The Project Gutenberg Etext of Can Such Things Be?
by Ambrose Bierce
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Title: Can Such Things Be?
Author: Ambrose Bierce
Release Date: August, 2003 [Etext #4366]
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The Project Gutenberg Etext of Can Such Things Be?
by Ambrose Bierce
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CAN SUCH THINGS BE?
Contents:
The death of Halpin Frayser
The secret of Macarger’s Gulch
One summer night
The moonlit road
A diagnosis of death
Moxon’s master
A tough tussle
One of twins
The haunted valley
A jug of sirup
Staley Fleming’s hallucination
A resumed identity
Hazen’s brigade
A baby tramp
The night-doings at “Deadman’s”
A story that is untrue
Beyond the wall
A psychological shipwreck
The middle toe of the right foot
John Mortonson’s funeral
The realm of the unreal
John Bartine’s watch
A story by a physician
The damned thing
Haïta the shepherd
An inhabitant of Carcosa
The Stranger
THE DEATH OF HALPIN FRAYSER
I
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.
- Hali.
One 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
“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.
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.
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!
II
In 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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
“Would you greatly mind, Katy, if I were called away to California
for a few weeks?”
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.
“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?”
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
III
The 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.
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.
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.
IV
A warm, 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.”
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.
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.
“How far is it?” inquired Holker, as they strode along,
their feet stirring white the dust beneath the damp surface of the road.
“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?”
“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.”
“You remember Branscom?” said Jaralson, treating his companion’s
wit with the inattention that it deserved.
“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 - ”
“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.”
“The devil! That’s where they buried his wife.”
“Well, you fellows might have had sense enough to suspect that
he would return to her grave some time.”
“The very last place that anyone would have expected him to return
to.”
“But you had exhausted all the other places. Learning your
failure at them, I ‘laid for him’ there.”
“And you found him?”
“Damn it! he found me. 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.”
Holker laughed good humoredly, and explained that his creditors were
never more importunate.
“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.”
“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.”
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.
“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.”
“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.”
“What is?”
“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.”
“Naturally.”
“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.”
“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.”
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.
“I will show you where he held me up,” he said. “This
is the graveyard.”
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
All this the two men observed without speaking - almost at a glance.
Then Holker said:
“Poor devil! he had a rough deal.”
Jaralson was making a vigilant circumspection of the forest, his shotgun
held in both hands and at full cock, his finger upon the trigger.
“The work of a maniac,” he said, without withdrawing his
eyes from the inclosing wood. “It was done by Branscom -
Pardee.”
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:
“Enthralled by some mysterious spell, I stood
In the lit gloom of an enchanted wood.
The cypress there and myrtle twined their boughs,
Significant, in baleful brotherhood.
“The brooding willow whispered to the yew;
Beneath, the deadly nightshade and the rue,
With immortelles self-woven into strange
Funereal shapes, and horrid nettles grew.
“No song of bird nor any drone of bees,
Nor light leaf lifted by the wholesome breeze:
The air was stagnant all, and Silence was
A living thing that breathed among the trees.
“Conspiring spirits whispered in the gloom,
Half-heard, the stilly secrets of the tomb.
With blood the trees were all adrip; the leaves
Shone in the witch-light with a ruddy bloom.
“I cried aloud! - the spell, unbroken still,
Rested upon my spirit and my will.
Unsouled, unhearted, hopeless and forlorn,
I strove with monstrous presages of ill!
“At last the viewless - ”
Holker ceased reading; there was no more to read. The manuscript
broke off in the middle of a line.
“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.
“Who’s Bayne?” Holker asked rather incuriously.
“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.”
“It is cold,” said Holker; “let us leave here; we
must have up the coroner from Napa.”
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.”
“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!”
“There is some rascally mystery here,” said Detective Jaralson.
“I hate anything of that kind.”
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.
