Part 7

To the northward of Mississippi City and its neighbor, Handsboro, there extends a tract of pine forest for miles with but few habitations scattered through it. Black and Red Creeks, with their numerous branches, drain this region into the Pascagoula River to the eastward. With the swamps of Pascagoula as a refuge, and the luxuriant and unfrequented bottoms of Red and Black Creeks to browse upon, there are few choicer spots for deer. Knowing this fact, a small party of gentlemen on the day before a crisp, cold Christmas, started from Handsboro in a large four-wheeled wagon for a thirty-mile drive into this wilderness of pine and a week’s sport after the deer. The guide was Jim Caruthers, a true woodsman, and the driver and general factotum, a jolly negro named Jack Lyons, than whom no one could make a better hoe-cake and cook a venison steak. His laugh could be heard a quarter of a mile, and his good nature was as expansive as the range of the laughter.

The usual experiences of a hunting camp were heartily enjoyed during the first days of this life out of doors; but its cream did not rise until about the fifth night, when, from familiar intercourse, Jack Lyons became loquacious, and after the day’s twenty or twenty-five-mile walk, would spin yarns in front of the camp fire, which brought forgetfulness of fatigue.

The night before New Year’s was intensely cold. The cold north wind of the afternoon had subsided at sunset, and only a gust now and again touched the musical leaves of the pines, making them vibrant with that mournful score of nature’s operas which even maestros have failed to catch.

In front of two new and white tents two sportsmen reclined at length within reach of the warmth of the fire, while opposite them rested at ease the guide and the worthy Jack Lyons.

Wearied with the day’s chase four stanch hounds--Ringwood, Rose, Jet and Boxer--were dreaming of future quarry.

The firelight brought out in bright relief the trunks of the tall pines like cathedral columns, and sparkling through the leafy dome overhead the scintillating stars glistened with a diamond brightness. A silence which added its influence to the scene rested about the borders of the creek below, and gave more effect to the story of the veteran teamster than perhaps it otherwise would have had.

“If de deer run down de creek,” said old Jack, smacking his lips over a carefully prepared brewing of the real Campbellton punch, “wese boun’ to see fun to-morrer, for dey’ll take us down thar by de old Gibbet’s place. In daylight dere’s no place like it, but after nightfall, you bet you wouldn’t catch dis nigger thar.”

Old Jack was naturally asked why he didn’t care about visiting the Gibbet’s place at night. Asking to be excused until he filled his pipe, the silence was unbroken until his return. He piled on more pine knots and commenced:

“You kno’, gemmen, dat when de gunboats was in de sound we folks had to travel way back hyar on dese roads outun de range of deir big guns. I was ’gaged by Mr. Harrison in hauling salt from de factory at Mississippi City, on de beach ober to Mobile, an’ I had been making a trip ebery week or so. Dis back country road was neber thought ob by de Federals, an’ we had good times long de way, no shells and no shootin’.

“De nite, gemmen, I’se speakin’ of was a Friday, dat yous all knows is unlucky. Well, you see, I hitched up Betsie an’ Rose in de lead, an’ ole Fox an’ Blossom at de pole, an’ takes in de biggest load of salt dat team eber carried. I starts out an’ crosses de Biloxi Riber at Han’sboro jes’ as de moon was goin’ down. Yes, boss, dese roads weren’t no better den now, an’ de rain had made ’em mighty rough when yer come to de holes.

“I sat in de seat whistlin’ ‘De Cows is in de Pea Patch,’ and a-thinkin’ of Sarah Jamison, what was afterwards my wife, when I felt de off fore wheel go ‘kersush’ in a hole up to de hub. I’d made seventeen miles out ob Han’sboro. I did some cussin’, an’ den went to de fence, about twenty yards off, an’ took out a rail to prize up de wheel. Den I saw I was at Mister Gibbet’s place. I sez to myself, I’ll go up to de house an’ get old Mr. Gibbet to give me a turn. I had done gone by dar two weeks afore an’ seed de old man.

“Now, gemmen, yer listen to me, for what I’se tellin’ yer is as sure as Jinny’ll blow de horn on de las’ day. I walked up to de house an’ dar I saw a bright light inside. It showed out froo de windows, an’ I saw shadders of Miss Gibbet and Mrs. Gibbet on de window curtain--shore, honeys, shore. De front do’ was shet, an’ I steps up on ter de gallery an’ knocks wid de butt end of my whip. I didn’t knock loud, needer. God bless us all, gemmen, de lights went out like dat, an’ I hears set up a laugh, ha-ha-ha-ha. How dat set my knees a-shakin’. I opens de do’, an’ dere was no sign of anybody. I struck a match an’ all de furniture was moved out, an’ de old red curtain dat I fought I seed was in rags. De whole family was gone, for shore. I didn’t kno’ ’zactly what to think ’bout dem strange voices, but I started back to de wagon, when it lightened, an’ bress God, dar in de front yard was six graves jes’ made. Somefin’ wrong here, sed I; an’ I builds a fire by de wagon an’ digs de wheel out. Jes’ den old Squire Pasture kem along de road from Mobile, an’ he tells me de news. Ole man Gibbet cut de froats of his wife and fore chillerns an’ shoot hisself in de head outun jealousy of his wife. Dey was all buried in de front yard, an’ de house was deserted ten days befo’.

