out of the common.</p>
<p>For example, ten or twelve years before, a shower of small
frogs had fallen, as is credibly attested by a contemporaneous
chronicle, the record concluding with a somewhat obscure
statement to the effect that the chronicler considered it good
growing-weather for Frenchmen.</p>
<p>Some years later Blackburg had a fall of crimson snow; it is
cold in Blackburg when winter is on, and the snows are frequent
and deep. There can be no doubt of it—the snow in
this instance was of the color of blood and melted into water of
the same hue, if water it was, not blood. The phenomenon
had attracted wide attention, and science had as many
explanations as there were scientists who knew nothing about
it. But the men of Blackburg—men who for many years
had lived right there where the red snow fell, and might be
supposed to know a good deal about the matter—shook their
heads and said something would come of it.</p>
<p>And something did, for the next summer was made memorable by
the prevalence of a mysterious disease—epidemic, endemic,
or the Lord knows what, though the physicians
didn’t—which carried away a full half of the
population. Most of the other half carried themselves away
and were slow to return, but finally came back, and were now
increasing and multiplying as before, but Blackburg had not since
been altogether the same.</p>
<p>Of quite another kind, though equally “out of the
common,” was the incident of Hetty Parlow’s
ghost. Hetty Parlow’s maiden name had been Brownon,
and in Blackburg that meant more than one would think.</p>
<p>The Brownons had from time immemorial—from the very
earliest of the old colonial days—been the leading family
of the town. It was the richest and it was the best, and
Blackburg would have shed the last drop of its plebeian blood in
defense of the Brownon fair fame. As few of the
family’s members had ever been known to live permanently
away from Blackburg, although most of them were educated
elsewhere and nearly all had traveled, there was quite a number
of them. The men held most of the public offices, and the
women were foremost in all good works. Of these latter,
Hetty was most beloved by reason of the sweetness of her
disposition, the purity of her character and her singular
personal beauty. She married in Boston a young scapegrace
named Parlow, and like a good Brownon brought him to Blackburg
forthwith and made a man and a town councilman of him. They
had a child which they named Joseph and dearly loved, as was then
the fashion among parents in all that region. Then they
died of the mysterious disorder already mentioned, and at the age
of one whole year Joseph set up as an orphan.</p>
<p>Unfortunately for Joseph the disease which had cut off his
parents did not stop at that; it went on and extirpated nearly
the whole Brownon contingent and its allies by marriage; and
those who fled did not return. The tradition was broken,
the Brownon estates passed into alien hands and the only Brownons
remaining in that place were underground in Oak Hill Cemetery,
where, indeed, was a colony of them powerful enough to resist the
encroachment of surrounding tribes and hold the best part of the
grounds. But about the ghost:</p>
<p>One night, about three years after the death of Hetty Parlow,
a number of the young people of Blackburg were passing Oak Hill
Cemetery in a wagon—if you have been there you will
remember that the road to Greenton runs alongside it on the
south. They had been attending a May Day festival at
Greenton; and that serves to fix the date. Altogether there
may have been a dozen, and a jolly party they were, considering
the legacy of gloom left by the town’s recent somber
experiences. As they passed the cemetery the man driving
suddenly reined in his team with an exclamation of
surprise. It was sufficiently surprising, no doubt, for
just ahead, and almost at the roadside, though inside the
cemetery, stood the ghost of Hetty Parlow. There could be
no doubt of it, for she had been personally known to every youth
and maiden in the party. That established the thing’s
identity; its character as ghost was signified by all the
customary signs—the shroud, the long, undone hair, the
“far-away look”—everything. This
disquieting apparition was stretching out its arms toward the
west, as if in supplication for the evening star, which,
certainly, was an alluring object, though obviously out of
reach. As they all sat silent (so the story goes) every
member of that party of merrymakers—they had merry-made on
coffee and lemonade only—distinctly heard that ghost call
the name “Joey, Joey!” A moment later nothing
was there. Of course one does not have to believe all
that.</p>
<p>Now, at that moment, as was afterward ascertained, Joey was
wandering about in the sage-brush on the opposite side of the
continent, near Winnemucca, in the State of Nevada. He had
been taken to that town by some good persons distantly related to
his dead father, and by them adopted and tenderly cared
for. But on that evening the poor child had strayed from
home and was lost in the desert.</p>
<p>His after history is involved in obscurity and has gaps which
conjecture alone can fill. It is known that he was found by
a family of Piute Indians, who kept the little wretch with them
for a time and then sold him—actually sold him for money to
a woman on one of the east-bound trains, at a station a long way
from Winnemucca. The woman professed to have made all
manner of inquiries, but all in vain: so, being childless and a
widow, she adopted him herself. At this point of his career
Jo seemed to be getting a long way from the condition of
orphanage; the interposition of a multitude of parents between
himself and that woeful state promised him a long immunity from
its disadvantages.</p>
<p>Mrs. Darnell, his newest mother, lived in Cleveland,
Ohio. But her adopted son did not long remain with
her. He was seen one afternoon by a policeman, new to that
beat, deliberately toddling away from her house, and being
questioned answered that he was “a doin’
home.” He must have traveled by rail, somehow, for
three days later he was in the town of Whiteville, which, as you
know, is a long way from Blackburg. His clothing was in
pretty fair condition, but he was sinfully dirty. Unable to
give any account of himself he was arrested as a vagrant and
sentenced to imprisonment in the Infants’ Sheltering
Home—where he was washed.</p>
<p>Jo ran away from the Infants’ Sheltering Home at
Whiteville—just took to the woods one day, and the Home
knew him no more forever.</p>
<p>We find him next, or rather get back to him, standing forlorn
in the cold autumn rain at a suburban street corner in Blackburg;
and it seems right to explain now that the raindrops falling upon
him there were really not dark and gummy; they only failed to
make his face and hands less so. Jo was indeed fearfully
and wonderfully besmirched, as by the hand of an artist.
And the forlorn little tramp had no shoes; his feet were bare,
red, and swollen, and when he walked he limped with both
legs. As to clothing—ah, you would hardly have had
the skill to name any single garment that he wore, or say by what
magic he kept it upon him. That he was cold all over and
all through did not admit of a doubt; he knew it himself.
Anyone would have been cold there that evening; but, for that
reason, no one else was there. How Jo came to be there
himself, he could not for the flickering little life of him have
told, even if gifted with a vocabulary exceeding a hundred
words. From the way he stared about him one could have seen
that he had not the faintest notion of where (nor why) he
was.</p>
<p>Yet he was not altogether a fool in his day and generation;
being cold and hungry, and still able to walk a little by bending
his knees very much indeed and putting his feet down toes first,
he decided to enter one of the houses which flanked the street at
long intervals and looked so bright and warm. But when he
attempted to act upon that very sensible decision a burly dog
came bowsing out and disputed his right. Inexpressibly
frightened and believing, no doubt (with some reason, too) that
brutes without meant brutality within, he hobbled away from all
the houses, and with gray, wet fields to right of him and gray,
wet fields to left of him—with the rain half blinding him
and the night coming in mist and darkness, held his way along the
road that leads to Greenton. That is to say, the road leads
those to Greenton who succeed in passing the Oak Hill
Cemetery. A considerable number every year do not.</p>
<p>Jo did not.</p>
<p>They found him there the next morning, very wet, very cold,
but no longer hungry. He had apparently entered the
cemetery gate—hoping, perhaps, that it led to a house where
there was no dog—and gone blundering about in the darkness,
falling over many a grave, no doubt, until he had tired of it all
and given up. The little body lay upon one side, with one
soiled cheek upon one soiled hand, the other hand tucked away
among the rags to make it warm, the other cheek washed clean and
white at last, as for a kiss from one of God’s great
angels. It was observed—though nothing was thought of
it at the time, the body being as yet unidentified—that the
little fellow was lying upon the grave of Hetty Parlow. The
grave, however, had not opened to receive him. That is a
circumstance which, without actual irreverence, one may wish had
been ordered otherwise.</p>
<h2><a name="page194"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 194</span>THE
NIGHT-DOINGS AT “DEADMAN’S”</h2>
<p style="text-align: center">A STORY THAT IS UNTRUE</p>
<p><span class="smcap">It</span> was a singularly sharp night,
and clear as the heart of a diamond. Clear nights have a
trick of being keen. In darkness you may be cold and not
know it; when you see, you suffer. This night was bright
enough to bite like a serpent. The moon was moving
mysteriously along behind the giant pines crowning the South
Mountain, striking a cold sparkle from the crusted snow, and
bringing out against the black west the ghostly outlines of the
Coast Range, beyond which lay the invisible Pacific. The
snow had piled itself, in the open spaces along the bottom of the
gulch, into long ridges that seemed to heave, and into hills that
appeared to toss and scatter spray. The spray was sunlight,
twice reflected: dashed once from the moon, once from the
snow.</p>
<p>In this snow many of the shanties of the abandoned mining camp
were obliterated, (a sailor might have said they had gone down)
and at irregular intervals it had overtopped the tall trestles
which had once supported a river called a flume; for, of course,
“flume” is <i>flumen</i>. Among the advantages
of which the mountains cannot deprive the gold-hunter is the
privilege of speaking Latin. He says of his dead neighbor,
“He has gone up the flume.” This is not a bad
way to say, “His life has returned to the Fountain of
Life.”</p>
<p>While putting on its armor against the assaults of the wind,
this snow had neglected no coign of vantage. Snow pursued
by the wind is not wholly unlike a retreating army. In the
open field it ranges itself in ranks and battalions; where it can
get a foothold it makes a stand; where it can take cover it does
so. You may see whole platoons of snow cowering behind a
bit of broken wall. The devious old road, hewn out of the
mountain side, was full of it. Squadron upon squadron had
struggled to escape by this line, when suddenly pursuit had
ceased. A more desolate and dreary spot than
Deadman’s Gulch in a winter midnight it is impossible to
imagine. Yet Mr. Hiram Beeson elected to live there, the
sole inhabitant.</p>
<p>Away up the side of the North Mountain his little pine-log
shanty projected from its single pane of glass a long, thin beam
of light, and looked not altogether unlike a black beetle
fastened to the hillside with a bright new pin. Within it
sat Mr. Beeson himself, before a roaring fire, staring into its
hot heart as if he had never before seen such a thing in all his
life. He was not a comely man. He was gray; he was
ragged and slovenly in his attire; his face was wan and haggard;
his eyes were too bright. As to his age, if one had
attempted to guess it, one might have said forty-seven, then
corrected himself and said seventy-four. He was really
twenty-eight. Emaciated he was; as much, perhaps, as he
dared be, with a needy undertaker at Bentley’s Flat and a
new and enterprising coroner at Sonora. Poverty and zeal
are an upper and a nether millstone. It is dangerous to
make a third in that kind of sandwich.</p>
<p>As Mr. Beeson sat there, with his ragged elbows on his ragged
knees, his lean jaws buried in his lean hands, and with no
apparent intention of going to bed, he looked as if the slightest
movement would tumble him to pieces. Yet during the last
hour he had winked no fewer than three times.</p>
<p>There was a sharp rapping at the door. A rap at that
time of night and in that weather might have surprised an
ordinary mortal who had dwelt two years in the gulch without
seeing a human face, and could not fail to know that the country
was impassable; but Mr. Beeson did not so much as pull his eyes
out of the coals. And even when the door was pushed open he
only shrugged a little more closely into himself, as one does who
is expecting something that he would rather not see. You
may observe this movement in women when, in a mortuary chapel,
the coffin is borne up the aisle behind them.</p>
<p>But when a long old man in a blanket overcoat, his head tied
up in a handkerchief and nearly his entire face in a muffler,
wearing green goggles and with a complexion of glittering
whiteness where it could be seen, strode silently into the room,
laying a hard, gloved hand on Mr. Beeson’s shoulder, the
latter so far forgot himself as to look up with an appearance of
no small astonishment; whomever he may have been expecting, he
had evidently not counted on meeting anyone like this.
Nevertheless, the sight of this unexpected guest produced in Mr.
Beeson the following sequence: a feeling of astonishment; a sense
of gratification; a sentiment of profound good will. Rising
from his seat, he took the knotty hand from his shoulder, and
shook it up and down with a fervor quite unaccountable; for in
the old man’s aspect was nothing to attract, much to
repel. However, attraction is too general a property for
repulsion to be without it. The most attractive object in
the world is the face we instinctively cover with a cloth.
When it becomes still more attractive—fascinating—we
put seven feet of earth above it.</p>
<p>“Sir,” said Mr. Beeson, releasing the old
man’s hand, which fell passively against his thigh with a
quiet clack, “it is an extremely disagreeable night.
Pray be seated; I am very glad to see you.”</p>
<p>Mr. Beeson spoke with an easy good breeding that one would
hardly have expected, considering all things. Indeed, the
contrast between his appearance and his manner was sufficiently
surprising to be one of the commonest of social phenomena in the
mines. The old man advanced a step toward the fire, glowing
cavernously in the green goggles. Mr. Beeson resumed:</p>
<p>“You bet your life I am!”</p>
<p>Mr. Beeson’s elegance was not too refined; it had made
reasonable concessions to local taste. He paused a moment,
letting his eyes drop from the muffled head of his guest, down
along the row of moldy buttons confining the blanket overcoat, to
the greenish cowhide boots powdered with snow, which had begun to
melt and run along the floor in little rills. He took an
inventory of his guest, and appeared satisfied. Who would
not have been? Then he continued:</p>
<p>“The cheer I can offer you is, unfortunately, in keeping
with my surroundings; but I shall esteem myself highly favored if
it is your pleasure to partake of it, rather than seek better at
Bentley’s Flat.”</p>
<p>With a singular refinement of hospitable humility Mr. Beeson
spoke as if a sojourn in his warm cabin on such a night, as
compared with walking fourteen miles up to the throat in snow
with a cutting crust, would be an intolerable hardship. By
way of reply, his guest unbuttoned the blanket overcoat.
The host laid fresh fuel on the fire, swept the hearth with the
tail of a wolf, and added:</p>
<p>“But <i>I</i> think you’d better
skedaddle.”</p>
<p>The old man took a seat by the fire, spreading his broad soles
to the heat without removing his hat. In the mines the hat
is seldom removed except when the boots are. Without
further remark Mr. Beeson also seated himself in a chair which
had been a barrel, and which, retaining much of its original
character, seemed to have been designed with a view to preserving
his dust if it should please him to crumble. For a moment
there was silence; then, from somewhere among the pines, came the
snarling yelp of a coyote; and simultaneously the door rattled in
its frame. There was no other connection between the two
incidents than that the coyote has an aversion to storms, and the
wind was rising; yet there seemed somehow a kind of supernatural
conspiracy between the two, and Mr. Beeson shuddered with a vague
sense of terror. He recovered himself in a moment and again
addressed his guest.</p>
<p>“There are strange doings here. I will tell you
everything, and then if you decide to go I shall hope to
accompany you over the worst of the way; as far as where Baldy
Peterson shot Ben Hike—I dare say you know the
place.”</p>
<p>The old man nodded emphatically, as intimating not merely that
he did, but that he did indeed.</p>
<p>“Two years ago,” began Mr. Beeson, “I, with
two companions, occupied this house; but when the rush to the
Flat occurred we left, along with the rest. In ten hours
the Gulch was deserted. That evening, however, I discovered
I had left behind me a valuable pistol (that is it) and returned
for it, passing the night here alone, as I have passed every
night since. I must explain that a few days before we left,
our Chinese domestic had the misfortune to die while the ground
was frozen so hard that it was impossible to dig a grave in the
usual way. So, on the day of our hasty departure, we cut
through the floor there, and gave him such burial as we
could. But before putting him down I had the extremely bad
taste to cut off his pigtail and spike it to that beam above his
grave, where you may see it at this moment, or, preferably, when
warmth has given you leisure for observation.</p>
<p>“I stated, did I not, that the Chinaman came to his
death from natural causes? I had, of course, nothing to do
with that, and returned through no irresistible attraction, or
morbid fascination, but only because I had forgotten a
pistol. This is clear to you, is it not, sir?”</p>
<p>The visitor nodded gravely. He appeared to be a man of
few words, if any. Mr. Beeson continued:</p>
<p>“According to the Chinese faith, a man is like a kite:
he cannot go to heaven without a tail. Well, to shorten
this tedious story—which, however, I thought it my duty to
relate—on that night, while I was here alone and thinking
of anything but him, that Chinaman came back for his pigtail.</p>
<p>“He did not get it.”</p>
<p>At this point Mr. Beeson relapsed into blank silence.