THE SECRET OF MACARGER’S GULCH
North Westwardly 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
a more familiar face
Than that of man -
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
“Mr. Morgan,” I asked abruptly, “do you know a place
up there called Macarger’s Gulch?”
“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.”
I had not heard of it; the accounts had been published, it appeared,
while I was absent in the East.
“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.”
That was hardly accurate - I had simply dropped it, glass and all.
“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 débris 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.
“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.”
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.”
“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.”
I thought he seemed rather glad to go on with his story.
“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?”
I had deposited a chicken bone in my finger bowl.
“In a little cupboard I found a photograph of MacGregor, but it
did not lead to his capture.”
“Will you let me see it?” I said.
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.
“By the way, Mr. Elderson,” said my affable host, “may
I know why you asked about ‘Macarger’s Gulch’?”
“I lost a mule near there once,” I replied, “and the
mischance has - has quite - upset me.”
“My dear,” said Mr. Morgan, with the mechanical intonation
of an interpreter translating, “the loss of Mr. Elderson’s
mule has peppered his coffee.”
ONE SUMMER NIGHT
The 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.
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.
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.
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.
Outside the wall, at the part of the grounds farthest from the public
road, were a horse and a light wagon, waiting.
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.
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.
“You saw it?” cried one.
“God! yes - what are we to do?”
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.
“I’m waiting for my pay,” he said.
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.
THE MOONLIT ROAD
I - STATEMENT OF JOEL HETMAN, JR.
I am 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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:
“God! God! what is that?”
“I hear nothing,” I replied.
“But see - see!” he said, pointing along the road, directly
ahead.
I said: “Nothing is there. Come, father, let us go in -
you are ill.”
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.
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.
II - STATEMENT OF CASPAR GRATTAN
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 -
Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow.
Ah, the poet’s prophecy of Me - how admirable, how dreadfully
admirable!
Backward beyond the beginning of this via dolorosa - 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“She is below,” I thought, “and terrified by my entrance
has evaded me in the darkness of the hall.”
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!
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.
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
-
Now I am calm, but truly there is no more to tell: the incident ends
where it began - in darkness and in doubt.
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.
To each and all, the peace that was not mine.
III - STATEMENT OF THE LATE JULIA HETMAN, THROUGH THE MEDIUM BAYROLLES
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 must 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.
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.
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.
A DIAGNOSIS OF DEATH
“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.”
“Yes, the right kind of eyes, conveying sensations to the wrong
kind of brain,” said Dr. Frayley, smiling.
“Thank you; one likes to have an expectation gratified; that is
about the reply that I supposed you would have the civility to make.”
“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.”
“You will call it an hallucination,” Hawver said, “but
that does not matter.” And he told the story.
“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.
“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.
“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!
“‘I beg your pardon,’ I said, somewhat coldly, ‘but
if you knocked I did not hear.’
“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.
“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.
“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.”
Hawver had finished his story and both men were silent. Dr. Frayley
absently drummed on the table with his fingers.
“Did he say anything to-day?” he asked - “anything
from which you inferred that he was not dead?”
Hawver stared and did not reply.
“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.”
“Yes, he did - just as his apparition had done. But, good
God! did you ever know him?”
Hawver was apparently growing nervous.
“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.”
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?”
“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.”
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.
MOXON’S MASTER
“Are you serious? - do you really believe that a machine thinks?”
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.”
Presently he said:
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
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:
“And what, pray, does it think with - in the absence of a brain?”
The reply, coming with less than his customary delay, took his favorite
form of counter-interrogation:
“With what does a plant think - in the absence of a brain?”
“Ah, plants also belong to the philosopher class! I should
be pleased to know some of their conclusions; you may omit the premises.”
“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 manoeuvre
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.
“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.”
“And all this?”
“Can you miss the significance of it? It shows the consciousness
of plants. It proves that they think.”
“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?”
“How else do you explain the phenomena, for example, of crystallization?”