“Gemmen, when I hear dat, dem mules make de quickest time to Mobile eber seed; an’ youse can tell me dar’s no ghosts, but yo’ don’ catch me roun’ dat log house of Gibbet’s ’ceptin’ sun’s an hour high.”

Jack looked suspiciously over his shoulder into the darkness and crawled into his blanket, muttering:

“It scares dis nigger eben now to tell ’bout dat night.”

Sleep soon fell upon the camp, but the impression of old Jack’s story survived the night, and the next day he still asserted its truth.

THE SPECTRE BRIDE.

The winter nights up at Sault Ste. Marie are as white and luminous as the Milky Way. The silence that rests upon the solitude appears to be white also. Nature has included sound in her arrestment. Save the still white frost, all things are obliterated. The stars are there, but they seem to belong to heaven and not to earth. They are at an immeasurable height, and so black is the night that the opaque ether rolls between them and the observer in great liquid billows.

In such a place it is difficult to believe that the world is peopled to any great extent. One fancies that Cain has just killed Abel, and that there is need for the greatest economy in the matter of human life.

The night Ralph Hagadorn started out for Echo Bay he felt as if he were the only man in the world, so complete was the solitude through which he was passing. He was going over to attend the wedding of his best friend, and was, in fact, to act as the groomsman. Business had delayed him, and he was compelled to make his journey at night. But he hadn’t gone far before he began to feel the exhilaration of the skater. His skates were keen, his legs fit for a longer journey than the one he had undertaken, and the tang of the frost was to him what a spur is to a spirited horse.

He cut through the air as a sharp stone cleaves the water. He could feel the tumult of the air as he cleft it. As he went on he began to have fancies. It seemed to him that he was enormously tall--a great Viking of the Northland, hastening over icy fiords to his love. That reminded him that he had a love--though, indeed, that thought was always present with him as a background for other thoughts. To be sure, he had not told her she was his love, because he had only seen her a few times and the opportunity had not presented itself. She lived at Echo Bay, too, and was to be the maid of honor to his friend’s bride--which was another reason why he skated on almost as swiftly as the wind, and why, now and then, he let out a shout of exhilaration.

The one drawback in the matter was that Marie Beaujeu’s father had money, and that Marie lived in a fine house and wore otter skin about her throat and little satin-lined mink boots on her feet when she went sledding, and that the jacket in which she kept a bit of her dead mother’s hair had a black pearl in it as big as a pea. These things made it difficult--nay, impossible--for Ralph Hagadorn to say anything more than “I love you.” But that much he meant to have the satisfaction of saying, no matter what came of it.

With this determination growing upon him he swept along the ice which gleamed under the starlight. Indeed, Venus made a glowing path toward the west and seemed to reassure him. He was sorry he could not skim down that avenue of light from the love star, but he was forced to turn his back upon it and face toward the northeast.

It came to him with a shock that he was not alone. His eyelashes were a good deal frosted and his eyeballs blurred with the cold, and at first he thought it an illusion. But he rubbed his eyes hard and at length made sure that not very far in front of him was a long white skater in fluttering garments who sped over the snows fast as ever werewolf went. He called aloud, but there was no answer, and then he gave chase, setting his teeth hard and putting a tension on his firm young muscles. But however fast he might go the white skater went faster. After a time he became convinced, as he chanced to glance for a second at the North Star, that the white skater was leading him out of his direct path. For a moment he hesitated, wondering if he should not keep to his road, but the strange companion seemed to draw him on irresistibly, and so he followed.

Of course it came to him more than once that this might be no earthly guide. Up in those latitudes men see strange things when the hoar frost is on the earth. Hagadorn’s father, who lived up there with the Lake Superior Indians and worked in the copper mines, had once welcomed a woman at his hut on a bitter night who was gone by morning, and who left wolf tracks in the snow--yes, it was so, and John Fontanelle, the half-breed, could tell you about it any day--if he were alive. (Alack, the snow where the wolf tracks were is melted now!)

Well, Hagadorn followed the white skater all the night, and when the ice flushed red at dawn and arrows of lovely light shot up into the cold heavens, she was gone, and Hagadorn was at his destination. Then, as he took off his skates while the sun climbed arrogantly up to his place above all other things, Hagadorn chanced to glance lakeward, and he saw there was a great wind-rift in the ice and that the waves showed blue as sapphires beside the gleaming ice. Had he swept along his intended path, watching the stars to guide him, his glance turned upward, all his body at magnificent momentum, he must certainly have gone into that cold grave. The white skater had been his guardian angel!

Much impressed, he went up to his friend’s house, expecting to find there the pleasant wedding furore. But someone met him quietly at the door, and his friend came downstairs to greet him with a solemn demeanor.

