The Fourth Ghost Story MEGAPACK ®. Sarah Orne Jewett

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      It was his prescription for the nitrite of amyl.

      He hesitated a moment; then refolded the paper and put it in his vest-pocket.

      Seated in his car, with his hand on the lever, he turned to Scudder, who was watching him with curious eyes.

      “I’m very much obliged to you, Scudder, for taking me through the house. And I’ll be more obliged to you if you’ll just keep it to yourself—what I said to you about last night.”

      “Sure,” said the old man, nodding gravely. “I like ye, doc’, and that kinder talk might do ye harm here in Calvinton. We don’t hold much to dreams and visions down this way. But, say, ’twas a mighty interestin’ dream, wa’n’t it? I guess Miss Jean hones for them white pillars, many a day—they sorter stand for old times. They draw ye, don’t they?”

      “Yes, my friend,” said Carmichael as he moved the lever, “they speak of the past. There is a magic in those white pillars. They draw you.”

HIS UNQUIET GHOST, by Mary Noailles Murfree

      Originally published in 1911.

      The moon was high in the sky. The wind was laid. So silent was the vast stretch of mountain wilderness, aglint with the dew, that the tinkle of a rill far below in the black abyss seemed less a sound than an evidence of the pervasive quietude, since so slight a thing, so distant, could compass so keen a vibration. For an hour or more the three men who lurked in the shadow of a crag in the narrow mountain-pass, heard nothing else. When at last they caught the dull reverberation of a slow wheel and the occasional metallic clank of a tire against a stone, the vehicle was fully three miles distant by the winding road in the valley. Time lagged. Only by imperceptible degrees the sound of deliberate approach grew louder on the air as the interval of space lessened. At length, above their ambush at the summit of the mountain’s brow the heads of horses came into view, distinct in the moonlight between the fibrous pines and the vast expanse of the sky above the valley. Even then there was renewed delay. The driver of the wagon paused to rest the team.

      The three lurking men did not move; they scarcely ventured to breathe. Only when there was no retrograde possible, no chance of escape, when the vehicle was fairly on the steep declivity of the road, the precipice sheer on one side, the wall of the ridge rising perpendicularly on the other, did two of them, both revenue-raiders disguised as mountaineers, step forth from the shadow. The other, the informer, a genuine mountaineer, still skulked motionless in the darkness. The “revenuers,” ascending the road, maintained a slow, lunging gait, as if they had toiled from far.

      Their abrupt appearance had the effect of a galvanic shock to the man handling the reins, a stalwart, rubicund fellow, who visibly paled. He drew up so suddenly as almost to throw the horses from their feet.

      “G’ evenin’,” ventured Browdie, the elder of the raiders, in a husky voice affecting an untutored accent. He had some special ability as a mimic, and, being familiar with the dialect and manners of the people, this gift greatly facilitated the rustic impersonation he had essayed. “Ye’re haulin’ late,” he added, for the hour was close to midnight.

      “Yes, stranger; haulin’ late, from Eskaqua—a needcessity.”

      “What’s yer cargo?” asked Browdie, seeming only ordinarily inquisitive.

      A sepulchral cadence was in the driver’s voice, and the disguised raiders noted that the three other men on the wagon had preserved, throughout, a solemn silence. “What we-uns mus’ all be one day, stranger—a corpus.”

      Browdie was stultified for a moment Then, sustaining his assumed character, he said: “I hope it be nobody I know. I be fairly well acquainted in Eskaqua, though I hail from down in Lonesome Cove. Who be dead!”

      There was palpably a moment’s hesitation before the spokesman replied: “Watt Wyatt; died day ’fore yestiddy.”

      At the words, one of the silent men in the wagon turned his face suddenly, with such obvious amazement depicted upon it that it arrested the attention of the “rev-enuers.” This face was so individual that it was not likely to be easily mistaken or forgotten. A wild, breezy look it had, and a tricksy, incorporeal expression that might well befit some fantastic, fabled thing of the woods. It was full of fine script of elusive meanings, not registered in the lineaments of the prosaic man of the day, though perchance of scant utility, not worth interpretation. His full gray eyes were touched to glancing brilliancy by a moonbeam; his long, fibrously floating brown hair was thrown backward; his receding chin was peculiarly delicate; and though his well-knit frame bespoke a hardy vigor, his pale cheek was soft and thin. All the rustic grotesquery of garb and posture was cancelled by the deep shadow of a bough, and his delicate face showed isolated in the moonlight.

      Browdie silently pondered his vague suspicions for a moment “Whar did he die at?” he then demanded at a venture.

      “At his daddy’s house, fur sure. Whar else?” responded the driver. “I hev got what’s lef’ of him hyar in the coffin-box. We expected ter make it ter Shiloh buryin’-ground ’fore dark; but the road is middlin’ heavy, an’ ’bout five mile’ back Ben cast a shoe. The funeral warn’t over much ’fore noon.”

      “Whyn’t they bury him in Eskaqua, whar he died!” persisted Browdie.

      “Waal, they planned ter bury him alongside his mother an’ gran’dad, what used ter live in Tanglefoot Cove. But we air wastin’ time hyar, an’ we hev got none ter spare. Gee, Ben! Git up, John!”

      The wagon gave a lurch; the horses, holding back in bracing attitudes far from the pole, went teetering down the steep slant, the locked wheel dragging heavily; the four men sat silent, two in slouching postures at the head of the coffin; the third, with the driver, was at its foot. It seemed drearily suggestive, the last journey of this humble mortality, in all the splendid environment of the mountains, under the vast expansions of the aloof skies, in the mystic light of the unnoting moon.

      “Is this bona-fide?” asked Browdie, with a questioning glance at the informer, who had at length crept forth.

      “I dunno,” sullenly responded the mountaineer. He had acquainted the two officers, who were of a posse of revenue-raiders hovering in the vicinity, with the mysterious circumstance that a freighted wagon now and then made a midnight transit across these lonely ranges. He himself had heard only occasionally in a wakeful hour the roll of heavy wheels, but he interpreted this as the secret transportation of brush whisky from the still to its market. He had thought to fix the transgression on an old enemy of his own, long suspected of moonshining; but he was acquainted with none of the youngsters on the wagon, at whom he had peered cautiously from behind the rocks. His actuating motive in giving information to the emissaries of the government had been the rancor of an old feud, and his detection meant certain death. He had not expected the revenue-raiders to be outnumbered by the supposed moonshiners, and he would not fight in the open. He had no sentiment of fealty to the law, and the officers glanced at each other in uncertainty.

      “This evidently is not the wagon in question,” said Browdie, disappointed.

      “I’ll follow them a bit,” volunteered Bonan, the younger and the more active of the two officers. “Seems to me they’ll bear watching.”

      Indeed, as the melancholy cortège fared down and СКАЧАТЬ