Can Such Things Be Read Online

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.