“I do not explain them.”
“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.”
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:
“Pardon me for leaving you so abruptly. I have a machine
in there that lost its temper and cut up rough.”
Fixing my eyes steadily upon his left cheek, which was traversed by
four parallel excoriations showing blood, I said:
“How would it do to trim its nails?”
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:
“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 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.
“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.
“‘Life,’ he says, ‘is a definite combination
of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and successive, in correspondence
with external coexistences and sequences.’”
“That defines the phenomenon,” I said, “but gives
no hint of its cause.”
“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.
“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.”
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:
“Moxon, whom have you in there?”
Somewhat to my surprise he laughed lightly and answered without hesitation:
“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?”
“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.”
Without waiting to observe the effect of my shot I left the house.
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 are 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
“Tell me about it,” I managed to say, faintly - “all
about it.”
“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.”
“And Moxon?”
“Buried yesterday - what was left of him.”
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:
“Who rescued me?”
“Well, if that interests you - I did.”
“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?”
The man was silent a long time, looking away from me. Presently
he turned and gravely said:
“Do you know that?”
“I do,” I replied; “I saw it done.”
That was many years ago. If asked to-day I should answer less
confidently.
A TOUGH TUSSLE
One 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
“Damn the thing!” he muttered. “What does it
want?”
It did not appear to be in need of anything but a soul.
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.
“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.”
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.
“Bah!” he exclaimed; “he was an actor - he knows how
to be dead.”
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.”
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.
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.
“Gad!” said the captain - “It is Byring!” -
adding, with a glance at the other, “They had a tough tussle.”
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.
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.
The surgeon looked at the captain. The captain looked at the surgeon.
ONE OF TWINS
A LETTER FOUND AMONG THE PAPERS OF THE LATE MORTIMER BARR
You 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.
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.
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.
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, en famille; and then if
the ladies can’t amuse you afterward I’ll stand in with
a few games of billiards.”
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.”
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
“You, too, Miss Margovan, have a double: I saw her last Tuesday
afternoon in Union square.”
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.
“Was she very like me?” she asked, with an indifference
which I thought a little overdone.
“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?”
She was now pale, but entirely calm. She again raised her eyes
to mine, with a look that did not falter.
“What do you wish me to do?” she asked. “You
need not fear to name your terms. I accept them.”
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.
“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.”
She shook her head, sadly and hopelessly, and I continued, with agitation:
“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.”
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.”
John decided to go with me. In the street he asked if I had observed
anything singular in Julia’s manner.
“I thought her ill,” I replied; “that is why I left.”
Nothing more was said.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
THE HAUNTED VALLEY
I - HOW TREES ARE FELLED IN CHINA
A half-mile 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
“They’re a flight of devouring locusts, and they’re
going for everything green in this God blest land, if you want to know.”
Here he pushed his reserve into the breach and when his gabble-gear
was again disengaged resumed his uplifting discourse.
“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. What 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?”
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.
“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.
Jo.’s gladness, which somehow did not impress me, was duly and
ostentatiously celebrated at the bottle.
“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.”
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.
“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,
so” - regarding me rather unsteadily and with evident complexity
of vision - “he was all right; but when I looked away, so”
- taking a long pull at the bottle - “he defied me. Then
I’d gaze at him reproachfully, so, and butter wouldn’t
have melted in his mouth.”
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.
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 delirium tremens 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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:
AH WEE - CHINAMAN.
Age unknown. Worked for Jo. Dunfer.
This monument is erected by him to keep the Chink’s memory green.
Likewise as a warning to Celestials not to take on airs. Devil
take ‘em!
She Was a Good Egg.
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.
II - WHO DRIVES SANE OXEN SHOULD HIMSELF BE SANE
“Gee-up, there, old Fuddy-Duddy!”
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, sans cérémonie, 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?”
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.
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:
“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!”
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.
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:
JO. DUNFER. DONE FOR.