Perhaps he was fatigued by the unwonted exercise of speaking;
perhaps he had conjured up a memory that demanded his undivided
attention. The wind was now fairly abroad, and the pines
along the mountainside sang with singular distinctness. The
narrator continued:</p>
<p>“You say you do not see much in that, and I must confess
I do not myself.</p>
<p>“But he keeps coming!”</p>
<p>There was another long silence, during which both stared into
the fire without the movement of a limb. Then Mr. Beeson
broke out, almost fiercely, fixing his eyes on what he could see
of the impassive face of his auditor:</p>
<p>“Give it him? Sir, in this matter I have no
intention of troubling anyone for advice. You will pardon
me, I am sure”—here he became singularly
persuasive—“but I have ventured to nail that pigtail
fast, and have assumed the somewhat onerous obligation of
guarding it. So it is quite impossible to act on your
considerate suggestion.</p>
<p>“Do you play me for a Modoc?”</p>
<p>Nothing could exceed the sudden ferocity with which he thrust
this indignant remonstrance into the ear of his guest. It
was as if he had struck him on the side of the head with a steel
gauntlet. It was a protest, but it was a challenge.
To be mistaken for a coward—to be played for a Modoc: these
two expressions are one. Sometimes it is a Chinaman.
Do you play me for a Chinaman? is a question frequently addressed
to the ear of the suddenly dead.</p>
<p>Mr. Beeson’s buffet produced no effect, and after a
moment’s pause, during which the wind thundered in the
chimney like the sound of clods upon a coffin, he resumed:</p>
<p>“But, as you say, it is wearing me out. I feel
that the life of the last two years has been a mistake—a
mistake that corrects itself; you see how. The grave!
No; there is no one to dig it. The ground is frozen,
too. But you are very welcome. You may say at
Bentley’s—but that is not important. It was
very tough to cut: they braid silk into their pigtails.
Kwaagh.”</p>
<p>Mr. Beeson was speaking with his eyes shut, and he
wandered. His last word was a snore. A moment later
he drew a long breath, opened his eyes with an effort, made a
single remark, and fell into a deep sleep. What he said was
this:</p>
<p>“They are swiping my dust!”</p>
<p>Then the aged stranger, who had not uttered one word since his
arrival, arose from his seat and deliberately laid off his outer
clothing, looking as angular in his flannels as the late
Signorina Festorazzi, an Irish woman, six feet in height, and
weighing fifty-six pounds, who used to exhibit herself in her
chemise to the people of San Francisco. He then crept into
one of the “bunks,” having first placed a revolver in
easy reach, according to the custom of the country. This
revolver he took from a shelf, and it was the one which Mr.
Beeson had mentioned as that for which he had returned to the
Gulch two years before.</p>
<p>In a few moments Mr. Beeson awoke, and seeing that his guest
had retired he did likewise. But before doing so he
approached the long, plaited wisp of pagan hair and gave it a
powerful tug, to assure himself that it was fast and firm.
The two beds—mere shelves covered with blankets not
overclean—faced each other from opposite sides of the room,
the little square trapdoor that had given access to the
Chinaman’s grave being midway between. This, by the
way, was crossed by a double row of spike-heads. In his
resistance to the supernatural, Mr. Beeson had not disdained the
use of material precautions.</p>
<p>The fire was now low, the flames burning bluely and
petulantly, with occasional flashes, projecting spectral shadows
on the walls—shadows that moved mysteriously about, now
dividing, now uniting. The shadow of the pendent queue,
however, kept moodily apart, near the roof at the further end of
the room, looking like a note of admiration. The song of
the pines outside had now risen to the dignity of a triumphal
hymn. In the pauses the silence was dreadful.</p>
<p>It was during one of these intervals that the trap in the
floor began to lift. Slowly and steadily it rose, and
slowly and steadily rose the swaddled head of the old man in the
bunk to observe it. Then, with a clap that shook the house
to its foundation, it was thrown clean back, where it lay with
its unsightly spikes pointing threateningly upward. Mr.
Beeson awoke, and without rising, pressed his fingers into his
eyes. He shuddered; his teeth chattered. His guest
was now reclining on one elbow, watching the proceedings with the
goggles that glowed like lamps.</p>
<p>Suddenly a howling gust of wind swooped down the chimney,
scattering ashes and smoke in all directions, for a moment
obscuring everything. When the firelight again illuminated
the room there was seen, sitting gingerly on the edge of a stool
by the hearthside, a swarthy little man of prepossessing
appearance and dressed with faultless taste, nodding to the old
man with a friendly and engaging smile. “From San
Francisco, evidently,” thought Mr. Beeson, who having
somewhat recovered from his fright was groping his way to a
solution of the evening’s events.</p>
<p>But now another actor appeared upon the scene. Out of
the square black hole in the middle of the floor protruded the
head of the departed Chinaman, his glassy eyes turned upward in
their angular slits and fastened on the dangling queue above with
a look of yearning unspeakable. Mr. Beeson groaned, and
again spread his hands upon his face. A mild odor of opium
pervaded the place. The phantom, clad only in a short blue
tunic quilted and silken but covered with grave-mold, rose
slowly, as if pushed by a weak spiral spring. Its knees
were at the level of the floor, when with a quick upward impulse
like the silent leaping of a flame it grasped the queue with both
hands, drew up its body and took the tip in its horrible yellow
teeth. To this it clung in a seeming frenzy, grimacing
ghastly, surging and plunging from side to side in its efforts to
disengage its property from the beam, but uttering no
sound. It was like a corpse artificially convulsed by means
of a galvanic battery. The contrast between its superhuman
activity and its silence was no less than hideous!</p>
<p>Mr. Beeson cowered in his bed. The swarthy little
gentleman uncrossed his legs, beat an impatient tattoo with the
toe of his boot and consulted a heavy gold watch. The old
man sat erect and quietly laid hold of the revolver.</p>
<p>Bang!</p>
<p>Like a body cut from the gallows the Chinaman plumped into the
black hole below, carrying his tail in his teeth. The
trapdoor turned over, shutting down with a snap. The
swarthy little gentleman from San Francisco sprang nimbly from
his perch, caught something in the air with his hat, as a boy
catches a butterfly, and vanished into the chimney as if drawn up
by suction.</p>
<p>From away somewhere in the outer darkness floated in through
the open door a faint, far cry—a long, sobbing wail, as of
a child death-strangled in the desert, or a lost soul borne away
by the Adversary. It may have been the coyote.</p>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<p>In the early days of the following spring a party of miners on
their way to new diggings passed along the Gulch, and straying
through the deserted shanties found in one of them the body of
Hiram Beeson, stretched upon a bunk, with a bullet hole through
the heart. The ball had evidently been fired from the
opposite side of the room, for in one of the oaken beams overhead
was a shallow blue dint, where it had struck a knot and been
deflected downward to the breast of its victim. Strongly
attached to the same beam was what appeared to be an end of a
rope of braided horsehair, which had been cut by the bullet in
its passage to the knot. Nothing else of interest was
noted, excepting a suit of moldy and incongruous clothing,
several articles of which were afterward identified by
respectable witnesses as those in which certain deceased citizens
of Deadman’s had been buried years before. But it is
not easy to understand how that could be, unless, indeed, the
garments had been worn as a disguise by Death himself—which
is hardly credible.</p>
<h2><a name="page210"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
210</span>BEYOND THE WALL</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">Many</span> years ago, on my way from
Hongkong to New York, I passed a week in San Francisco. A
long time had gone by since I had been in that city, during which
my ventures in the Orient had prospered beyond my hope; I was
rich and could afford to revisit my own country to renew my
friendship with such of the companions of my youth as still lived
and remembered me with the old affection. Chief of these, I
hoped, was Mohun Dampier, an old schoolmate with whom I had held
a desultory correspondence which had long ceased, as is the way
of correspondence between men. You may have observed that
the indisposition to write a merely social letter is in the ratio
of the square of the distance between you and your
correspondent. It is a law.</p>
<p>I remembered Dampier as a handsome, strong young fellow of
scholarly tastes, with an aversion to work and a marked
indifference to many of the things that the world cares for,
including wealth, of which, however, he had inherited enough to
put him beyond the reach of want. In his family, one of the
oldest and most aristocratic in the country, it was, I think, a
matter of pride that no member of it had ever been in trade nor
politics, nor suffered any kind of distinction. Mohun was a
trifle sentimental, and had in him a singular element of
superstition, which led him to the study of all manner of occult
subjects, although his sane mental health safeguarded him against
fantastic and perilous faiths. He made daring incursions
into the realm of the unreal without renouncing his residence in
the partly surveyed and charted region of what we are pleased to
call certitude.</p>
<p>The night of my visit to him was stormy. The Californian
winter was on, and the incessant rain plashed in the deserted
streets, or, lifted by irregular gusts of wind, was hurled
against the houses with incredible fury. With no small
difficulty my cabman found the right place, away out toward the
ocean beach, in a sparsely populated suburb. The dwelling,
a rather ugly one, apparently, stood in the center of its
grounds, which as nearly as I could make out in the gloom were
destitute of either flowers or grass. Three or four trees,
writhing and moaning in the torment of the tempest, appeared to
be trying to escape from their dismal environment and take the
chance of finding a better one out at sea. The house was a
two-story brick structure with a tower, a story higher, at one
corner. In a window of that was the only visible
light. Something in the appearance of the place made me
shudder, a performance that may have been assisted by a rill of
rain-water down my back as I scuttled to cover in the
doorway.</p>
<p>In answer to my note apprising him of my wish to call, Dampier
had written, “Don’t ring—open the door and come
up.” I did so. The staircase was dimly lighted
by a single gas-jet at the top of the second flight. I
managed to reach the landing without disaster and entered by an
open door into the lighted square room of the tower.
Dampier came forward in gown and slippers to receive me, giving
me the greeting that I wished, and if I had held a thought that
it might more fitly have been accorded me at the front door the
first look at him dispelled any sense of his inhospitality.</p>
<p>He was not the same. Hardly past middle age, he had gone
gray and had acquired a pronounced stoop. His figure was
thin and angular, his face deeply lined, his complexion
dead-white, without a touch of color. His eyes, unnaturally
large, glowed with a fire that was almost uncanny.</p>
<p>He seated me, proffered a cigar, and with grave and obvious
sincerity assured me of the pleasure that it gave him to meet
me. Some unimportant conversation followed, but all the
while I was dominated by a melancholy sense of the great change
in him. This he must have perceived, for he suddenly said
with a bright enough smile, “You are disappointed in
me—<i>non sum qualis eram</i>.”</p>
<p>I hardly knew what to reply, but managed to say: “Why,
really, I don’t know: your Latin is about the
same.”</p>
<p>He brightened again. “No,” he said,
“being a dead language, it grows in appropriateness.
But please have the patience to wait: where I am going there is
perhaps a better tongue. Will you care to have a message in
it?”</p>
<p>The smile faded as he spoke, and as he concluded he was
looking into my eyes with a gravity that distressed me. Yet
I would not surrender myself to his mood, nor permit him to see
how deeply his prescience of death affected me.</p>
<p>“I fancy that it will be long,” I said,
“before human speech will cease to serve our need; and then
the need, with its possibilities of service, will have
passed.”</p>
<p>He made no reply, and I too was silent, for the talk had taken
a dispiriting turn, yet I knew not how to give it a more
agreeable character. Suddenly, in a pause of the storm,
when the dead silence was almost startling by contrast with the
previous uproar, I heard a gentle tapping, which appeared to come
from the wall behind my chair. The sound was such as might
have been made by a human hand, not as upon a door by one asking
admittance, but rather, I thought, as an agreed signal, an
assurance of someone’s presence in an adjoining room; most
of us, I fancy, have had more experience of such communications
than we should care to relate. I glanced at Dampier.
If possibly there was something of amusement in the look he did
not observe it. He appeared to have forgotten my presence,
and was staring at the wall behind me with an expression in his
eyes that I am unable to name, although my memory of it is as
vivid to-day as was my sense of it then. The situation was
embarrassing; I rose to take my leave. At this he seemed to
recover himself.</p>
<p>“Please be seated,” he said; “it is
nothing—no one is there.”</p>
<p>But the tapping was repeated, and with the same gentle, slow
insistence as before.</p>
<p>“Pardon me,” I said, “it is late. May
I call to-morrow?”</p>
<p>He smiled—a little mechanically, I thought.
“It is very delicate of you,” said he, “but
quite needless. Really, this is the only room in the tower,
and no one is there. At least—” He left the
sentence incomplete, rose, and threw up a window, the only
opening in the wall from which the sound seemed to come.
“See.”</p>
<p>Not clearly knowing what else to do I followed him to the
window and looked out. A street-lamp some little distance
away gave enough light through the murk of the rain that was
again falling in torrents to make it entirely plain that
“no one was there.” In truth there was nothing
but the sheer blank wall of the tower.</p>
<p>Dampier closed the window and signing me to my seat resumed
his own.</p>
<p>The incident was not in itself particularly mysterious; any
one of a dozen explanations was possible (though none has
occurred to me), yet it impressed me strangely, the more,
perhaps, from my friend’s effort to reassure me, which
seemed to dignify it with a certain significance and
importance. He had proved that no one was there, but in
that fact lay all the interest; and he proffered no
explanation. His silence was irritating and made me
resentful.</p>
<p>“My good friend,” I said, somewhat ironically, I
fear, “I am not disposed to question your right to harbor
as many spooks as you find agreeable to your taste and consistent
with your notions of companionship; that is no business of
mine. But being just a plain man of affairs, mostly of this
world, I find spooks needless to my peace and comfort. I am
going to my hotel, where my fellow-guests are still in the
flesh.”</p>
<p>It was not a very civil speech, but he manifested no feeling
about it. “Kindly remain,” he said.
“I am grateful for your presence here. What you have
heard to-night I believe myself to have heard twice before.
Now I <i>know</i> it was no illusion. That is much to
me—more than you know. Have a fresh cigar and a good
stock of patience while I tell you the story.”</p>
<p>The rain was now falling more steadily, with a low, monotonous
susurration, interrupted at long intervals by the sudden slashing
of the boughs of the trees as the wind rose and failed. The
night was well advanced, but both sympathy and curiosity held me
a willing listener to my friend’s monologue, which I did
not interrupt by a single word from beginning to end.</p>
<p>“Ten years ago,” he said, “I occupied a
ground-floor apartment in one of a row of houses, all alike, away
at the other end of the town, on what we call Rincon Hill.
This had been the best quarter of San Francisco, but had fallen
into neglect and decay, partly because the primitive character of
its domestic architecture no longer suited the maturing tastes of
our wealthy citizens, partly because certain public improvements
had made a wreck of it. The row of dwellings in one of
which I lived stood a little way back from the street, each
having a miniature garden, separated from its neighbors by low
iron fences and bisected with mathematical precision by a
box-bordered gravel walk from gate to door.</p>
<p>“One morning as I was leaving my lodging I observed a
young girl entering the adjoining garden on the left. It
was a warm day in June, and she was lightly gowned in
white. From her shoulders hung a broad straw hat profusely
decorated with flowers and wonderfully beribboned in the fashion
of the time. My attention was not long held by the
exquisite simplicity of her costume, for no one could look at her
face and think of anything earthly. Do not fear; I shall
not profane it by description; it was beautiful
exceedingly. All that I had ever seen or dreamed of
loveliness was in that matchless living picture by the hand of
the Divine Artist. So deeply did it move me that, without a
thought of the impropriety of the act, I unconsciously bared my
head, as a devout Catholic or well-bred Protestant uncovers
before an image of the Blessed Virgin. The maiden showed no
displeasure; she merely turned her glorious dark eyes upon me
with a look that made me catch my breath, and without other
recognition of my act passed into the house. For a moment I
stood motionless, hat in hand, painfully conscious of my
rudeness, yet so dominated by the emotion inspired by that vision
of incomparable beauty that my penitence was less poignant than
it should have been. Then I went my way, leaving my heart
behind. In the natural course of things I should probably
have remained away until nightfall, but by the middle of the
afternoon I was back in the little garden, affecting an interest
in the few foolish flowers that I had never before
observed. My hope was vain; she did not appear.</p>
<p>“To a night of unrest succeeded a day of expectation and
disappointment, but on the day after, as I wandered aimlessly
about the neighborhood, I met her. Of course I did not
repeat my folly of uncovering, nor venture by even so much as too
long a look to manifest an interest in her; yet my heart was
beating audibly. I trembled and consciously colored as she
turned her big black eyes upon me with a look of obvious
recognition entirely devoid of boldness or coquetry.</p>
<p>“I will not weary you with particulars; many times
afterward I met the maiden, yet never either addressed her or
sought to fix her attention. Nor did I take any action
toward making her acquaintance. Perhaps my forbearance,
requiring so supreme an effort of self-denial, will not be
entirely clear to you. That I was heels over head in love
is true, but who can overcome his habit of thought, or
reconstruct his character?</p>
<p>“I was what some foolish persons are pleased to call,
and others, more foolish, are pleased to be called—an
aristocrat; and despite her beauty, her charms and graces, the
girl was not of my class. I had learned her
name—which it is needless to speak—and something of
her family. She was an orphan, a dependent niece of the
impossible elderly fat woman in whose lodging-house she
lived. My income was small and I lacked the talent for
marrying; it is perhaps a gift. An alliance with that
family would condemn me to its manner of life, part me from my
books and studies, and in a social sense reduce me to the
ranks. It is easy to deprecate such considerations as these
and I have not retained myself for the defense. Let
judgment be entered against me, but in strict justice all my
ancestors for generations should be made co-defendants and I be
permitted to plead in mitigation of punishment the imperious
mandate of heredity. To a mésalliance of that kind
every globule of my ancestral blood spoke in opposition. In
brief, my tastes, habits, instinct, with whatever of reason my
love had left me—all fought against it. Moreover, I
was an irreclaimable sentimentalist, and found a subtle charm in
an impersonal and spiritual relation which acquaintance might
vulgarize and marriage would certainly dispel. No woman, I
argued, is what this lovely creature seems. Love is a
delicious dream; why should I bring about my own awakening?</p>
<p>“The course dictated by all this sense and sentiment was
obvious. Honor, pride, prudence, preservation of my
ideals—all commanded me to go away, but for that I was too
weak. The utmost that I could do by a mighty effort of will
was to cease meeting the girl, and that I did. I even
avoided the chance encounters of the garden, leaving my lodging
only when I knew that she had gone to her music lessons, and
returning after nightfall. Yet all the while I was as one
in a trance, indulging the most fascinating fancies and ordering
my entire intellectual life in accordance with my dream.