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.
“My friend,” I said, pointing to the smaller grave, “did
Jo. Dunfer murder that Chinaman?”
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:
“No, sir; he justifiably homicided him.”
“Then he really did kill him.”
“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.”
“But did Jo. do that because the Chinaman did not, or would n’ot,
learn to cut down trees like a white man?”
“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’ me” - 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.
“Jealous of you!” I repeated with ill-mannered astonishment.
“That’s what I said. Why not? - don’t I look
all right?”
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:
“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.”
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 dramatis persone 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:
“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.”
“But why did you hold your tongue afterward?” I asked.
“It’s that kind of tongue,” he replied, and not another
word would he say about it.
“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.”
“When did Jo. die?” I asked rather absently. The answer
took my breath:
“Pretty soon after I looked at him through that knot-hole, w’en
you had put something in his w’isky, you derned Borgia!”
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?”
“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.”
“Meet him? Why, Gopher, my poor fellow, he is dead!”
“That’s why I’m afraid of ‘im.”
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:
“Gee-up, there, you derned old Geranium.”
A JUG OF SIRUP
This 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“Why! - what the devil,” he said, “has become of that
jug?”
“What jug, Alvan?” his wife inquired, not very sympathetically.
“A jug of maple sirup - I brought it along from the store and
set it down here to open the door. What the - ”
“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.
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.
“Are you quite sure, Alvan?”
“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 - ”
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.
Mrs. Creede stood by her husband, regarding him with surprise and anxiety.
“For Heaven’s sake,” she said, “what ails you?”
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.
“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.”
This monologue gave the woman time to collect what faculties she had.
“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.”
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.
“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.”
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?”
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.
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
en bloc. The rooms above were vacant as well, for
the widow and daughters had gone to another town.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
STALEY FLEMING’S HALLUCINATION
Of two men who were talking one was a physician.
“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.”
“You look all right,” the physician said.
“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.”
“You say you wake; are you sure about that? ‘Hallucinations’
are sometimes only dreams.”
“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!”
“‘M, ‘m - what is the beast’s expression?”
“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?”
“Really, my diagnosis would have no value: I am not going to treat
the dog.”
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.”
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?”
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?”
“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?”
“It was first to find the body. It died of starvation on
his grave.”
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.”
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?”
“Yes, there is an electric bell.”
“Good. If anything disturbs you push the button without
sitting up. Good night.”
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:
“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 - ”
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.
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.
When the man was dead an examination disclosed the unmistakable marks
of an animal’s fangs deeply sunken into the jugular vein.
But there was no animal.
A RESUMED IDENTITY
I - THE REVIEW AS A FORM OF WELCOME
One 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.
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.
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.
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 timbre and resonance. But he was not deaf, and
that for the moment sufficed.
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.
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.
“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!”
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.
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.
“I must get away from here,” he thought, “or I shall
be discovered and taken.”
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!
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.
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.
II - WHEN YOU HAVE LOST YOUR LIFE CONSULT A PHYSICIAN
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.
“Sir,” said the stranger, “although a civilian, you
are perhaps an enemy.”
“I am a physician,” was the non-committal reply.
“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.”
The physician merely nodded.
“Kindly tell me,” continued the other, “what has happened
here. Where are the armies? Which has won the battle?”
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.
“Not seriously - it seems.”
The man removed the unmilitary hat, put his hand to his head, passed
it through his hair and, withdrawing it, attentively considered the
palm.
“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?”
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:
“Lieutenant, you are not wearing the uniform of your rank and
service.”
At this the man glanced down at his civilian attire, lifted his eyes,
and said with hesitation:
“That is true. I - I don’t quite understand.”
Still regarding him sharply but not unsympathetically the man of science
bluntly inquired:
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-three - if that has anything to do with it.”
“You don’t look it; I should hardly have guessed you to
be just that.”
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.”
“You are quite sure that you saw them?”
“Sure? My God, sir, I could have counted them!”
“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.”
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!”
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.
III - THE DANGER OF LOOKING INTO A POOL OF WATER
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.
“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.”
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:
HAZEN’S BRIGADE
to
The Memory of Its Soldiers
who fell at
Stone River, Dec. 31, 1862.
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.
A BABY TRAMP
If 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jo did not.
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.
THE NIGHT-DOINGS AT “DEADMAN’S”
A STORY THAT IS UNTRUE
It 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.
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 flumen.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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:
“You bet your life I am!”
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:
“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.”
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:
“But I think you’d better skedaddle.”
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.
“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.”
The old man nodded emphatically, as intimating not merely that he did,
but that he did indeed.
“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.
“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?”
The visitor nodded gravely. He appeared to be a man of few words,
if any. Mr. Beeson continued:
“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.
“He did not get it.”
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:
“You say you do not see much in that, and I must confess I do
not myself.
“But he keeps coming!”
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:
“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.
“Do you play me for a Modoc?”
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.
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:
“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.”
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:
“They are swiping my dust!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Bang!
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.
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.
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.
BEYOND THE WALL
Many years ago, on my way from Hongkong to New York, I assed 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 - non sum qualis eram.”
I hardly knew what to reply, but managed to say: “Why, really,
I don’t know: your Latin is about the same.”
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?”
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.
“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.”
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.
“Please be seated,” he said; “it is nothing - no one
is there.”
But the tapping was repeated, and with the same gentle, slow insistence
as before.
“Pardon me,” I said, “it is late. May I call
to-morrow?”
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.”
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.
Dampier closed the window and signing me to my seat resumed his own.
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.
“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.”
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 know 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.”
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.
“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.
“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.
“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.
“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?
“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?
“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.
“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.
“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.
“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.
“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.
“Late the next morning, as I was leaving the house, I met my landlady,
entering.
“‘Good morning, Mr. Dampier,’ she said. ‘Have
you heard the news?’
“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.
“‘About the sick young lady next door,’ she babbled
on. ‘What! you did not know? Why, she has been ill
for weeks. And now - ’
“I almost sprang upon her. ‘And now,’ I cried,
‘now what?’
“‘She is dead.’
“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.
“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?
“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.”
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.
A PSYCHOLOGICAL SHIPWRECK
In 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.
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 Morrow, upon which I had shipped a large and
valuable invoice of the goods I had bought. The Morrow 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.
The Morrow 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.
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 with, but through, 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:
“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.”
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.
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.
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
City of Prague, on which he had urged me to accompany him.
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.
“Doyle,” I repeated, “did they save her?”
He now deigned to look at me and smiled as if amused. He evidently
thought me but half awake.
“Her? Whom do you mean?”
“Janette Harford.”
His amusement turned to amazement; he stared at me fixedly, saying nothing.
“You will tell me after a while,” I continued; “I
suppose you will tell me after a while.”
A moment later I asked: “What ship is this?”
Doyle stared again. “The steamer City of Prague, 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.”
I sat bolt upright. “Do you mean to say that I have been
for three weeks a passenger on this steamer?”
“Yes, pretty nearly; this is the 3d of July.”
“Have I been ill?”
“Right as a trivet all the time, and punctual at your meals.”
“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 Morrow?”
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.
“First tell me what you know of her?”
Mr. Doyle gazed at me for some moments as if thinking what to do, then
seating himself again on the couch, said:
“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 Morrow. 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 Morrow will get to New York before us, and
the poor girl will not know where to go.”
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:
“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.”
“Doyle, what book are you reading?”
“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?”
He tossed me the volume, which opened as it fell. On one of the
exposed pages was a marked passage:
“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.”
“She had - she has - a singular taste in reading,” I managed
to say, mastering my agitation.
“Yes. And now perhaps you will have the kindness to explain
how you knew her name and that of the ship she sailed in.”