Ah, my friend, as one whose actions have a traceable relation to
reason, you cannot know the fool’s paradise in which I
lived.</p>
<p>“One evening the devil put it into my head to be an
unspeakable idiot. By apparently careless and purposeless
questioning I learned from my gossipy landlady that the young
woman’s bedroom adjoined my own, a party-wall
between. Yielding to a sudden and coarse impulse I gently
rapped on the wall. There was no response, naturally, but I
was in no mood to accept a rebuke. A madness was upon me
and I repeated the folly, the offense, but again ineffectually,
and I had the decency to desist.</p>
<p>“An hour later, while absorbed in some of my infernal
studies, I heard, or thought I heard, my signal answered.
Flinging down my books I sprang to the wall and as steadily as my
beating heart would permit gave three slow taps upon it.
This time the response was distinct, unmistakable: one, two,
three—an exact repetition of my signal. That was all
I could elicit, but it was enough—too much.</p>
<p>“The next evening, and for many evenings afterward, that
folly went on, I always having ‘the last word.’
During the whole period I was deliriously happy, but with the
perversity of my nature I persevered in my resolution not to see
her. Then, as I should have expected, I got no further
answers. ‘She is disgusted,’ I said to myself,
‘with what she thinks my timidity in making no more
definite advances’; and I resolved to seek her and make her
acquaintance and—what? I did not know, nor do I now
know, what might have come of it. I know only that I passed
days and days trying to meet her, and all in vain; she was
invisible as well as inaudible. I haunted the streets where
we had met, but she did not come. From my window I watched
the garden in front of her house, but she passed neither in nor
out. I fell into the deepest dejection, believing that she
had gone away, yet took no steps to resolve my doubt by inquiry
of my landlady, to whom, indeed, I had taken an unconquerable
aversion from her having once spoken of the girl with less of
reverence than I thought befitting.</p>
<p>“There came a fateful night. Worn out with
emotion, irresolution and despondency, I had retired early and
fallen into such sleep as was still possible to me. In the
middle of the night something—some malign power bent upon
the wrecking of my peace forever—caused me to open my eyes
and sit up, wide awake and listening intently for I knew not
what. Then I thought I heard a faint tapping on the
wall—the mere ghost of the familiar signal. In a few
moments it was repeated: one, two, three—no louder than
before, but addressing a sense alert and strained to receive
it. I was about to reply when the Adversary of Peace again
intervened in my affairs with a rascally suggestion of
retaliation. She had long and cruelly ignored me; now I
would ignore her. Incredible fatuity—may God forgive
it! All the rest of the night I lay awake, fortifying my
obstinacy with shameless justifications and—listening.</p>
<p>“Late the next morning, as I was leaving the house, I
met my landlady, entering.</p>
<p>“‘Good morning, Mr. Dampier,’ she
said. ‘Have you heard the news?’</p>
<p>“I replied in words that I had heard no news; in manner,
that I did not care to hear any. The manner escaped her
observation.</p>
<p>“‘About the sick young lady next door,’ she
babbled on. ‘What! you did not know? Why, she
has been ill for weeks. And now—’</p>
<p>“I almost sprang upon her. ‘And now,’
I cried, ‘now what?’</p>
<p>“‘She is dead.’</p>
<p>“That is not the whole story. In the middle of the
night, as I learned later, the patient, awakening from a long
stupor after a week of delirium, had asked—it was her last
utterance—that her bed be moved to the opposite side of the
room. Those in attendance had thought the request a vagary
of her delirium, but had complied. And there the poor
passing soul had exerted its failing will to restore a broken
connection—a golden thread of sentiment between its
innocence and a monstrous baseness owning a blind, brutal
allegiance to the Law of Self.</p>
<p>“What reparation could I make? Are there masses
that can be said for the repose of souls that are abroad such
nights as this—spirits ‘blown about by the viewless
winds’—coming in the storm and darkness with signs
and portents, hints of memory and presages of doom?</p>
<p>“This is the third visitation. On the first
occasion I was too skeptical to do more than verify by natural
methods the character of the incident; on the second, I responded
to the signal after it had been several times repeated, but
without result. To-night’s recurrence completes the
‘fatal triad’ expounded by Parapelius
Necromantius. There is no more to tell.”</p>
<p>When Dampier had finished his story I could think of nothing
relevant that I cared to say, and to question him would have been
a hideous impertinence. I rose and bade him good night in a
way to convey to him a sense of my sympathy, which he silently
acknowledged by a pressure of the hand. That night, alone
with his sorrow and remorse, he passed into the Unknown.</p>
<h2><a name="page227"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 227</span>A
PSYCHOLOGICAL SHIPWRECK</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">In</span> the summer of 1874 I was in
Liverpool, whither I had gone on business for the mercantile
house of Bronson & Jarrett, New York. I am William
Jarrett; my partner was Zenas Bronson. The firm failed last
year, and unable to endure the fall from affluence to poverty he
died.</p>
<p>Having finished my business, and feeling the lassitude and
exhaustion incident to its dispatch, I felt that a protracted sea
voyage would be both agreeable and beneficial, so instead of
embarking for my return on one of the many fine passenger
steamers I booked for New York on the sailing vessel
<i>Morrow</i>, upon which I had shipped a large and valuable
invoice of the goods I had bought. The <i>Morrow</i> was an
English ship with, of course, but little accommodation for
passengers, of whom there were only myself, a young woman and her
servant, who was a middle-aged negress. I thought it
singular that a traveling English girl should be so attended, but
she afterward explained to me that the woman had been left with
her family by a man and his wife from South Carolina, both of
whom had died on the same day at the house of the young
lady’s father in Devonshire—a circumstance in itself
sufficiently uncommon to remain rather distinctly in my memory,
even had it not afterward transpired in conversation with the
young lady that the name of the man was William Jarrett, the same
as my own. I knew that a branch of my family had settled in
South Carolina, but of them and their history I was ignorant.</p>
<p>The <i>Morrow</i> sailed from the mouth of the Mersey on the
15th of June and for several weeks we had fair breezes and
unclouded skies. The skipper, an admirable seaman but
nothing more, favored us with very little of his society, except
at his table; and the young woman, Miss Janette Harford, and I
became very well acquainted. We were, in truth, nearly
always together, and being of an introspective turn of mind I
often endeavored to analyze and define the novel feeling with
which she inspired me—a secret, subtle, but powerful
attraction which constantly impelled me to seek her; but the
attempt was hopeless. I could only be sure that at least it
was not love. Having assured myself of this and being
certain that she was quite as whole-hearted, I ventured one
evening (I remember it was on the 3d of July) as we sat on deck
to ask her, laughingly, if she could assist me to resolve my
psychological doubt.</p>
<p>For a moment she was silent, with averted face, and I began to
fear I had been extremely rude and indelicate; then she fixed her
eyes gravely on my own. In an instant my mind was dominated
by as strange a fancy as ever entered human consciousness.
It seemed as if she were looking at me, not <i>with</i>, but
<i>through</i>, those eyes—from an immeasurable distance
behind them—and that a number of other persons, men, women
and children, upon whose faces I caught strangely familiar
evanescent expressions, clustered about her, struggling with
gentle eagerness to look at me through the same orbs. Ship,
ocean, sky—all had vanished. I was conscious of
nothing but the figures in this extraordinary and fantastic
scene. Then all at once darkness fell upon me, and anon
from out of it, as to one who grows accustomed by degrees to a
dimmer light, my former surroundings of deck and mast and cordage
slowly resolved themselves. Miss Harford had closed her
eyes and was leaning back in her chair, apparently asleep, the
book she had been reading open in her lap. Impelled by
surely I cannot say what motive, I glanced at the top of the
page; it was a copy of that rare and curious work,
“Denneker’s Meditations,” and the lady’s
index finger rested on this passage:</p>
<p>“To sundry it is given to be drawn away, and to be apart
from the body for a season; for, as concerning rills which would
flow across each other the weaker is borne along by the stronger,
so there be certain of kin whose paths intersecting, their souls
do bear company, the while their bodies go fore-appointed ways,
unknowing.”</p>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<p>Miss Harford arose, shuddering; the sun had sunk below the
horizon, but it was not cold. There was not a breath of
wind; there were no clouds in the sky, yet not a star was
visible. A hurried tramping sounded on the deck; the
captain, summoned from below, joined the first officer, who stood
looking at the barometer. “Good God!” I heard
him exclaim.</p>
<p>An hour later the form of Janette Harford, invisible in the
darkness and spray, was torn from my grasp by the cruel vortex of
the sinking ship, and I fainted in the cordage of the floating
mast to which I had lashed myself.</p>
<p>It was by lamplight that I awoke. I lay in a berth amid
the familiar surroundings of the stateroom of a steamer. On
a couch opposite sat a man, half undressed for bed, reading a
book. I recognized the face of my friend Gordon Doyle, whom
I had met in Liverpool on the day of my embarkation, when he was
himself about to sail on the steamer <i>City of Prague</i>, on
which he had urged me to accompany him.</p>
<p>After some moments I now spoke his name. He simply said,
“Well,” and turned a leaf in his book without
removing his eyes from the page.</p>
<p>“Doyle,” I repeated, “did they save
<i>her</i>?”</p>
<p>He now deigned to look at me and smiled as if amused. He
evidently thought me but half awake.</p>
<p>“Her? Whom do you mean?”</p>
<p>“Janette Harford.”</p>
<p>His amusement turned to amazement; he stared at me fixedly,
saying nothing.</p>
<p>“You will tell me after a while,” I continued;
“I suppose you will tell me after a while.”</p>
<p>A moment later I asked: “What ship is this?”</p>
<p>Doyle stared again. “The steamer <i>City of
Prague</i>, bound from Liverpool to New York, three weeks out
with a broken shaft. Principal passenger, Mr. Gordon Doyle;
ditto lunatic, Mr. William Jarrett. These two distinguished
travelers embarked together, but they are about to part, it being
the resolute intention of the former to pitch the latter
overboard.”</p>
<p>I sat bolt upright. “Do you mean to say that I
have been for three weeks a passenger on this steamer?”</p>
<p>“Yes, pretty nearly; this is the 3d of July.”</p>
<p>“Have I been ill?”</p>
<p>“Right as a trivet all the time, and punctual at your
meals.”</p>
<p>“My God! Doyle, there is some mystery here; do
have the goodness to be serious. Was I not rescued from the
wreck of the ship <i>Morrow</i>?”</p>
<p>Doyle changed color, and approaching me, laid his fingers on
my wrist. A moment later, “What do you know of
Janette Harford?” he asked very calmly.</p>
<p>“First tell me what <i>you</i> know of her?”</p>
<p>Mr. Doyle gazed at me for some moments as if thinking what to
do, then seating himself again on the couch, said:</p>
<p>“Why should I not? I am engaged to marry Janette
Harford, whom I met a year ago in London. Her family, one
of the wealthiest in Devonshire, cut up rough about it, and we
eloped—are eloping rather, for on the day that you and I
walked to the landing stage to go aboard this steamer she and her
faithful servant, a negress, passed us, driving to the ship
<i>Morrow</i>. She would not consent to go in the same
vessel with me, and it had been deemed best that she take a
sailing vessel in order to avoid observation and lessen the risk
of detection. I am now alarmed lest this cursed breaking of
our machinery may detain us so long that the <i>Morrow</i> will
get to New York before us, and the poor girl will not know where
to go.”</p>
<p>I lay still in my berth—so still I hardly
breathed. But the subject was evidently not displeasing to
Doyle, and after a short pause he resumed:</p>
<p>“By the way, she is only an adopted daughter of the
Harfords. Her mother was killed at their place by being
thrown from a horse while hunting, and her father, mad with
grief, made away with himself the same day. No one ever
claimed the child, and after a reasonable time they adopted
her. She has grown up in the belief that she is their
daughter.”</p>
<p>“Doyle, what book are you reading?”</p>
<p>“Oh, it’s called ‘Denneker’s
Meditations.’ It’s a rum lot, Janette gave it
to me; she happened to have two copies. Want to see
it?”</p>
<p>He tossed me the volume, which opened as it fell. On one
of the exposed pages was a marked passage:</p>
<p>“To sundry it is given to be drawn away, and to be apart
from the body for a season; for, as concerning rills which would
flow across each other the weaker is borne along by the stronger,
so there be certain of kin whose paths intersecting, their souls
do bear company, the while their bodies go fore-appointed ways,
unknowing.”</p>
<p>“She had—she has—a singular taste in
reading,” I managed to say, mastering my agitation.</p>
<p>“Yes. And now perhaps you will have the kindness
to explain how you knew her name and that of the ship she sailed
in.”</p>
<p>“You talked of her in your sleep,” I said.</p>
<p>A week later we were towed into the port of New York.
But the <i>Morrow</i> was never heard from.</p>
<h2><a name="page235"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 235</span>THE
MIDDLE TOE OF THE RIGHT FOOT</h2>
<h3>I</h3>
<p><span class="smcap">It</span> is well known that the old
Manton house is haunted. In all the rural district near
about, and even in the town of Marshall, a mile away, not one
person of unbiased mind entertains a doubt of it; incredulity is
confined to those opinionated persons who will be called
“cranks” as soon as the useful word shall have
penetrated the intellectual demesne of the Marshall
<i>Advance</i>. The evidence that the house is haunted is
of two kinds: the testimony of disinterested witnesses who have
had ocular proof, and that of the house itself. The former
may be disregarded and ruled out on any of the various grounds of
objection which may be urged against it by the ingenious; but
facts within the observation of all are material and
controlling.</p>
<p>In the first place, the Manton house has been unoccupied by
mortals for more than ten years, and with its outbuildings is
slowly falling into decay—a circumstance which in itself
the judicious will hardly venture to ignore. It stands a
little way off the loneliest reach of the Marshall and Harriston
road, in an opening which was once a farm and is still disfigured
with strips of rotting fence and half covered with brambles
overrunning a stony and sterile soil long unacquainted with the
plow. The house itself is in tolerably good condition,
though badly weather-stained and in dire need of attention from
the glazier, the smaller male population of the region having
attested in the manner of its kind its disapproval of dwelling
without dwellers. It is two stories in height, nearly
square, its front pierced by a single doorway flanked on each
side by a window boarded up to the very top. Corresponding
windows above, not protected, serve to admit light and rain to
the rooms of the upper floor. Grass and weeds grow pretty
rankly all about, and a few shade trees, somewhat the worse for
wind, and leaning all in one direction, seem to be making a
concerted effort to run away. In short, as the Marshall
town humorist explained in the columns of the <i>Advance</i>,
“the proposition that the Manton house is badly haunted is
the only logical conclusion from the premises.” The
fact that in this dwelling Mr. Manton thought it expedient one
night some ten years ago to rise and cut the throats of his wife
and two small children, removing at once to another part of the
country, has no doubt done its share in directing public
attention to the fitness of the place for supernatural
phenomena.</p>
<p>To this house, one summer evening, came four men in a
wagon. Three of them promptly alighted, and the one who had
been driving hitched the team to the only remaining post of what
had been a fence. The fourth remained seated in the
wagon. “Come,” said one of his companions,
approaching him, while the others moved away in the direction of
the dwelling—“this is the place.”</p>
<p>The man addressed did not move. “By God!” he
said harshly, “this is a trick, and it looks to me as if
you were in it.”</p>
<p>“Perhaps I am,” the other said, looking him
straight in the face and speaking in a tone which had something
of contempt in it. “You will remember, however, that
the choice of place was with your own assent left to the other
side. Of course if you are afraid of
spooks—”</p>
<p>“I am afraid of nothing,” the man interrupted with
another oath, and sprang to the ground. The two then joined
the others at the door, which one of them had already opened with
some difficulty, caused by rust of lock and hinge. All
entered. Inside it was dark, but the man who had unlocked
the door produced a candle and matches and made a light. He
then unlocked a door on their right as they stood in the
passage. This gave them entrance to a large, square room
that the candle but dimly lighted. The floor had a thick
carpeting of dust, which partly muffled their footfalls.
Cobwebs were in the angles of the walls and depended from the
ceiling like strips of rotting lace, making undulatory movements
in the disturbed air. The room had two windows in adjoining
sides, but from neither could anything be seen except the rough
inner surfaces of boards a few inches from the glass. There
was no fireplace, no furniture; there was nothing: besides the
cobwebs and the dust, the four men were the only objects there
which were not a part of the structure.</p>
<p>Strange enough they looked in the yellow light of the
candle. The one who had so reluctantly alighted was
especially spectacular—he might have been called
sensational. He was of middle age, heavily built, deep
chested and broad shouldered. Looking at his figure, one
would have said that he had a giant’s strength; at his
features, that he would use it like a giant. He was clean
shaven, his hair rather closely cropped and gray. His low
forehead was seamed with wrinkles above the eyes, and over the
nose these became vertical. The heavy black brows followed
the same law, saved from meeting only by an upward turn at what
would otherwise have been the point of contact. Deeply
sunken beneath these, glowed in the obscure light a pair of eyes
of uncertain color, but obviously enough too small. There
was something forbidding in their expression, which was not
bettered by the cruel mouth and wide jaw. The nose was well
enough, as noses go; one does not expect much of noses. All
that was sinister in the man’s face seemed accentuated by
an unnatural pallor—he appeared altogether bloodless.</p>
<p>The appearance of the other men was sufficiently commonplace:
they were such persons as one meets and forgets that he
met. All were younger than the man described, between whom
and the eldest of the others, who stood apart, there was
apparently no kindly feeling. They avoided looking at each
other.</p>
<p>“Gentlemen,” said the man holding the candle and
keys, “I believe everything is right. Are you ready,
Mr. Rosser?”</p>
<p>The man standing apart from the group bowed and smiled.</p>
<p>“And you, Mr. Grossmith?”</p>
<p>The heavy man bowed and scowled.</p>
<p>“You will be pleased to remove your outer
clothing.”</p>
<p>Their hats, coats, waistcoats and neckwear were soon removed
and thrown outside the door, in the passage. The man with
the candle now nodded, and the fourth man—he who had urged
Grossmith to leave the wagon—produced from the pocket of
his overcoat two long, murderous-looking bowie-knives, which he
drew now from their leather scabbards.</p>
<p>“They are exactly alike,” he said, presenting one
to each of the two principals—for by this time the dullest
observer would have understood the nature of this meeting.
It was to be a duel to the death.</p>
<p>Each combatant took a knife, examined it critically near the
candle and tested the strength of blade and handle across his
lifted knee. Their persons were then searched in turn, each
by the second of the other.</p>
<p>“If it is agreeable to you, Mr. Grossmith,” said
the man holding the light, “you will place yourself in that
corner.”</p>
<p>He indicated the angle of the room farthest from the door,
whither Grossmith retired, his second parting from him with a
grasp of the hand which had nothing of cordiality in it. In
the angle nearest the door Mr. Rosser stationed himself, and
after a whispered consultation his second left him, joining the
other near the door. At that moment the candle was suddenly
extinguished, leaving all in profound darkness. This may
have been done by a draught from the opened door; whatever the
cause, the effect was startling.</p>
<p>“Gentlemen,” said a voice which sounded strangely
unfamiliar in the altered condition affecting the relations of
the senses—“gentlemen, you will not move until you
hear the closing of the outer door.”</p>
<p>A sound of trampling ensued, then the closing of the inner
door; and finally the outer one closed with a concussion which
shook the entire building.</p>
<p>A few minutes afterward a belated farmer’s boy met a
light wagon which was being driven furiously toward the town of
Marshall. He declared that behind the two figures on the
front seat stood a third, with its hands upon the bowed shoulders
of the others, who appeared to struggle vainly to free themselves
from its grasp. This figure, unlike the others, was clad in
white, and had undoubtedly boarded the wagon as it passed the
haunted house. As the lad could boast a considerable former
experience with the supernatural thereabouts his word had the
weight justly due to the testimony of an expert. The story
(in connection with the next day’s events) eventually
appeared in the <i>Advance</i>, with some slight literary
embellishments and a concluding intimation that the gentlemen
referred to would be allowed the use of the paper’s columns
for their version of the night’s adventure. But the
privilege remained without a claimant.</p>
<h3>II</h3>
<p>The events that led up to this “duel in the dark”
were simple enough. One evening three young men of the town
of Marshall were sitting in a quiet corner of the porch of the
village hotel, smoking and discussing such matters as three
educated young men of a Southern village would naturally find
interesting. Their names were King, Sancher and
Rosser. At a little distance, within easy hearing, but
taking no part in the conversation, sat a fourth. He was a
stranger to the others. They merely knew that on his
arrival by the stage-coach that afternoon he had written in the
hotel register the name Robert Grossmith. He had not been
observed to speak to anyone except the hotel clerk. He
seemed, indeed, singularly fond of his own company—or, as
the <i>personnel</i> of the <i>Advance</i> expressed it,
“grossly addicted to evil associations.” But
then it should be said in justice to the stranger that the
<i>personnel</i> was himself of a too convivial disposition
fairly to judge one differently gifted, and had, moreover,
experienced a slight rebuff in an effort at an
“interview.”</p>
<p>“I hate any kind of deformity in a woman,” said
King, “whether natural or—acquired. I have a
theory that any physical defect has its correlative mental and
moral defect.”</p>
<p>“I infer, then,” said Rosser, gravely, “that
a lady lacking the moral advantage of a nose would find the
struggle to become Mrs. King an arduous enterprise.”</p>
<p>“Of course you may put it that way,” was the
reply; “but, seriously, I once threw over a most charming
girl on learning quite accidentally that she had suffered
amputation of a toe. My conduct was brutal if you like, but
if I had married that girl I should have been miserable for life
and should have made her so.”</p>
<p>“Whereas,” said Sancher, with a light laugh,
“by marrying a gentleman of more liberal views she escaped
with a parted throat.”</p>
<p>“Ah, you know to whom I refer. Yes, she married
Manton, but I don’t know about his liberality; I’m
not sure but he cut her throat because he discovered that she
lacked that excellent thing in woman, the middle toe of the right
foot.”</p>
<p>“Look at that chap!” said Rosser in a low voice,
his eyes fixed upon the stranger.</p>
<p>That chap was obviously listening intently to the
conversation.</p>
<p>“Damn his impudence!” muttered
King—“what ought we to do?”</p>
<p>“That’s an easy one,” Rosser replied,
rising. “Sir,” he continued, addressing the
stranger, “I think it would be better if you would remove
your chair to the other end of the veranda. The presence of
gentlemen is evidently an unfamiliar situation to you.”</p>
<p>The man sprang to his feet and strode forward with clenched
hands, his face white with rage. All were now
standing. Sancher stepped between the belligerents.</p>
<p>“You are hasty and unjust,” he said to Rosser;
“this gentleman has done nothing to deserve such
language.”</p>
<p>But Rosser would not withdraw a word. By the custom of
the country and the time there could be but one outcome to the
quarrel.</p>
<p>“I demand the satisfaction due to a gentleman,”
said the stranger, who had become more calm. “I have
not an acquaintance in this region. Perhaps you,
sir,” bowing to Sancher, “will be kind enough to
represent me in this matter.”</p>
<p>Sancher accepted the trust—somewhat reluctantly it must
be confessed, for the man’s appearance and manner were not
at all to his liking. King, who during the colloquy had
hardly removed his eyes from the stranger’s face and had
not spoken a word, consented with a nod to act for Rosser, and
the upshot of it was that, the principals having retired, a
meeting was arranged for the next evening. The nature of
the arrangements has been already disclosed. The duel with
knives in a dark room was once a commoner feature of Southwestern
life than it is likely to be again. How thin a veneering of
“chivalry” covered the essential brutality of the
code under which such encounters were possible we shall see.</p>
<h3>III</h3>
<p>In the blaze of a midsummer noonday the old Manton house was
hardly true to its traditions. It was of the earth,
earthy. The sunshine caressed it warmly and affectionately,
with evident disregard of its bad reputation. The grass
greening all the expanse in its front seemed to grow, not rankly,
but with a natural and joyous exuberance, and the weeds blossomed
quite like plants. Full of charming lights and shadows and
populous with pleasant-voiced birds, the neglected shade trees no
longer struggled to run away, but bent reverently beneath their
burdens of sun and song. Even in the glassless upper
windows was an expression of peace and contentment, due to the
light within. Over the stony fields the visible heat danced
with a lively tremor incompatible with the gravity which is an
attribute of the supernatural.</p>
<p>Such was the aspect under which the place presented itself to
Sheriff Adams and two other men who had come out from Marshall to
look at it. One of these men was Mr. King, the
sheriff’s deputy; the other, whose name was Brewer, was a
brother of the late Mrs. Manton. Under a beneficent law of
the State relating to property which has been for a certain
period abandoned by an owner whose residence cannot be
ascertained, the sheriff was legal custodian of the Manton farm
and appurtenances thereunto belonging. His present visit
was in mere perfunctory compliance with some order of a court in
which Mr. Brewer had an action to get possession of the property
as heir to his deceased sister. By a mere coincidence, the
visit was made on the day after the night that Deputy King had
unlocked the house for another and very different purpose.
His presence now was not of his own choosing: he had been ordered
to accompany his superior and at the moment could think of
nothing more prudent than simulated alacrity in obedience to the
command.</p>
<p>Carelessly opening the front door, which to his surprise was
not locked, the sheriff was amazed to see, lying on the floor of
the passage into which it opened, a confused heap of men’s
apparel. Examination showed it to consist of two hats, and
the same number of coats, waistcoats and scarves, all in a
remarkably good state of preservation, albeit somewhat defiled by
the dust in which they lay. Mr. Brewer was equally
astonished, but Mr. King’s emotion is not of record.
With a new and lively interest in his own actions the sheriff now
unlatched and pushed open a door on the right, and the three
entered. The room was apparently vacant—no; as their
eyes became accustomed to the dimmer light something was visible
in the farthest angle of the wall. It was a human
figure—that of a man crouching close in the corner.
Something in the attitude made the intruders halt when they had
barely passed the threshold. The figure more and more
clearly defined itself. The man was upon one knee, his back
in the angle of the wall, his shoulders elevated to the level of
his ears, his hands before his face, palms outward, the fingers
spread and crooked like claws; the white face turned upward on
the retracted neck had an expression of unutterable fright, the
mouth half open, the eyes incredibly expanded. He was stone
dead. Yet, with the exception of a bowie-knife, which had
evidently fallen from his own hand, not another object was in the
room.</p>
<p>In thick dust that covered the floor were some confused
footprints near the door and along the wall through which it
opened. Along one of the adjoining walls, too, past the
boarded-up windows, was the trail made by the man himself in
reaching his corner. Instinctively in approaching the body
the three men followed that trail. The sheriff grasped one
of the outthrown arms; it was as rigid as iron, and the
application of a gentle force rocked the entire body without
altering the relation of its parts. Brewer, pale with
excitement, gazed intently into the distorted face.
“God of mercy!” he suddenly cried, “it is
Manton!”</p>
<p>“You are right,” said King, with an evident
attempt at calmness: “I knew Manton. He then wore a
full beard and his hair long, but this is he.”</p>
<p>He might have added: “I recognized him when he
challenged Rosser. I told Rosser and Sancher who he was
before we played him this horrible trick. When Rosser left
this dark room at our heels, forgetting his outer clothing in the
excitement, and driving away with us in his shirt
sleeves—all through the discreditable proceedings we knew
whom we were dealing with, murderer and coward that he
was!”</p>
<p>But nothing of this did Mr. King say. With his better
light he was trying to penetrate the mystery of the man’s
death. That he had not once moved from the corner where he
had been stationed; that his posture was that of neither attack
nor defense; that he had dropped his weapon; that he had
obviously perished of sheer horror of something that he
saw—these were circumstances which Mr. King’s
disturbed intelligence could not rightly comprehend.</p>
<p>Groping in intellectual darkness for a clew to his maze of
doubt, his gaze, directed mechanically downward in the way of one
who ponders momentous matters, fell upon something which, there,
in the light of day and in the presence of living companions,
affected him with terror. In the dust of years that lay
thick upon the floor—leading from the door by which they
had entered, straight across the room to within a yard of
Manton’s crouching corpse—were three parallel lines
of footprints—light but definite impressions of bare feet,
the outer ones those of small children, the inner a
woman’s. From the point at which they ended they did
not return; they pointed all one way. Brewer, who had
observed them at the same moment, was leaning forward in an
attitude of rapt attention, horribly pale.</p>
<p>“Look at that!” he cried, pointing with both hands
at the nearest print of the woman’s right foot, where she
had apparently stopped and stood. “The middle toe is
missing—it was Gertrude!”</p>
<p>Gertrude was the late Mrs. Manton, sister to Mr. Brewer.</p>
<h2><a name="page252"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 252</span>JOHN
MORTONSON’S FUNERAL <a name="citation252"></a><a
href="#footnote252" class="citation">[252]</a></h2>
<p><span class="smcap">John Mortonson</span> was dead: his lines
in “the tragedy ‘Man’” had all been
spoken and he had left the stage.</p>
<p>The body rested in a fine mahogany coffin fitted with a plate
of glass. All arrangements for the funeral had been so well
attended to that had the deceased known he would doubtless have
approved. The face, as it showed under the glass, was not
disagreeable to look upon: it bore a faint smile, and as the
death had been painless, had not been distorted beyond the
repairing power of the undertaker. At two o’clock of
the afternoon the friends were to assemble to pay their last
tribute of respect to one who had no further need of friends and
respect. The surviving members of the family came severally
every few minutes to the casket and wept above the placid
features beneath the glass. This did them no good; it did
no good to John Mortonson; but in the presence of death reason
and philosophy are silent.</p>
<p>As the hour of two approached the friends began to arrive and
after offering such consolation to the stricken relatives as the
proprieties of the occasion required, solemnly seated themselves
about the room with an augmented consciousness of their
importance in the scheme funereal. Then the minister came,
and in that overshadowing presence the lesser lights went into
eclipse. His entrance was followed by that of the widow,
whose lamentations filled the room. She approached the
casket and after leaning her face against the cold glass for a
moment was gently led to a seat near her daughter.
Mournfully and low the man of God began his eulogy of the dead,
and his doleful voice, mingled with the sobbing which it was its
purpose to stimulate and sustain, rose and fell, seemed to come
and go, like the sound of a sullen sea. The gloomy day grew
darker as he spoke; a curtain of cloud underspread the sky and a
few drops of rain fell audibly. It seemed as if all nature
were weeping for John Mortonson.</p>
<p>When the minister had finished his eulogy with prayer a hymn
was sung and the pall-bearers took their places beside the
bier. As the last notes of the hymn died away the widow ran
to the coffin, cast herself upon it and sobbed
hysterically. Gradually, however, she yielded to
dissuasion, becoming more composed; and as the minister was in
the act of leading her away her eyes sought the face of the dead
beneath the glass. She threw up her arms and with a shriek
fell backward insensible.</p>
<p>The mourners sprang forward to the coffin, the friends
followed, and as the clock on the mantel solemnly struck three
all were staring down upon the face of John Mortonson,
deceased.</p>
<p>They turned away, sick and faint. One man, trying in his
terror to escape the awful sight, stumbled against the coffin so
heavily as to knock away one of its frail supports. The
coffin fell to the floor, the glass was shattered to bits by the
concussion.</p>
<p>From the opening crawled John Mortonson’s cat, which
lazily leapt to the floor, sat up, tranquilly wiped its crimson
muzzle with a forepaw, then walked with dignity from the
room.</p>
<h2><a name="page255"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 255</span>THE
REALM OF THE UNREAL</h2>
<h3>I</h3>
<p><span class="smcap">For</span> a part of the distance between
Auburn and Newcastle the road—first on one side of a creek
and then on the other—occupies the whole bottom of the
ravine, being partly cut out of the steep hillside, and partly
built up with bowlders removed from the creek-bed by the
miners. The hills are wooded, the course of the ravine is
sinuous. In a dark night careful driving is required in
order not to go off into the water. The night that I have
in memory was dark, the creek a torrent, swollen by a recent
storm. I had driven up from Newcastle and was within about
a mile of Auburn in the darkest and narrowest part of the ravine,
looking intently ahead of my horse for the roadway.