“You talked of her in your sleep,” I said.
A week later we were towed into the port of New York. But the
Morrow was never heard from.
THE MIDDLE TOE OF THE RIGHT FOOT
I
It 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 Advance. 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.
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 Advance, “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.
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.”
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.”
“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 - ”
“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.
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.
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.
“Gentlemen,” said the man holding the candle and keys, “I
believe everything is right. Are you ready, Mr. Rosser?”
The man standing apart from the group bowed and smiled.
“And you, Mr. Grossmith?”
The heavy man bowed and scowled.
“You will be pleased to remove your outer clothing.”
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.
“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.
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.
“If it is agreeable to you, Mr. Grossmith,” said the man
holding the light, “you will place yourself in that corner.”
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.
“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.”
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.
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 Advance, 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.
II
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 personnel of the Advance expressed
it, “grossly addicted to evil associations.” But then
it should be said in justice to the stranger that the personnel 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Whereas,” said Sancher, with a light laugh, “by marrying
a gentleman of more liberal views she escaped with a parted throat.”
“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.”
“Look at that chap!” said Rosser in a low voice, his eyes
fixed upon the stranger.
That chap was obviously listening intently to the conversation.
“Damn his impudence!” muttered King - “what ought
we to do?”
“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.”
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.
“You are hasty and unjust,” he said to Rosser; “this
gentleman has done nothing to deserve such language.”
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.
“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.”
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.
III
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.
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.
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.
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!”
“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.”
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!”
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.
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.
“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!”
Gertrude was the late Mrs. Manton, sister to Mr. Brewer.
JOHN MORTONSON’S FUNERAL {1}
John Mortonson was dead: his lines in “the tragedy ‘Man’”
had all been spoken and he had left the stage.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
THE REALM OF THE UNREAL
For 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.
“I beg your pardon,” I said; “I did not see you, sir.”
“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.”
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.
“You are Dr. Dorrimore, I think,” said I.
“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.”
“Which I extend with all my heart.”
That was not altogether true.
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.
II
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 prestidigitateurs,
one of whom was then exhibiting at a local theatre.
“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.”
“For example, how?” asked another, lighting a cigar.
“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.”
“Nonsense!” I said, rather uncivilly, I fear. “You
surely do not believe such things?”
“Certainly not: I have seen them too often.”
“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.”
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.
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.
“Mr. Manrich,” he said, “I am going your way.”
“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.”
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.
“You do not believe what is told of the Hindu jugglers,”
he said abruptly.
“How do you know that?” I asked.
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.
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?
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.
“What is all this nonsense, you devil?” I demanded, fiercely
enough, though weak and trembling in every limb.
“It is what some are pleased to call jugglery,” he answered,
with a light, hard laugh.
He turned down Dupont street and I saw him no more until we met in the
Auburn ravine.
III
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.
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
veils her sacred fires,
And, unaware, Morality expires,
famished upon the sifted meal and distilled water of a prudish purveyance.
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.
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.
IV
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.
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!
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.
“Are Mrs. Corray and her daughter still here?” I asked.
“What name did you say?”
“Corray.”
“Nobody of that name has been here.”
“I beg you will not trifle with me,” I said petulantly.
“You see that I am all right now; tell me the truth.”
“I give you my word,” he replied with evident sincerity,
“we have had no guests of that name.”
His words stupefied me. I lay for a few moments in silence; then
I asked: “Where is Dr. Dorrimore?”
“He left on the morning of your fight and has not been heard of
since. It was a rough deal he gave you.”
V
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 Sun the following
paragraph:
“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.”
JOHN BARTINE’S WATCH
A STORY BY A PHYSICIAN
“The 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.”
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.”
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.
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.
“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.”
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:
“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.
“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.”
Something in Bartine’s manner that was not in his words - I hardly
knew what it was - prompted me to ask:
“What is your view of the matter - of the justice of it?”