Suddenly I saw a man almost under the animal’s nose, and
reined in with a jerk that came near setting the creature upon
its haunches.</p>
<p>“I beg your pardon,” I said; “I did not see
you, sir.”</p>
<p>“You could hardly be expected to see me,” the man
replied, civilly, approaching the side of the vehicle; “and
the noise of the creek prevented my hearing you.”</p>
<p>I at once recognized the voice, although five years had passed
since I had heard it. I was not particularly well pleased
to hear it now.</p>
<p>“You are Dr. Dorrimore, I think,” said I.</p>
<p>“Yes; and you are my good friend Mr. Manrich. I am
more than glad to see you—the excess,” he added, with
a light laugh, “being due to the fact that I am going your
way, and naturally expect an invitation to ride with
you.”</p>
<p>“Which I extend with all my heart.”</p>
<p>That was not altogether true.</p>
<p>Dr. Dorrimore thanked me as he seated himself beside me, and I
drove cautiously forward, as before. Doubtless it is fancy,
but it seems to me now that the remaining distance was made in a
chill fog; that I was uncomfortably cold; that the way was longer
than ever before, and the town, when we reached it, cheerless,
forbidding, and desolate. It must have been early in the
evening, yet I do not recollect a light in any of the houses nor
a living thing in the streets. Dorrimore explained at some
length how he happened to be there, and where he had been during
the years that had elapsed since I had seen him. I recall
the fact of the narrative, but none of the facts narrated.
He had been in foreign countries and had returned—this is
all that my memory retains, and this I already knew. As to
myself I cannot remember that I spoke a word, though doubtless I
did. Of one thing I am distinctly conscious: the
man’s presence at my side was strangely distasteful and
disquieting—so much so that when I at last pulled up under
the lights of the Putnam House I experienced a sense of having
escaped some spiritual peril of a nature peculiarly
forbidding. This sense of relief was somewhat modified by
the discovery that Dr. Dorrimore was living at the same
hotel.</p>
<h3>II</h3>
<p>In partial explanation of my feelings regarding Dr. Dorrimore
I will relate briefly the circumstances under which I had met him
some years before. One evening a half-dozen men of whom I
was one were sitting in the library of the Bohemian Club in San
Francisco. The conversation had turned to the subject of
sleight-of-hand and the feats of the <i>prestidigitateurs</i>,
one of whom was then exhibiting at a local theatre.</p>
<p>“These fellows are pretenders in a double sense,”
said one of the party; “they can do nothing which it is
worth one’s while to be made a dupe by. The humblest
wayside juggler in India could mystify them to the verge of
lunacy.”</p>
<p>“For example, how?” asked another, lighting a
cigar.</p>
<p>“For example, by all their common and familiar
performances—throwing large objects into the air which
never come down; causing plants to sprout, grow visibly and
blossom, in bare ground chosen by spectators; putting a man into
a wicker basket, piercing him through and through with a sword
while he shrieks and bleeds, and then—the basket being
opened nothing is there; tossing the free end of a silken ladder
into the air, mounting it and disappearing.”</p>
<p>“Nonsense!” I said, rather uncivilly, I
fear. “You surely do not believe such
things?”</p>
<p>“Certainly not: I have seen them too often.”</p>
<p>“But I do,” said a journalist of considerable
local fame as a picturesque reporter. “I have so
frequently related them that nothing but observation could shake
my conviction. Why, gentlemen, I have my own word for
it.”</p>
<p>Nobody laughed—all were looking at something behind
me. Turning in my seat I saw a man in evening dress who had
just entered the room. He was exceedingly dark, almost
swarthy, with a thin face, black-bearded to the lips, an
abundance of coarse black hair in some disorder, a high nose and
eyes that glittered with as soulless an expression as those of a
cobra. One of the group rose and introduced him as Dr.
Dorrimore, of Calcutta. As each of us was presented in turn
he acknowledged the fact with a profound bow in the Oriental
manner, but with nothing of Oriental gravity. His smile
impressed me as cynical and a trifle contemptuous. His
whole demeanor I can describe only as disagreeably engaging.</p>
<p>His presence led the conversation into other channels.
He said little—I do not recall anything of what he did
say. I thought his voice singularly rich and melodious, but
it affected me in the same way as his eyes and smile. In a
few minutes I rose to go. He also rose and put on his
overcoat.</p>
<p>“Mr. Manrich,” he said, “I am going your
way.”</p>
<p>“The devil you are!” I thought. “How
do you know which way I am going?” Then I said,
“I shall be pleased to have your company.”</p>
<p>We left the building together. No cabs were in sight,
the street cars had gone to bed, there was a full moon and the
cool night air was delightful; we walked up the California street
hill. I took that direction thinking he would naturally
wish to take another, toward one of the hotels.</p>
<p>“You do not believe what is told of the Hindu
jugglers,” he said abruptly.</p>
<p>“How do you know that?” I asked.</p>
<p>Without replying he laid his hand lightly upon my arm and with
the other pointed to the stone sidewalk directly in front.
There, almost at our feet, lay the dead body of a man, the face
upturned and white in the moonlight! A sword whose hilt
sparkled with gems stood fixed and upright in the breast; a pool
of blood had collected on the stones of the sidewalk.</p>
<p>I was startled and terrified—not only by what I saw, but
by the circumstances under which I saw it. Repeatedly
during our ascent of the hill my eyes, I thought, had traversed
the whole reach of that sidewalk, from street to street.
How could they have been insensible to this dreadful object now
so conspicuous in the white moonlight?</p>
<p>As my dazed faculties cleared I observed that the body was in
evening dress; the overcoat thrown wide open revealed the
dress-coat, the white tie, the broad expanse of shirt front
pierced by the sword. And—horrible
revelation!—the face, except for its pallor, was that of my
companion! It was to the minutest detail of dress and
feature Dr. Dorrimore himself. Bewildered and horrified, I
turned to look for the living man. He was nowhere visible,
and with an added terror I retired from the place, down the hill
in the direction whence I had come. I had taken but a few
strides when a strong grasp upon my shoulder arrested me. I
came near crying out with terror: the dead man, the sword still
fixed in his breast, stood beside me! Pulling out the sword
with his disengaged hand, he flung it from him, the moonlight
glinting upon the jewels of its hilt and the unsullied steel of
its blade. It fell with a clang upon the sidewalk ahead
and—vanished! The man, swarthy as before, relaxed his
grasp upon my shoulder and looked at me with the same cynical
regard that I had observed on first meeting him. The dead
have not that look—it partly restored me, and turning my
head backward, I saw the smooth white expanse of sidewalk,
unbroken from street to street.</p>
<p>“What is all this nonsense, you devil?” I
demanded, fiercely enough, though weak and trembling in every
limb.</p>
<p>“It is what some are pleased to call jugglery,” he
answered, with a light, hard laugh.</p>
<p>He turned down Dupont street and I saw him no more until we
met in the Auburn ravine.</p>
<h3>III</h3>
<p>On the day after my second meeting with Dr. Dorrimore I did
not see him: the clerk in the Putnam House explained that a
slight illness confined him to his rooms. That afternoon at
the railway station I was surprised and made happy by the
unexpected arrival of Miss Margaret Corray and her mother, from
Oakland.</p>
<p>This is not a love story. I am no storyteller, and love
as it is cannot be portrayed in a literature dominated and
enthralled by the debasing tyranny which “sentences
letters” in the name of the Young Girl. Under the
Young Girl’s blighting reign—or rather under the rule
of those false Ministers of the Censure who have appointed
themselves to the custody of her welfare—love</p>
<blockquote><p> veils
her sacred fires,<br />
And, unaware, Morality expires,</p>
</blockquote>
<p>famished upon the sifted meal and distilled water of a prudish
purveyance.</p>
<p>Let it suffice that Miss Corray and I were engaged in
marriage. She and her mother went to the hotel at which I
lived, and for two weeks I saw her daily. That I was happy
needs hardly be said; the only bar to my perfect enjoyment of
those golden days was the presence of Dr. Dorrimore, whom I had
felt compelled to introduce to the ladies.</p>
<p>By them he was evidently held in favor. What could I
say? I knew absolutely nothing to his discredit. His
manners were those of a cultivated and considerate gentleman; and
to women a man’s manner is the man. On one or two
occasions when I saw Miss Corray walking with him I was furious,
and once had the indiscretion to protest. Asked for
reasons, I had none to give and fancied I saw in her expression a
shade of contempt for the vagaries of a jealous mind. In
time I grew morose and consciously disagreeable, and resolved in
my madness to return to San Francisco the next day. Of
this, however, I said nothing.</p>
<h3>IV</h3>
<p>There was at Auburn an old, abandoned cemetery. It was
nearly in the heart of the town, yet by night it was as gruesome
a place as the most dismal of human moods could crave. The
railings about the plats were prostrate, decayed, or altogether
gone. Many of the graves were sunken, from others grew
sturdy pines, whose roots had committed unspeakable sin.
The headstones were fallen and broken across; brambles overran
the ground; the fence was mostly gone, and cows and pigs wandered
there at will; the place was a dishonor to the living, a calumny
on the dead, a blasphemy against God.</p>
<p>The evening of the day on which I had taken my madman’s
resolution to depart in anger from all that was dear to me found
me in that congenial spot. The light of the half moon fell
ghostly through the foliage of trees in spots and patches,
revealing much that was unsightly, and the black shadows seemed
conspiracies withholding to the proper time revelations of darker
import. Passing along what had been a gravel path, I saw
emerging from shadow the figure of Dr. Dorrimore. I was
myself in shadow, and stood still with clenched hands and set
teeth, trying to control the impulse to leap upon and strangle
him. A moment later a second figure joined him and clung to
his arm. It was Margaret Corray!</p>
<p>I cannot rightly relate what occurred. I know that I
sprang forward, bent upon murder; I know that I was found in the
gray of the morning, bruised and bloody, with finger marks upon
my throat. I was taken to the Putnam House, where for days
I lay in a delirium. All this I know, for I have been
told. And of my own knowledge I know that when
consciousness returned with convalescence I sent for the clerk of
the hotel.</p>
<p>“Are Mrs. Corray and her daughter still here?” I
asked.</p>
<p>“What name did you say?”</p>
<p>“Corray.”</p>
<p>“Nobody of that name has been here.”</p>
<p>“I beg you will not trifle with me,” I said
petulantly. “You see that I am all right now; tell me
the truth.”</p>
<p>“I give you my word,” he replied with evident
sincerity, “we have had no guests of that name.”</p>
<p>His words stupefied me. I lay for a few moments in
silence; then I asked: “Where is Dr. Dorrimore?”</p>
<p>“He left on the morning of your fight and has not been
heard of since. It was a rough deal he gave you.”</p>
<h3>V</h3>
<p>Such are the facts of this case. Margaret Corray is now
my wife. She has never seen Auburn, and during the weeks
whose history as it shaped itself in my brain I have endeavored
to relate, was living at her home in Oakland, wondering where her
lover was and why he did not write. The other day I saw in
the Baltimore <i>Sun</i> the following paragraph:</p>
<p>“Professor Valentine Dorrimore, the hypnotist, had a
large audience last night. The lecturer, who has lived most
of his life in India, gave some marvelous exhibitions of his
power, hypnotizing anyone who chose to submit himself to the
experiment, by merely looking at him. In fact, he twice
hypnotized the entire audience (reporters alone exempted), making
all entertain the most extraordinary illusions. The most
valuable feature of the lecture was the disclosure of the methods
of the Hindu jugglers in their famous performances, familiar in
the mouths of travelers. The professor declares that these
thaumaturgists have acquired such skill in the art which he
learned at their feet that they perform their miracles by simply
throwing the ‘spectators’ into a state of hypnosis
and telling them what to see and hear. His assertion that a
peculiarly susceptible subject may be kept in the realm of the
unreal for weeks, months, and even years, dominated by whatever
delusions and hallucinations the operator may from time to time
suggest, is a trifle disquieting.”</p>
<h2><a name="page268"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 268</span>JOHN
BARTINE’S WATCH</h2>
<p style="text-align: center">A STORY BY A PHYSICIAN</p>
<p>“<span class="smcap">The</span> exact time? Good
God! my friend, why do you insist? One would
think—but what does it matter; it is easily
bedtime—isn’t that near enough? But, here, if
you must set your watch, take mine and see for
yourself.”</p>
<p>With that he detached his watch—a tremendously heavy,
old-fashioned one—from the chain, and handed it to me; then
turned away, and walking across the room to a shelf of books,
began an examination of their backs. His agitation and
evident distress surprised me; they appeared reasonless.