“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!”
For some minutes nothing was said: Bartine was recovering his temper,
and I waited. Then I said:
“Was that all?”
“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.”
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:
“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.
“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.”
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.
“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?”
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.
“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.”
“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?”
“Resemble you? I should say so! Barring the costume,
which I supposed you to have assumed out of compliment to the art -
or for vraisemblance, so to say - and the no mustache, that portrait
is you in every feature, line, and expression.”
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.
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.
“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.”
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:
“Damn you! it is two minutes to eleven!”
I was not unprepared for some such outbreak, and without rising replied,
calmly enough:
“I beg your pardon; I must have misread your watch in setting
my own by it.”
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.
The post-mortem 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.
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.
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.
THE DAMNED THING
I - ONE DOES NOT ALWAYS EAT WHAT IS ON THE TABLE
By 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.
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.
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.
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.
The coroner nodded; no one else greeted him.
“We have waited for you,” said the coroner. “It
is necessary to have done with this business to-night.”
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.”
The coroner smiled.
“The account that you posted to your newspaper,” he said,
“differs, probably, from that which you will give here under oath.”
“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.”
“But you say it is incredible.”
“That is nothing to you, sir, if I also swear that it is true.”
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.”
The men removed their hats. The witness was sworn.
“What is your name?” the coroner asked.
“William Harker.”
“Age?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“You knew the deceased, Hugh Morgan?”
“Yes.”
“You were with him when he died?”
“Near him.”
“How did that happen - your presence, I mean?”
“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.”
“I sometimes read them.”
“Thank you.”
“Stories in general - not yours.”
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.
“Relate the circumstances of this man’s death,” said
the coroner. “You may use any notes or memoranda that you
please.”
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.
II - WHAT MAY HAPPEN IN A FIELD OF WILD OATS
“ . . . 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 chaparral.
On the other side was comparatively level ground, thickly covered with
wild oats. As we emerged from the chaparral 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.
“‘We’ve started a deer,’ I said. ‘I
wish we had brought a rifle.’
“Morgan, who had stopped and was intently watching the agitated
chaparral, 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.
“‘O, come,’ I said. ‘You are not going
to fill up a deer with quail-shot, are you?’
“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.
“The bushes were now quiet and the sounds had ceased, but Morgan
was as attentive to the place as before.
“‘What is it? What the devil is it?’ I asked.
“‘That Damned Thing!’ he replied, without turning
his head. His voice was husky and unnatural. He trembled
visibly.
“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.
“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 aerial 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.
“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.
“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!
“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.”
III - A MAN THOUGH NAKED MAY BE IN RAGS
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.
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.
“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.”
The foreman rose - a tall, bearded man of sixty, coarsely clad.
“I should like to ask one question, Mr. Coroner,” he said.
“What asylum did this yer last witness escape from?”
“Mr. Harker,” said the coroner, gravely and tranquilly,
“from what asylum did you last escape?”
Harker flushed crimson again, but said nothing, and the seven jurors
rose and solemnly filed out of the cabin.
“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?”
“Yes.”
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:
“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 -
”
“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.”
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:
“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.”
IV - AN EXPLANATION FROM THE TOMB
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:
“ . . . 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.
“Can a dog see with his nose? Do odors impress some cerebral
centre with images of the thing that emitted them? . . .
“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.” . . .
Several weeks’ entries are missing, three leaves being torn from
the book.
“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.
“Oct. 3. - I shall not go - it shall not drive me away.
No, this is my house, my land. God hates a coward
. . .
“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.
“Oct. 7. - I have the solution of the mystery; it came to me last
night - suddenly, as by revelation. How simple - how terribly
simple!
“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.
“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.
“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.
“And, God help me! the Damned Thing is of such a color!”
HAÏTA THE SHEPHERD
In 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.
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.
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.
“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.”