Having set my watch by his, I stepped over to where he stood and
said, “Thank you.”</p>
<p>As he took his timepiece and reattached it to the guard I
observed that his hands were unsteady. With a tact upon
which I greatly prided myself, I sauntered carelessly to the
sideboard and took some brandy and water; then, begging his
pardon for my thoughtlessness, asked him to have some and went
back to my seat by the fire, leaving him to help himself, as was
our custom. He did so and presently joined me at the
hearth, as tranquil as ever.</p>
<p>This odd little incident occurred in my apartment, where John
Bartine was passing an evening. We had dined together at
the club, had come home in a cab and—in short, everything
had been done in the most prosaic way; and why John Bartine
should break in upon the natural and established order of things
to make himself spectacular with a display of emotion, apparently
for his own entertainment, I could nowise understand. The
more I thought of it, while his brilliant conversational gifts
were commending themselves to my inattention, the more curious I
grew, and of course had no difficulty in persuading myself that
my curiosity was friendly solicitude. That is the disguise
that curiosity usually assumes to evade resentment. So I
ruined one of the finest sentences of his disregarded monologue
by cutting it short without ceremony.</p>
<p>“John Bartine,” I said, “you must try to
forgive me if I am wrong, but with the light that I have at
present I cannot concede your right to go all to pieces when
asked the time o’ night. I cannot admit that it is
proper to experience a mysterious reluctance to look your own
watch in the face and to cherish in my presence, without
explanation, painful emotions which are denied to me, and which
are none of my business.”</p>
<p>To this ridiculous speech Bartine made no immediate reply, but
sat looking gravely into the fire. Fearing that I had
offended I was about to apologize and beg him to think no more
about the matter, when looking me calmly in the eyes he said:</p>
<p>“My dear fellow, the levity of your manner does not at
all disguise the hideous impudence of your demand; but happily I
had already decided to tell you what you wish to know, and no
manifestation of your unworthiness to hear it shall alter my
decision. Be good enough to give me your attention and you
shall hear all about the matter.</p>
<p>“This watch,” he said, “had been in my
family for three generations before it fell to me. Its
original owner, for whom it was made, was my great-grandfather,
Bramwell Olcott Bartine, a wealthy planter of Colonial Virginia,
and as stanch a Tory as ever lay awake nights contriving new
kinds of maledictions for the head of Mr. Washington, and new
methods of aiding and abetting good King George. One day
this worthy gentleman had the deep misfortune to perform for his
cause a service of capital importance which was not recognized as
legitimate by those who suffered its disadvantages. It does
not matter what it was, but among its minor consequences was my
excellent ancestor’s arrest one night in his own house by a
party of Mr. Washington’s rebels. He was permitted to
say farewell to his weeping family, and was then marched away
into the darkness which swallowed him up forever. Not the
slenderest clew to his fate was ever found. After the war
the most diligent inquiry and the offer of large rewards failed
to turn up any of his captors or any fact concerning his
disappearance. He had disappeared, and that was
all.”</p>
<p>Something in Bartine’s manner that was not in his
words—I hardly knew what it was—prompted me to
ask:</p>
<p>“What is your view of the matter—of the justice of
it?”</p>
<p>“My view of it,” he flamed out, bringing his
clenched hand down upon the table as if he had been in a public
house dicing with blackguards—“my view of it is that
it was a characteristically dastardly assassination by that
damned traitor, Washington, and his ragamuffin rebels!”</p>
<p>For some minutes nothing was said: Bartine was recovering his
temper, and I waited. Then I said:</p>
<p>“Was that all?”</p>
<p>“No—there was something else. A few weeks
after my great-grandfather’s arrest his watch was found
lying on the porch at the front door of his dwelling. It
was wrapped in a sheet of letter paper bearing the name of Rupert
Bartine, his only son, my grandfather. I am wearing that
watch.”</p>
<p>Bartine paused. His usually restless black eyes were
staring fixedly into the grate, a point of red light in each,
reflected from the glowing coals. He seemed to have
forgotten me. A sudden threshing of the branches of a tree
outside one of the windows, and almost at the same instant a
rattle of rain against the glass, recalled him to a sense of his
surroundings. A storm had risen, heralded by a single gust
of wind, and in a few moments the steady plash of the water on
the pavement was distinctly heard. I hardly know why I
relate this incident; it seemed somehow to have a certain
significance and relevancy which I am unable now to
discern. It at least added an element of seriousness,
almost solemnity. Bartine resumed:</p>
<p>“I have a singular feeling toward this watch—a
kind of affection for it; I like to have it about me, though
partly from its weight, and partly for a reason I shall now
explain, I seldom carry it. The reason is this: Every
evening when I have it with me I feel an unaccountable desire to
open and consult it, even if I can think of no reason for wishing
to know the time. But if I yield to it, the moment my eyes
rest upon the dial I am filled with a mysterious
apprehension—a sense of imminent calamity. And this
is the more insupportable the nearer it is to eleven
o’clock—by this watch, no matter what the actual hour
may be. After the hands have registered eleven the desire
to look is gone; I am entirely indifferent. Then I can
consult the thing as often as I like, with no more emotion than
you feel in looking at your own. Naturally I have trained
myself not to look at that watch in the evening before eleven;
nothing could induce me. Your insistence this evening upset
me a trifle. I felt very much as I suppose an opium-eater
might feel if his yearning for his special and particular kind of
hell were re-enforced by opportunity and advice.</p>
<p>“Now that is my story, and I have told it in the
interest of your trumpery science; but if on any evening
hereafter you observe me wearing this damnable watch, and you
have the thoughtfulness to ask me the hour, I shall beg leave to
put you to the inconvenience of being knocked down.”</p>
<p>His humor did not amuse me. I could see that in relating
his delusion he was again somewhat disturbed. His
concluding smile was positively ghastly, and his eyes had resumed
something more than their old restlessness; they shifted hither
and thither about the room with apparent aimlessness and I
fancied had taken on a wild expression, such as is sometimes
observed in cases of dementia. Perhaps this was my own
imagination, but at any rate I was now persuaded that my friend
was afflicted with a most singular and interesting
monomania. Without, I trust, any abatement of my
affectionate solicitude for him as a friend, I began to regard
him as a patient, rich in possibilities of profitable
study. Why not? Had he not described his delusion in
the interest of science? Ah, poor fellow, he was doing more
for science than he knew: not only his story but himself was in
evidence. I should cure him if I could, of course, but
first I should make a little experiment in psychology—nay,
the experiment itself might be a step in his restoration.</p>
<p>“That is very frank and friendly of you, Bartine,”
I said cordially, “and I’m rather proud of your
confidence. It is all very odd, certainly. Do you
mind showing me the watch?”</p>
<p>He detached it from his waistcoat, chain and all, and passed
it to me without a word. The case was of gold, very thick
and strong, and singularly engraved. After closely
examining the dial and observing that it was nearly twelve
o’clock, I opened it at the back and was interested to
observe an inner case of ivory, upon which was painted a
miniature portrait in that exquisite and delicate manner which
was in vogue during the eighteenth century.</p>
<p>“Why, bless my soul!” I exclaimed, feeling a sharp
artistic delight—“how under the sun did you get that
done? I thought miniature painting on ivory was a lost
art.”</p>
<p>“That,” he replied, gravely smiling, “is not
I; it is my excellent great-grandfather, the late Bramwell Olcott
Bartine, Esquire, of Virginia. He was younger then than
later—about my age, in fact. It is said to resemble
me; do you think so?”</p>
<p>“Resemble you? I should say so! Barring the
costume, which I supposed you to have assumed out of compliment
to the art—or for <i>vraisemblance</i>, so to say—and
the no mustache, that portrait is you in every feature, line, and
expression.”</p>
<p>No more was said at that time. Bartine took a book from
the table and began reading. I heard outside the incessant
plash of the rain in the street. There were occasional
hurried footfalls on the sidewalks; and once a slower, heavier
tread seemed to cease at my door—a policeman, I thought,
seeking shelter in the doorway. The boughs of the trees
tapped significantly on the window panes, as if asking for
admittance. I remember it all through these years and years
of a wiser, graver life.</p>
<p>Seeing myself unobserved, I took the old-fashioned key that
dangled from the chain and quickly turned back the hands of the
watch a full hour; then, closing the case, I handed Bartine his
property and saw him replace it on his person.</p>
<p>“I think you said,” I began, with assumed
carelessness, “that after eleven the sight of the dial no
longer affects you. As it is now nearly
twelve”—looking at my own
timepiece—“perhaps, if you don’t resent my
pursuit of proof, you will look at it now.”</p>
<p>He smiled good-humoredly, pulled out the watch again, opened
it, and instantly sprang to his feet with a cry that Heaven has
not had the mercy to permit me to forget! His eyes, their
blackness strikingly intensified by the pallor of his face, were
fixed upon the watch, which he clutched in both hands. For
some time he remained in that attitude without uttering another
sound; then, in a voice that I should not have recognized as his,
he said:</p>
<p>“Damn you! it is two minutes to eleven!”</p>
<p>I was not unprepared for some such outbreak, and without
rising replied, calmly enough:</p>
<p>“I beg your pardon; I must have misread your watch in
setting my own by it.”</p>
<p>He shut the case with a sharp snap and put the watch in his
pocket. He looked at me and made an attempt to smile, but
his lower lip quivered and he seemed unable to close his
mouth. His hands, also, were shaking, and he thrust them,
clenched, into the pockets of his sack-coat. The courageous
spirit was manifestly endeavoring to subdue the coward
body. The effort was too great; he began to sway from side
to side, as from vertigo, and before I could spring from my chair
to support him his knees gave way and he pitched awkwardly
forward and fell upon his face. I sprang to assist him to
rise; but when John Bartine rises we shall all rise.</p>
<p>The <i>post-mortem</i> examination disclosed nothing; every
organ was normal and sound. But when the body had been
prepared for burial a faint dark circle was seen to have
developed around the neck; at least I was so assured by several
persons who said they saw it, but of my own knowledge I cannot
say if that was true.</p>
<p>Nor can I set limitations to the law of heredity. I do
not know that in the spiritual world a sentiment or emotion may
not survive the heart that held it, and seek expression in a
kindred life, ages removed. Surely, if I were to guess at
the fate of Bramwell Olcott Bartine, I should guess that he was
hanged at eleven o’clock in the evening, and that he had
been allowed several hours in which to prepare for the
change.</p>
<p>As to John Bartine, my friend, my patient for five minutes,
and—Heaven forgive me!—my victim for eternity, there
is no more to say. He is buried, and his watch with
him—I saw to that. May God rest his soul in Paradise,
and the soul of his Virginian ancestor, if, indeed, they are two
souls.</p>
<h2><a name="page280"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 280</span>THE
DAMNED THING</h2>
<h3>I<br />
ONE DOES NOT ALWAYS EAT WHAT IS ON THE TABLE</h3>
<p><span class="smcap">By</span> the light of a tallow candle
which had been placed on one end of a rough table a man was
reading something written in a book. It was an old account
book, greatly worn; and the writing was not, apparently, very
legible, for the man sometimes held the page close to the flame
of the candle to get a stronger light on it. The shadow of
the book would then throw into obscurity a half of the room,
darkening a number of faces and figures; for besides the reader,
eight other men were present. Seven of them sat against the
rough log walls, silent, motionless, and the room being small,
not very far from the table. By extending an arm any one of
them could have touched the eighth man, who lay on the table,
face upward, partly covered by a sheet, his arms at his
sides. He was dead.</p>
<p>The man with the book was not reading aloud, and no one spoke;
all seemed to be waiting for something to occur; the dead man
only was without expectation. From the blank darkness
outside came in, through the aperture that served for a window,
all the ever unfamiliar noises of night in the
wilderness—the long nameless note of a distant coyote; the
stilly pulsing thrill of tireless insects in trees; strange cries
of night birds, so different from those of the birds of day; the
drone of great blundering beetles, and all that mysterious chorus
of small sounds that seem always to have been but half heard when
they have suddenly ceased, as if conscious of an
indiscretion. But nothing of all this was noted in that
company; its members were not overmuch addicted to idle interest
in matters of no practical importance; that was obvious in every
line of their rugged faces—obvious even in the dim light of
the single candle. They were evidently men of the
vicinity—farmers and woodsmen.</p>
<p>The person reading was a trifle different; one would have said
of him that he was of the world, worldly, albeit there was that
in his attire which attested a certain fellowship with the
organisms of his environment. His coat would hardly have
passed muster in San Francisco; his foot-gear was not of urban
origin, and the hat that lay by him on the floor (he was the only
one uncovered) was such that if one had considered it as an
article of mere personal adornment he would have missed its
meaning. In countenance the man was rather prepossessing,
with just a hint of sternness; though that he may have assumed or
cultivated, as appropriate to one in authority. For he was
a coroner. It was by virtue of his office that he had
possession of the book in which he was reading; it had been found
among the dead man’s effects—in his cabin, where the
inquest was now taking place.</p>
<p>When the coroner had finished reading he put the book into his
breast pocket. At that moment the door was pushed open and
a young man entered. He, clearly, was not of mountain birth
and breeding: he was clad as those who dwell in cities. His
clothing was dusty, however, as from travel. He had, in
fact, been riding hard to attend the inquest.</p>
<p>The coroner nodded; no one else greeted him.</p>
<p>“We have waited for you,” said the coroner.
“It is necessary to have done with this business
to-night.”</p>
<p>The young man smiled. “I am sorry to have kept
you,” he said. “I went away, not to evade your
summons, but to post to my newspaper an account of what I suppose
I am called back to relate.”</p>
<p>The coroner smiled.</p>
<p>“The account that you posted to your newspaper,”
he said, “differs, probably, from that which you will give
here under oath.”</p>
<p>“That,” replied the other, rather hotly and with a
visible flush, “is as you please. I used manifold
paper and have a copy of what I sent. It was not written as
news, for it is incredible, but as fiction. It may go as a
part of my testimony under oath.”</p>
<p>“But you say it is incredible.”</p>
<p>“That is nothing to you, sir, if I also swear that it is
true.”</p>
<p>The coroner was silent for a time, his eyes upon the
floor. The men about the sides of the cabin talked in
whispers, but seldom withdrew their gaze from the face of the
corpse. Presently the coroner lifted his eyes and said:
“We will resume the inquest.”</p>
<p>The men removed their hats. The witness was sworn.</p>
<p>“What is your name?” the coroner asked.</p>
<p>“William Harker.”</p>
<p>“Age?”</p>
<p>“Twenty-seven.”</p>
<p>“You knew the deceased, Hugh Morgan?”</p>
<p>“Yes.”</p>
<p>“You were with him when he died?”</p>
<p>“Near him.”</p>
<p>“How did that happen—your presence, I
mean?”</p>
<p>“I was visiting him at this place to shoot and
fish. A part of my purpose, however, was to study him and
his odd, solitary way of life. He seemed a good model for a
character in fiction. I sometimes write stories.”</p>
<p>“I sometimes read them.”</p>
<p>“Thank you.”</p>
<p>“Stories in general—not yours.”</p>
<p>Some of the jurors laughed. Against a sombre background
humor shows high lights. Soldiers in the intervals of
battle laugh easily, and a jest in the death chamber conquers by
surprise.</p>
<p>“Relate the circumstances of this man’s
death,” said the coroner. “You may use any
notes or memoranda that you please.”</p>
<p>The witness understood. Pulling a manuscript from his
breast pocket he held it near the candle and turning the leaves
until he found the passage that he wanted began to read.</p>
<h3>II<br />
WHAT MAY HAPPEN IN A FIELD OF WILD OATS</h3>
<p>“ . . . The sun had hardly risen when we left the
house. We were looking for quail, each with a shotgun, but
we had only one dog. Morgan said that our best ground was
beyond a certain ridge that he pointed out, and we crossed it by
a trail through the <i>chaparral</i>. On the other side was
comparatively level ground, thickly covered with wild oats.
As we emerged from the <i>chaparral</i> Morgan was but a few
yards in advance. Suddenly we heard, at a little distance
to our right and partly in front, a noise as of some animal
thrashing about in the bushes, which we could see were violently
agitated.</p>
<p>“‘We’ve started a deer,’ I said.
‘I wish we had brought a rifle.’</p>
<p>“Morgan, who had stopped and was intently watching the
agitated <i>chaparral</i>, said nothing, but had cocked both
barrels of his gun and was holding it in readiness to aim.
I thought him a trifle excited, which surprised me, for he had a
reputation for exceptional coolness, even in moments of sudden
and imminent peril.</p>
<p>“‘O, come,’ I said. ‘You are not
going to fill up a deer with quail-shot, are you?’</p>
<p>“Still he did not reply; but catching a sight of his
face as he turned it slightly toward me I was struck by the
intensity of his look. Then I understood that we had
serious business in hand and my first conjecture was that we had
‘jumped’ a grizzly. I advanced to
Morgan’s side, cocking my piece as I moved.</p>
<p>“The bushes were now quiet and the sounds had ceased,
but Morgan was as attentive to the place as before.</p>
<p>“‘What is it? What the devil is it?’ I
asked.</p>
<p>“‘That Damned Thing!’ he replied, without
turning his head. His voice was husky and unnatural.
He trembled visibly.</p>
<p>“I was about to speak further, when I observed the wild
oats near the place of the disturbance moving in the most
inexplicable way. I can hardly describe it. It seemed
as if stirred by a streak of wind, which not only bent it, but
pressed it down—crushed it so that it did not rise; and
this movement was slowly prolonging itself directly toward
us.</p>
<p>“Nothing that I had ever seen had affected me so
strangely as this unfamiliar and unaccountable phenomenon, yet I
am unable to recall any sense of fear. I remember—and
tell it here because, singularly enough, I recollected it
then—that once in looking carelessly out of an open window
I momentarily mistook a small tree close at hand for one of a
group of larger trees at a little distance away. It looked
the same size as the others, but being more distinctly and
sharply defined in mass and detail seemed out of harmony with
them. It was a mere falsification of the law of aërial
perspective, but it startled, almost terrified me. We so
rely upon the orderly operation of familiar natural laws that any
seeming suspension of them is noted as a menace to our safety, a
warning of unthinkable calamity. So now the apparently
causeless movement of the herbage and the slow, undeviating
approach of the line of disturbance were distinctly
disquieting. My companion appeared actually frightened, and
I could hardly credit my senses when I saw him suddenly throw his
gun to his shoulder and fire both barrels at the agitated
grain! Before the smoke of the discharge had cleared away I
heard a loud savage cry—a scream like that of a wild
animal—and flinging his gun upon the ground Morgan sprang
away and ran swiftly from the spot. At the same instant I
was thrown violently to the ground by the impact of something
unseen in the smoke—some soft, heavy substance that seemed
thrown against me with great force.</p>
<p>“Before I could get upon my feet and recover my gun,
which seemed to have been struck from my hands, I heard Morgan
crying out as if in mortal agony, and mingling with his cries
were such hoarse, savage sounds as one hears from fighting
dogs. Inexpressibly terrified, I struggled to my feet and
looked in the direction of Morgan’s retreat; and may Heaven
in mercy spare me from another sight like that! At a
distance of less than thirty yards was my friend, down upon one
knee, his head thrown back at a frightful angle, hatless, his
long hair in disorder and his whole body in violent movement from
side to side, backward and forward. His right arm was
lifted and seemed to lack the hand—at least, I could see
none. The other arm was invisible. At times, as my
memory now reports this extraordinary scene, I could discern but
a part of his body; it was as if he had been partly blotted
out—I cannot otherwise express it—then a shifting of
his position would bring it all into view again.</p>
<p>“All this must have occurred within a few seconds, yet
in that time Morgan assumed all the postures of a determined
wrestler vanquished by superior weight and strength. I saw
nothing but him, and him not always distinctly. During the
entire incident his shouts and curses were heard, as if through
an enveloping uproar of such sounds of rage and fury as I had
never heard from the throat of man or brute!</p>
<p>“For a moment only I stood irresolute, then throwing
down my gun I ran forward to my friend’s assistance.