And Hastur, knowing that Haïta was a youth who kept his word, spared
the cities and turned the waters into the sea.
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.
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.
“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?”
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.
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!”
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.
Haïta was entranced. Rising, he knelt before her in adoration,
and she laid her hand upon his head.
“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.”
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.”
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?”
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.”
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.
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.
“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?”
“Who would not have thee forever?” replied Haïta.
“Oh! never again leave me until - until I - change and become
silent and motionless.”
Haïta had no word for death.
“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.”
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.
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.
“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.”
As he spoke, the maiden, clad in glittering garments, met him in the
path with a smile that took away his breath.
“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.”
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.”
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.
“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.”
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.
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?”
“Only a single instant,” answered Haïta, blushing with
shame at the confession. “Each time I drove her away in
one moment.”
“Unfortunate youth!” said the holy hermit, “but for
thine indiscretion thou mightst have had her for two.”
AN INHABITANT OF CARCOSA
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.
Pondering 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
all 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.
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.
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.”
He gave no heed, nor did he arrest his pace.
“Good stranger,” I continued, “I am ill and lost.
Direct me, I beseech you, to Carcosa.”
The man broke into a barbarous chant in an unknown tongue, passing on
and away.
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?
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.
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.
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! my name in full! - the date
of my birth! - the date of my death!
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!
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.
Such are the facts imparted to the medium Bayrolles by the spirit Hoseib
Alar Robardin.
THE STRANGER
A man stepped out of the darkness into the little illuminated circle
about our failing campfire and seated himself upon a rock.
“You are not the first to explore this region,” he said,
gravely.
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:
“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.”
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?
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.
Nobody having broken silence the visitor went on to say:
“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 arroyo 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.
“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 chaparral 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.”
“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:
“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 chaparral 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.
“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:
“‘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.’
“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.’
“And so he left us - William Shaw, George W. Kent and Berry Davis.
“I was the leader: it was for me to speak.
“‘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.’
“‘That is right,’ said William Shaw.
“‘That is right,’ said George W. Kent.
“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.’
“And George W. Kent said that he felt that way, too.
“‘It shall be so,’ I said: ‘the red devils will
wait a week. William Shaw and George W. Kent, draw and kneel.’
“They did so and I stood before them.
“‘Almighty God, our Father,’ said I.
“‘Almighty God, our Father,’ said William Shaw.
“‘Almighty God, our Father,’ said George W. Kent.
“‘Forgive us our sins,’ said I.
“‘Forgive us our sins,’ said they.
“‘And receive our souls.’
“‘And receive our souls.’
“‘Amen!’
“‘Amen!’
“I laid them beside Ramon Gallegos and covered their faces.”
There was a quick commotion on the opposite side of the campfire: one
of our party had sprung to his feet, pistol in hand.
“And you!” he shouted - “you dared to escape?
- you dare to be alive? You cowardly hound, I’ll send you
to join them if I hang for it!”
But with the leap of a panther the captain was upon him, grasping his
wrist. “Hold it in, Sam Yountsey, hold it in!”
We were now all upon our feet - except the stranger, who sat motionless
and apparently inattentive. Some one seized Yountsey’s other
arm.
“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.”
“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.”
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.
“There were four,” he said - “Ramon Gallegos, William
Shaw, George W. Kent and Berry Davis.”
With this reiterated roll-call of the dead he walked into the darkness
and we saw him no more.
At that moment one of our party, who had been on guard, strode in among
us, rifle in hand and somewhat excited.
“Captain,” he said, “for the last half-hour three
men have been standing out there on the mesa.” 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.”
“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.”
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?”
“Ramon Gallegos, William Shaw and George W. Kent.”
“But how about Berry Davis? I ought to have shot him.”
“Quite needless; you couldn’t have made him any deader.
Go to sleep.”
Footnotes:
{1} 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.
End of the Project Gutenberg eText Can Such Things Be?
by Ambrose Bierce