I had a vague belief that he was suffering from a fit, or some
form of convulsion. Before I could reach his side he was
down and quiet. All sounds had ceased, but with a feeling
of such terror as even these awful events had not inspired I now
saw again the mysterious movement of the wild oats, prolonging
itself from the trampled area about the prostrate man toward the
edge of a wood. It was only when it had reached the wood
that I was able to withdraw my eyes and look at my
companion. He was dead.”</p>
<h3>III<br />
A MAN THOUGH NAKED MAY BE IN RAGS</h3>
<p>The coroner rose from his seat and stood beside the dead
man. Lifting an edge of the sheet he pulled it away,
exposing the entire body, altogether naked and showing in the
candle-light a claylike yellow. It had, however, broad
maculations of bluish black, obviously caused by extravasated
blood from contusions. The chest and sides looked as if
they had been beaten with a bludgeon. There were dreadful
lacerations; the skin was torn in strips and shreds.</p>
<p>The coroner moved round to the end of the table and undid a
silk handkerchief which had been passed under the chin and
knotted on the top of the head. When the handkerchief was
drawn away it exposed what had been the throat. Some of the
jurors who had risen to get a better view repented their
curiosity and turned away their faces. Witness Harker went
to the open window and leaned out across the sill, faint and
sick. Dropping the handkerchief upon the dead man’s
neck the coroner stepped to an angle of the room and from a pile
of clothing produced one garment after another, each of which he
held up a moment for inspection. All were torn, and stiff
with blood. The jurors did not make a closer
inspection. They seemed rather uninterested. They
had, in truth, seen all this before; the only thing that was new
to them being Harker’s testimony.</p>
<p>“Gentlemen,” the coroner said, “we have no
more evidence, I think. Your duty has been already
explained to you; if there is nothing you wish to ask you may go
outside and consider your verdict.”</p>
<p>The foreman rose—a tall, bearded man of sixty, coarsely
clad.</p>
<p>“I should like to ask one question, Mr. Coroner,”
he said. “What asylum did this yer last witness
escape from?”</p>
<p>“Mr. Harker,” said the coroner, gravely and
tranquilly, “from what asylum did you last
escape?”</p>
<p>Harker flushed crimson again, but said nothing, and the seven
jurors rose and solemnly filed out of the cabin.</p>
<p>“If you have done insulting me, sir,” said Harker,
as soon as he and the officer were left alone with the dead man,
“I suppose I am at liberty to go?”</p>
<p>“Yes.”</p>
<p>Harker started to leave, but paused, with his hand on the door
latch. The habit of his profession was strong in
him—stronger than his sense of personal dignity. He
turned about and said:</p>
<p>“The book that you have there—I recognize it as
Morgan’s diary. You seemed greatly interested in it;
you read in it while I was testifying. May I see it?
The public would like—”</p>
<p>“The book will cut no figure in this matter,”
replied the official, slipping it into his coat pocket;
“all the entries in it were made before the writer’s
death.”</p>
<p>As Harker passed out of the house the jury reentered and stood
about the table, on which the now covered corpse showed under the
sheet with sharp definition. The foreman seated himself
near the candle, produced from his breast pocket a pencil and
scrap of paper and wrote rather laboriously the following
verdict, which with various degrees of effort all signed:</p>
<p>“We, the jury, do find that the remains come to their
death at the hands of a mountain lion, but some of us thinks, all
the same, they had fits.”</p>
<h3>IV<br />
AN EXPLANATION FROM THE TOMB</h3>
<p>In the diary of the late Hugh Morgan are certain interesting
entries having, possibly, a scientific value as
suggestions. At the inquest upon his body the book was not
put in evidence; possibly the coroner thought it not worth while
to confuse the jury. The date of the first of the entries
mentioned cannot be ascertained; the upper part of the leaf is
torn away; the part of the entry remaining follows:</p>
<p>“ . . . would run in a half-circle, keeping his head
turned always toward the centre, and again he would stand still,
barking furiously. At last he ran away into the brush as
fast as he could go. I thought at first that he had gone
mad, but on returning to the house found no other alteration in
his manner than what was obviously due to fear of punishment.</p>
<p>“Can a dog see with his nose? Do odors impress
some cerebral centre with images of the thing that emitted them?
. . .</p>
<p>“Sept. 2.—Looking at the stars last night as they
rose above the crest of the ridge east of the house, I observed
them successively disappear—from left to right. Each
was eclipsed but an instant, and only a few at the same time, but
along the entire length of the ridge all that were within a
degree or two of the crest were blotted out. It was as if
something had passed along between me and them; but I could not
see it, and the stars were not thick enough to define its
outline. Ugh! I don’t like this.” . .
.</p>
<p>Several weeks’ entries are missing, three leaves being
torn from the book.</p>
<p>“Sept. 27.—It has been about here again—I
find evidences of its presence every day. I watched again
all last night in the same cover, gun in hand, double-charged
with buckshot. In the morning the fresh footprints were
there, as before. Yet I would have sworn that I did not
sleep—indeed, I hardly sleep at all. It is terrible,
insupportable! If these amazing experiences are real I
shall go mad; if they are fanciful I am mad already.</p>
<p>“Oct. 3.—I shall not go—it shall not drive
me away. No, this is <i>my</i> house, <i>my</i> land.
God hates a coward . . .</p>
<p>“Oct. 5.—I can stand it no longer; I have invited
Harker to pass a few weeks with me—he has a level
head. I can judge from his manner if he thinks me mad.</p>
<p>“Oct. 7.—I have the solution of the mystery; it
came to me last night—suddenly, as by revelation. How
simple—how terribly simple!</p>
<p>“There are sounds that we cannot hear. At either
end of the scale are notes that stir no chord of that imperfect
instrument, the human ear. They are too high or too
grave. I have observed a flock of blackbirds occupying an
entire tree-top—the tops of several trees—and all in
full song. Suddenly—in a moment—at absolutely
the same instant—all spring into the air and fly
away. How? They could not all see one
another—whole tree-tops intervened. At no point could
a leader have been visible to all. There must have been a
signal of warning or command, high and shrill above the din, but
by me unheard. I have observed, too, the same simultaneous
flight when all were silent, among not only blackbirds, but other
birds—quail, for example, widely separated by
bushes—even on opposite sides of a hill.</p>
<p>“It is known to seamen that a school of whales basking
or sporting on the surface of the ocean, miles apart, with the
convexity of the earth between, will sometimes dive at the same
instant—all gone out of sight in a moment. The signal
has been sounded—too grave for the ear of the sailor at the
masthead and his comrades on the deck—who nevertheless feel
its vibrations in the ship as the stones of a cathedral are
stirred by the bass of the organ.</p>
<p>“As with sounds, so with colors. At each end of
the solar spectrum the chemist can detect the presence of what
are known as ‘actinic’ rays. They represent
colors—integral colors in the composition of
light—which we are unable to discern. The human eye
is an imperfect instrument; its range is but a few octaves of the
real ‘chromatic scale.’ I am not mad; there are
colors that we cannot see.</p>
<p>“And, God help me! the Damned Thing is of such a
color!”</p>
<h2><a name="page297"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
297</span>HAÏTA THE SHEPHERD</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">In</span> the heart of Haïta the
illusions of youth had not been supplanted by those of age and
experience. His thoughts were pure and pleasant, for his
life was simple and his soul devoid of ambition. He rose
with the sun and went forth to pray at the shrine of Hastur, the
god of shepherds, who heard and was pleased. After
performance of this pious rite Haïta unbarred the gate of
the fold and with a cheerful mind drove his flock afield, eating
his morning meal of curds and oat cake as he went, occasionally
pausing to add a few berries, cold with dew, or to drink of the
waters that came away from the hills to join the stream in the
middle of the valley and be borne along with it, he knew not
whither.</p>
<p>During the long summer day, as his sheep cropped the good
grass which the gods had made to grow for them, or lay with their
forelegs doubled under their breasts and chewed the cud,
Haïta, reclining in the shadow of a tree, or sitting upon a
rock, played so sweet music upon his reed pipe that sometimes
from the corner of his eye he got accidental glimpses of the
minor sylvan deities, leaning forward out of the copse to hear;
but if he looked at them directly they vanished. From
this—for he must be thinking if he would not turn into one
of his own sheep—he drew the solemn inference that
happiness may come if not sought, but if looked for will never be
seen; for next to the favor of Hastur, who never disclosed
himself, Haïta most valued the friendly interest of his
neighbors, the shy immortals of the wood and stream. At
nightfall he drove his flock back to the fold, saw that the gate
was secure and retired to his cave for refreshment and for
dreams.</p>
<p>So passed his life, one day like another, save when the storms
uttered the wrath of an offended god. Then Haïta
cowered in his cave, his face hidden in his hands, and prayed
that he alone might be punished for his sins and the world saved
from destruction. Sometimes when there was a great rain,
and the stream came out of its banks, compelling him to urge his
terrified flock to the uplands, he interceded for the people in
the cities which he had been told lay in the plain beyond the two
blue hills forming the gateway of his valley.</p>
<p>“It is kind of thee, O Hastur,” so he prayed,
“to give me mountains so near to my dwelling and my fold
that I and my sheep can escape the angry torrents; but the rest
of the world thou must thyself deliver in some way that I know
not of, or I will no longer worship thee.”</p>
<p>And Hastur, knowing that Haïta was a youth who kept his
word, spared the cities and turned the waters into the sea.</p>
<p>So he had lived since he could remember. He could not
rightly conceive any other mode of existence. The holy
hermit who dwelt at the head of the valley, a full hour’s
journey away, from whom he had heard the tale of the great cities
where dwelt people—poor souls!—who had no sheep, gave
him no knowledge of that early time, when, so he reasoned, he
must have been small and helpless like a lamb.</p>
<p>It was through thinking on these mysteries and marvels, and on
that horrible change to silence and decay which he felt sure must
some time come to him, as he had seen it come to so many of his
flock—as it came to all living things except the
birds—that Haïta first became conscious how miserable
and hopeless was his lot.</p>
<p>“It is necessary,” he said, “that I know
whence and how I came; for how can one perform his duties unless
able to judge what they are by the way in which he was intrusted
with them? And what contentment can I have when I know not
how long it is going to last? Perhaps before another sun I
may be changed, and then what will become of the sheep?
What, indeed, will have become of me?”</p>
<p>Pondering these things Haïta became melancholy and
morose. He no longer spoke cheerfully to his flock, nor ran
with alacrity to the shrine of Hastur. In every breeze he
heard whispers of malign deities whose existence he now first
observed. Every cloud was a portent signifying disaster,
and the darkness was full of terrors. His reed pipe when
applied to his lips gave out no melody, but a dismal wail; the
sylvan and riparian intelligences no longer thronged the
thicket-side to listen, but fled from the sound, as he knew by
the stirred leaves and bent flowers. He relaxed his
vigilance and many of his sheep strayed away into the hills and
were lost. Those that remained became lean and ill for lack
of good pasturage, for he would not seek it for them, but
conducted them day after day to the same spot, through mere
abstraction, while puzzling about life and death—of
immortality he knew not.</p>
<p>One day while indulging in the gloomiest reflections he
suddenly sprang from the rock upon which he sat, and with a
determined gesture of the right hand exclaimed: “I will no
longer be a suppliant for knowledge which the gods
withhold. Let them look to it that they do me no
wrong. I will do my duty as best I can and if I err upon
their own heads be it!”</p>
<p>Suddenly, as he spoke, a great brightness fell about him,
causing him to look upward, thinking the sun had burst through a
rift in the clouds; but there were no clouds. No more than
an arm’s length away stood a beautiful maiden. So
beautiful she was that the flowers about her feet folded their
petals in despair and bent their heads in token of submission; so
sweet her look that the humming birds thronged her eyes,
thrusting their thirsty bills almost into them, and the wild bees
were about her lips. And such was her brightness that the
shadows of all objects lay divergent from her feet, turning as
she moved.</p>
<p>Haïta was entranced. Rising, he knelt before her in
adoration, and she laid her hand upon his head.</p>
<p>“Come,” she said in a voice that had the music of
all the bells of his flock—“come, thou art not to
worship me, who am no goddess, but if thou art truthful and
dutiful I will abide with thee.”</p>
<p>Haïta seized her hand, and stammering his joy and
gratitude arose, and hand in hand they stood and smiled into each
other’s eyes. He gazed on her with reverence and
rapture. He said: “I pray thee, lovely maid, tell me
thy name and whence and why thou comest.”</p>
<p>At this she laid a warning finger on her lip and began to
withdraw. Her beauty underwent a visible alteration that
made him shudder, he knew not why, for still she was
beautiful. The landscape was darkened by a giant shadow
sweeping across the valley with the speed of a vulture. In
the obscurity the maiden’s figure grew dim and indistinct
and her voice seemed to come from a distance, as she said, in a
tone of sorrowful reproach: “Presumptuous and ungrateful
youth! must I then so soon leave thee? Would nothing do but
thou must at once break the eternal compact?”</p>
<p>Inexpressibly grieved, Haïta fell upon his knees and
implored her to remain—rose and sought her in the deepening
darkness—ran in circles, calling to her aloud, but all in
vain. She was no longer visible, but out of the gloom he
heard her voice saying: “Nay, thou shalt not have me by
seeking. Go to thy duty, faithless shepherd, or we shall
never meet again.”</p>
<p>Night had fallen; the wolves were howling in the hills and the
terrified sheep crowding about Haïta’s feet. In
the demands of the hour he forgot his disappointment, drove his
sheep to the fold and repairing to the place of worship poured
out his heart in gratitude to Hastur for permitting him to save
his flock, then retired to his cave and slept.</p>
<p>When Haïta awoke the sun was high and shone in at the
cave, illuminating it with a great glory. And there, beside
him, sat the maiden. She smiled upon him with a smile that
seemed the visible music of his pipe of reeds. He dared not
speak, fearing to offend her as before, for he knew not what he
could venture to say.</p>
<p>“Because,” she said, “thou didst thy duty by
the flock, and didst not forget to thank Hastur for staying the
wolves of the night, I am come to thee again. Wilt thou
have me for a companion?”</p>
<p>“Who would not have thee forever?” replied
Haïta. “Oh! never again leave me
until—until I—change and become silent and
motionless.”</p>
<p>Haïta had no word for death.</p>
<p>“I wish, indeed,” he continued, “that thou
wert of my own sex, that we might wrestle and run races and so
never tire of being together.”</p>
<p>At these words the maiden arose and passed out of the cave,
and Haïta, springing from his couch of fragrant boughs to
overtake and detain her, observed to his astonishment that the
rain was falling and the stream in the middle of the valley had
come out of its banks. The sheep were bleating in terror,
for the rising waters had invaded their fold. And there was
danger for the unknown cities of the distant plain.</p>
<p>It was many days before Haïta saw the maiden again.
One day he was returning from the head of the valley, where he
had gone with ewe’s milk and oat cake and berries for the
holy hermit, who was too old and feeble to provide himself with
food.</p>
<p>“Poor old man!” he said aloud, as he trudged along
homeward. “I will return to-morrow and bear him on my
back to my own dwelling, where I can care for him.
Doubtless it is for this that Hastur has reared me all these many
years, and gives me health and strength.”</p>
<p>As he spoke, the maiden, clad in glittering garments, met him
in the path with a smile that took away his breath.</p>
<p>“I am come again,” she said, “to dwell with
thee if thou wilt now have me, for none else will. Thou
mayest have learned wisdom, and art willing to take me as I am,
nor care to know.”</p>
<p>Haïta threw himself at her feet. “Beautiful
being,” he cried, “if thou wilt but deign to accept
all the devotion of my heart and soul—after Hastur be
served—it is thine forever. But, alas! thou art
capricious and wayward. Before to-morrow’s sun I may
lose thee again. Promise, I beseech thee, that however in
my ignorance I may offend, thou wilt forgive and remain always
with me.”</p>
<p>Scarcely had he finished speaking when a troop of bears came
out of the hills, racing toward him with crimson mouths and fiery
eyes. The maiden again vanished, and he turned and fled for
his life. Nor did he stop until he was in the cot of the
holy hermit, whence he had set out. Hastily barring the
door against the bears he cast himself upon the ground and
wept.</p>
<p>“My son,” said the hermit from his couch of straw,
freshly gathered that morning by Haïta’s hands,
“it is not like thee to weep for bears—tell me what
sorrow hath befallen thee, that age may minister to the hurts of
youth with such balms as it hath of its wisdom.”</p>
<p>Haïta told him all: how thrice he had met the radiant
maid, and thrice she had left him forlorn. He related
minutely all that had passed between them, omitting no word of
what had been said.</p>
<p>When he had ended, the holy hermit was a moment silent, then
said: “My son, I have attended to thy story, and I know the
maiden. I have myself seen her, as have many. Know,
then, that her name, which she would not even permit thee to
inquire, is Happiness. Thou saidst the truth to her, that
she is capricious for she imposeth conditions that man cannot
fulfill, and delinquency is punished by desertion. She
cometh only when unsought, and will not be questioned. One
manifestation of curiosity, one sign of doubt, one expression of
misgiving, and she is away! How long didst thou have her at
any time before she fled?”</p>
<p>“Only a single instant,” answered Haïta,
blushing with shame at the confession. “Each time I
drove her away in one moment.”</p>
<p>“Unfortunate youth!” said the holy hermit,
“but for thine indiscretion thou mightst have had her for
two.”</p>
<h2><a name="page308"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 308</span>AN
INHABITANT OF CARCOSA</h2>
<blockquote><p>For there be divers sorts of death—some
wherein the body remaineth; and in some it vanisheth quite away
with the spirit. This commonly occurreth only in solitude
(such is God’s will) and, none seeing the end, we say the
man is lost, or gone on a long journey—which indeed he
hath; but sometimes it hath happened in sight of many, as
abundant testimony showeth. In one kind of death the spirit
also dieth, and this it hath been known to do while yet the body
was in vigor for many years. Sometimes, as is veritably
attested, it dieth with the body, but after a season is raised up
again in that place where the body did decay.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><span class="smcap">Pondering</span> these words of Hali (whom
God rest) and questioning their full meaning, as one who, having
an intimation, yet doubts if there be not something behind, other
than that which he has discerned, I noted not whither I had
strayed until a sudden chill wind striking my face revived in me
a sense of my surroundings. I observed with astonishment
that everything seemed unfamiliar. On every side of me
stretched a bleak and desolate expanse of plain, covered with a
tall overgrowth of sere grass, which rustled and whistled in the
autumn wind with heaven knows what mysterious and disquieting
suggestion. Protruded at long intervals above it, stood
strangely shaped and somber-colored rocks, which seemed to have
an understanding with one another and to exchange looks of
uncomfortable significance, as if they had reared their heads to
watch the issue of some foreseen event. A few blasted trees
here and there appeared as leaders in this malevolent conspiracy
of silent expectation.</p>
<p>The day, I thought, must be far advanced, though the sun was
invisible; and although sensible that the air was raw and chill
my consciousness of that fact was rather mental than
physical—I had no feeling of discomfort. Over all the
dismal landscape a canopy of low, lead-colored clouds hung like a
visible curse. In all this there were a menace and a
portent—a hint of evil, an intimation of doom. Bird,
beast, or insect there was none. The wind sighed in the
bare branches of the dead trees and the gray grass bent to
whisper its dread secret to the earth; but no other sound nor
motion broke the awful repose of that dismal place.</p>
<p>I observed in the herbage a number of weather-worn stones,
evidently shaped with tools. They were broken, covered with
moss and half sunken in the earth. Some lay prostrate, some
leaned at various angles, none was vertical. They were
obviously headstones of graves, though the graves themselves no
longer existed as either mounds or depressions; the years had
leveled all. Scattered here and there, more massive blocks
showed where some pompous tomb or ambitious monument had once
flung its feeble defiance at oblivion. So old seemed these
relics, these vestiges of vanity and memorials of affection and
piety, so battered and worn and stained—so neglected,
deserted, forgotten the place, that I could not help thinking
myself the discoverer of the burial-ground of a prehistoric race
of men whose very name was long extinct.</p>
<p>Filled with these reflections, I was for some time heedless of
the sequence of my own experiences, but soon I thought,
“How came I hither?” A moment’s
reflection seemed to make this all clear and explain at the same
time, though in a disquieting way, the singular character with
which my fancy had invested all that I saw or heard. I was
ill. I remembered now that I had been prostrated by a
sudden fever, and that my family had told me that in my periods
of delirium I had constantly cried out for liberty and air, and
had been held in bed to prevent my escape out-of-doors. Now
I had eluded the vigilance of my attendants and had wandered
hither to—to where? I could not conjecture.
Clearly I was at a considerable distance from the city where I
dwelt—the ancient and famous city of Carcosa.</p>
<p>No signs of human life were anywhere visible nor audible; no
rising smoke, no watch-dog’s bark, no lowing of cattle, no
shouts of children at play—nothing but that dismal
burial-place, with its air of mystery and dread, due to my own
disordered brain. Was I not becoming again delirious, there
beyond human aid? Was it not indeed <i>all</i> an illusion
of my madness? I called aloud the names of my wives and
sons, reached out my hands in search of theirs, even as I walked
among the crumbling stones and in the withered grass.</p>
<p>A noise behind me caused me to turn about. A wild
animal—a lynx—was approaching. The thought came
to me: If I break down here in the desert—if the fever
return and I fail, this beast will be at my throat. I
sprang toward it, shouting. It trotted tranquilly by within
a hand’s breadth of me and disappeared behind a rock.</p>
<p>A moment later a man’s head appeared to rise out of the
ground a short distance away. He was ascending the farther
slope of a low hill whose crest was hardly to be distinguished
from the general level. His whole figure soon came into
view against the background of gray cloud. He was half
naked, half clad in skins. His hair was unkempt, his beard
long and ragged. In one hand he carried a bow and arrow;
the other held a blazing torch with a long trail of black
smoke. He walked slowly and with caution, as if he feared
falling into some open grave concealed by the tall grass.
This strange apparition surprised but did not alarm, and taking
such a course as to intercept him I met him almost face to face,
accosting him with the familiar salutation, “God keep
you.”</p>
<p>He gave no heed, nor did he arrest his pace.</p>
<p>“Good stranger,” I continued, “I am ill and
lost. Direct me, I beseech you, to Carcosa.”</p>
<p>The man broke into a barbarous chant in an unknown tongue,
passing on and away.</p>
<p>An owl on the branch of a decayed tree hooted dismally and was
answered by another in the distance. Looking upward, I saw
through a sudden rift in the clouds Aldebaran and the
Hyades! In all this there was a hint of night—the
lynx, the man with the torch, the owl. Yet I saw—I
saw even the stars in absence of the darkness. I saw, but
was apparently not seen nor heard. Under what awful spell
did I exist?</p>
<p>I seated myself at the root of a great tree, seriously to
consider what it were best to do. That I was mad I could no
longer doubt, yet recognized a ground of doubt in the
conviction. Of fever I had no trace. I had, withal, a
sense of exhilaration and vigor altogether unknown to me—a
feeling of mental and physical exaltation. My senses seemed
all alert; I could feel the air as a ponderous substance; I could
hear the silence.</p>
<p>A great root of the giant tree against whose trunk I leaned as
I sat held inclosed in its grasp a slab of stone, a part of which
protruded into a recess formed by another root. The stone
was thus partly protected from the weather, though greatly
decomposed. Its edges were worn round, its corners eaten
away, its surface deeply furrowed and scaled. Glittering
particles of mica were visible in the earth about
it—vestiges of its decomposition. This stone had
apparently marked the grave out of which the tree had sprung ages
ago. The tree’s exacting roots had robbed the grave
and made the stone a prisoner.</p>
<p>A sudden wind pushed some dry leaves and twigs from the
uppermost face of the stone; I saw the low-relief letters of an
inscription and bent to read it. God in Heaven! <i>my</i>
name in full!—the date of <i>my</i> birth!—the date
of <i>my</i> death!</p>
<p>A level shaft of light illuminated the whole side of the tree
as I sprang to my feet in terror. The sun was rising in the
rosy east. I stood between the tree and his broad red
disk—no shadow darkened the trunk!</p>
<p>A chorus of howling wolves saluted the dawn. I saw them
sitting on their haunches, singly and in groups, on the summits
of irregular mounds and tumuli filling a half of my desert
prospect and extending to the horizon. And then I knew that
these were ruins of the ancient and famous city of Carcosa.</p>
<div class="gapshortline"> </div>
<p>Such are the facts imparted to the medium Bayrolles by the
spirit Hoseib Alar Robardin.</p>
<h2><a name="page315"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 315</span>THE
STRANGER</h2>
<p>A <span class="smcap">man</span> stepped out of the darkness
into the little illuminated circle about our failing campfire and
seated himself upon a rock.</p>
<p>“You are not the first to explore this region,” he
said, gravely.</p>
<p>Nobody controverted his statement; he was himself proof of its
truth, for he was not of our party and must have been somewhere
near when we camped. Moreover, he must have companions not
far away; it was not a place where one would be living or
traveling alone. For more than a week we had seen, besides
ourselves and our animals, only such living things as
rattlesnakes and horned toads. In an Arizona desert one
does not long coexist with only such creatures as these: one must
have pack animals, supplies, arms—“an
outfit.” And all these imply comrades. It was
perhaps a doubt as to what manner of men this unceremonious
stranger’s comrades might be, together with something in
his words interpretable as a challenge, that caused every man of
our half-dozen “gentlemen adventurers” to rise to a
sitting posture and lay his hand upon a weapon—an act
signifying, in that time and place, a policy of
expectation. The stranger gave the matter no attention and
began again to speak in the same deliberate, uninflected monotone
in which he had delivered his first sentence:</p>
<p>“Thirty years ago Ramon Gallegos, William Shaw, George
W. Kent and Berry Davis, all of Tucson, crossed the Santa
Catalina mountains and traveled due west, as nearly as the
configuration of the country permitted. We were prospecting
and it was our intention, if we found nothing, to push through to
the Gila river at some point near Big Bend, where we understood
there was a settlement. We had a good outfit but no
guide—just Ramon Gallegos, William Shaw, George W. Kent and
Berry Davis.”</p>
<p>The man repeated the names slowly and distinctly, as if to fix
them in the memories of his audience, every member of which was
now attentively observing him, but with a slackened apprehension
regarding his possible companions somewhere in the darkness that
seemed to enclose us like a black wall; in the manner of this
volunteer historian was no suggestion of an unfriendly
purpose. His act was rather that of a harmless lunatic than
an enemy. We were not so new to the country as not to know
that the solitary life of many a plainsman had a tendency to
develop eccentricities of conduct and character not always easily
distinguishable from mental aberration. A man is like a
tree: in a forest of his fellows he will grow as straight as his
generic and individual nature permits; alone in the open, he
yields to the deforming stresses and tortions that environ
him. Some such thoughts were in my mind as I watched the
man from the shadow of my hat, pulled low to shut out the
firelight. A witless fellow, no doubt, but what could he be
doing there in the heart of a desert?</p>
<p>Having undertaken to tell this story, I wish that I could
describe the man’s appearance; that would be a natural
thing to do. Unfortunately, and somewhat strangely, I find
myself unable to do so with any degree of confidence, for
afterward no two of us agreed as to what he wore and how he
looked; and when I try to set down my own impressions they elude
me. Anyone can tell some kind of story; narration is one of
the elemental powers of the race. But the talent for
description is a gift.</p>
<p>Nobody having broken silence the visitor went on to say:</p>
<p>“This country was not then what it is now. There
was not a ranch between the Gila and the Gulf. There was a
little game here and there in the mountains, and near the
infrequent water-holes grass enough to keep our animals from
starvation. If we should be so fortunate as to encounter no
Indians we might get through. But within a week the purpose
of the expedition had altered from discovery of wealth to
preservation of life. We had gone too far to go back, for
what was ahead could be no worse than what was behind; so we
pushed on, riding by night to avoid Indians and the intolerable
heat, and concealing ourselves by day as best we could.
Sometimes, having exhausted our supply of wild meat and emptied
our casks, we were days without food or drink; then a water-hole
or a shallow pool in the bottom of an <i>arroyo</i> so restored
our strength and sanity that we were able to shoot some of the
wild animals that sought it also. Sometimes it was a bear,
sometimes an antelope, a coyote, a cougar—that was as God
pleased; all were food.</p>
<p>“One morning as we skirted a mountain range, seeking a
practicable pass, we were attacked by a band of Apaches who had
followed our trail up a gulch—it is not far from
here. Knowing that they outnumbered us ten to one, they
took none of their usual cowardly precautions, but dashed upon us
at a gallop, firing and yelling. Fighting was out of the
question: we urged our feeble animals up the gulch as far as
there was footing for a hoof, then threw ourselves out of our
saddles and took to the <i>chaparral</i> on one of the slopes,
abandoning our entire outfit to the enemy. But we retained
our rifles, every man—Ramon Gallegos, William Shaw, George
W. Kent and Berry Davis.”</p>
<p>“Same old crowd,” said the humorist of our
party. He was an Eastern man, unfamiliar with the decent
observances of social intercourse. A gesture of disapproval
from our leader silenced him and the stranger proceeded with his
tale:</p>
<p>“The savages dismounted also, and some of them ran up
the gulch beyond the point at which we had left it, cutting off
further retreat in that direction and forcing us on up the
side. Unfortunately the <i>chaparral</i> extended only a
short distance up the slope, and as we came into the open ground
above we took the fire of a dozen rifles; but Apaches shoot badly
when in a hurry, and God so willed it that none of us fell.
Twenty yards up the slope, beyond the edge of the brush, were
vertical cliffs, in which, directly in front of us, was a narrow
opening. Into that we ran, finding ourselves in a cavern
about as large as an ordinary room in a house. Here for a
time we were safe: a single man with a repeating rifle could
defend the entrance against all the Apaches in the land.
But against hunger and thirst we had no defense. Courage we
still had, but hope was a memory.</p>
<p>“Not one of those Indians did we afterward see, but by
the smoke and glare of their fires in the gulch we knew that by
day and by night they watched with ready rifles in the edge of
the bush—knew that if we made a sortie not a man of us
would live to take three steps into the open. For three
days, watching in turn, we held out before our suffering became
insupportable. Then—it was the morning of the fourth
day—Ramon Gallegos said:</p>
<p>“‘Senores, I know not well of the good God and
what please him. I have live without religion, and I am not
acquaint with that of you. Pardon, senores, if I shock you,
but for me the time is come to beat the game of the
Apache.’</p>
<p>“He knelt upon the rock floor of the cave and pressed
his pistol against his temple. ‘Madre de Dios,’
he said, ‘comes now the soul of Ramon Gallegos.’</p>
<p>“And so he left us—William Shaw, George W. Kent
and Berry Davis.</p>
<p>“I was the leader: it was for me to speak.</p>
<p>“‘He was a brave man,’ I
said—‘he knew when to die, and how. It is
foolish to go mad from thirst and fall by Apache bullets, or be
skinned alive—it is in bad taste. Let us join Ramon
Gallegos.’</p>
<p>“‘That is right,’ said William Shaw.</p>
<p>“‘That is right,’ said George W. Kent.</p>
<p>“I straightened the limbs of Ramon Gallegos and put a
handkerchief over his face. Then William Shaw said:
‘I should like to look like that—a little
while.’</p>
<p>“And George W. Kent said that he felt that way, too.</p>
<p>“‘It shall be so,’ I said: ‘the red
devils will wait a week. William Shaw and George W. Kent,
draw and kneel.’</p>
<p>“They did so and I stood before them.</p>
<p>“‘Almighty God, our Father,’ said I.</p>
<p>“‘Almighty God, our Father,’ said William
Shaw.</p>
<p>“‘Almighty God, our Father,’ said George W.
Kent.</p>
<p>“‘Forgive us our sins,’ said I.</p>
<p>“‘Forgive us our sins,’ said they.</p>
<p>“‘And receive our souls.’</p>
<p>“‘And receive our souls.’</p>
<p>“‘Amen!’</p>
<p>“‘Amen!’</p>
<p>“I laid them beside Ramon Gallegos and covered their
faces.”</p>
<p>There was a quick commotion on the opposite side of the
campfire: one of our party had sprung to his feet, pistol in
hand.</p>
<p>“And you!” he shouted—“<i>you</i>
dared to escape?—you dare to be alive? You cowardly
hound, I’ll send you to join them if I hang for
it!”</p>
<p>But with the leap of a panther the captain was upon him,
grasping his wrist. “Hold it in, Sam Yountsey, hold
it in!”</p>
<p>We were now all upon our feet—except the stranger, who
sat motionless and apparently inattentive. Some one seized
Yountsey’s other arm.</p>
<p>“Captain,” I said, “there is something wrong
here. This fellow is either a lunatic or merely a
liar—just a plain, every-day liar whom Yountsey has no call
to kill. If this man was of that party it had five members,
one of whom—probably himself—he has not
named.”</p>
<p>“Yes,” said the captain, releasing the insurgent,
who sat down, “there is something—unusual.
Years ago four dead bodies of white men, scalped and shamefully
mutilated, were found about the mouth of that cave. They
are buried there; I have seen the graves—we shall all see
them to-morrow.”</p>
<p>The stranger rose, standing tall in the light of the expiring
fire, which in our breathless attention to his story we had
neglected to keep going.</p>
<p>“There were four,” he said—“Ramon
Gallegos, William Shaw, George W. Kent and Berry
Davis.”</p>
<p>With this reiterated roll-call of the dead he walked into the
darkness and we saw him no more.</p>
<p>At that moment one of our party, who had been on guard, strode
in among us, rifle in hand and somewhat excited.</p>
<p>“Captain,” he said, “for the last half-hour
three men have been standing out there on the
<i>mesa</i>.” He pointed in the direction taken by
the stranger. “I could see them distinctly, for the
moon is up, but as they had no guns and I had them covered with
mine I thought it was their move. They have made none, but,
damn it! they have got on to my nerves.”</p>
<p>“Go back to your post, and stay till you see them
again,” said the captain. “The rest of you lie
down again, or I’ll kick you all into the fire.”</p>
<p>The sentinel obediently withdrew, swearing, and did not
return. As we were arranging our blankets the fiery
Yountsey said: “I beg your pardon, Captain, but who the
devil do you take them to be?”</p>
<p>“Ramon Gallegos, William Shaw and George W.
Kent.”</p>
<p>“But how about Berry Davis? I ought to have shot
him.”</p>
<p>“Quite needless; you couldn’t have made him any
deader. Go to sleep.”</p>
<h2>FOOTNOTES</h2>
<p><a name="footnote252"></a><a href="#citation252"
class="footnote">[252]</a> Rough notes of this tale were
found among the papers of the late Leigh Bierce. It is
printed here with such revision only as the author might himself
have made in transcription.</p>
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