“Is this your wedding face?” cried Hagadorn. “Why, really, if this is the way you are affected, the sooner I take warning the better.”

“There’s no wedding to-day,” said his friend.

“No wedding? Why, you’re not----”

“Marie Beaujeu died last night----”

“Marie----”

“Died last night. She had been skating in the afternoon, and she came home chilled and wandering in her mind, as if the frost had got in it somehow. She got worse and worse and talked all the time of you.”

“Of me?”

“We wondered what it all meant. We didn’t know you were lovers.”

“I didn’t know it myself; more’s the pity.”

“She said you were on the ice. She said you didn’t know about the big breaking up, and she cried to us that the wind was off shore. Then she cried that you could come in by the old French Creek if you only knew----?”

“I came in that way,” interrupted Hagadorn.

“How did you come to do that? It’s out of your way.”

So Hagadorn told him how it came to pass.

And that day they watched beside the maiden, who had tapers at her head and feet, and over in the little church the bride who might have been at her wedding said prayers for her friend. Then they buried her in her bridesmaid’s white, and Hagadorn was there before the altar with her, as he intended from the first. At midnight the day of the burial her friends were married in the gloom of the cold church, and they walked together through the snow to lay their bridal wreaths on her grave.

Three nights later Hagadorn started back again to his home. They wanted him to go by sunlight, but he had his way and went when Venus made her bright path on the ice. He hoped for the companionship of the white skater. But he did not have it. His only companion was the wind. The only voice he heard was the baying of a wolf on the north shore. The world was as white as if it had just been created and the sun had not yet colored nor man defiled it.

HOW HE CAUGHT THE GHOST.

“Yes, the house is a good one,” said the agent; “it’s in a good neighborhood, and you’re getting it at almost nothing; but I think it right to tell you all about it. You are orphans, you say, and with a mother dependent on you? That makes it all the more necessary that you should know. The fact is, the house is said to be haunted----”

The agent could not help smiling as he said it, and he was relieved to see an answering smile on the two faces before him.

“Ah, you don’t believe in ghosts,” he went on; “nor do I, for that matter; but, somehow, the reputation of the house keeps me from having a tenant long at a time. The place ought to rent for twice as much as it does.”

“If we succeed in driving out the ghost, you will not raise the rent?” asked the boy, with a merry twinkle in his eyes.

“Well, no--not this year, at any rate,” laughed the agent. And so the house was rented; and the slip of a girl and the tall lad, her brother, went their way.

Within a week the family had moved into the house, and were delighted with it. It was large and cool, with wide halls and fine stairways, and with more room than they needed. But that did not matter in the least, for they had always been cramped in small houses, suffering many discomforts; and they never could have afforded such a place as this if it had not been “haunted.”

“Blessings on the ghost!” cried Margaret, gaily, as she ran about as merry as a child. “Who would be without a ghost in the house, when it brings one like this?”

“And it is so near your school,” said the mother; “and I used to worry so over the long walk; and David can come home to lunch now, and you don’t know what a pleasure that will be.”

“It seems to me,” David gravely explained, “that if I should meet the ghost I would treat him with the greatest politeness and encourage him to stay. We shall not miss the room he takes, shall we? I think it would be well to set aside that room over yours, Maggie, for his ghostship’s own, for we shall not need that, you know. Besides, the door doesn’t shut, and he can go in and out without breaking the lock.”

And then they all laughed and had a great deal of fun over the ghost, which was a great joke to them.

They were very tired that night and slept soundly all night long. When they met the next morning there was more laughter about the ghost which was shy about meeting strangers, probably, and had made no effort to introduce himself. For the next three days they were all hard at work, trying to bring chaos into something like order; and then it was time for the school to open, and Margaret was to begin teaching, and David inserted an advertisement in the city papers for a maid-of-all-work, who might help their mother in their absence.

For one whole day prospective colored servants presented themselves and announced:

“Is dis de house whar dey wants a worklady? No, ma’am, I ain’ gwine to work in dis house. Ketch me workin’ in no ha’nted house.”

After which they each and all departed, and others came in their stead. One was secured after a while, but no sooner had she talked across the fence with a neighbor’s servant than she, too, departed.

“Never mind, children,” said Mrs. Craig, wearily, “I would much rather do the work than be troubled in this way.”

So the maid-of-all-work was dismissed and the Craig family locked the doors and went to their rooms, worn out with the day’s anxieties.

They had been in the house four days, and there had been neither sight nor sound of the ghost. The very mention of it was enough to start them all to laughing, for they were thoroughly practical people, with a fondness for inquiring into anything that seemed mysterious to them and for understanding it thoroughly before they let it go.

David was soon sleeping the sound sleep of healthy boyhood, and all was silent in the house, when Margaret stole softly into his room and laid her hand on his arm. He was not easy to waken, and several minutes had passed before he sat up in bed with an articulate murmur of surprise.

“Hush!” said Margaret, in a whisper, with her hand on his lips. “I want you to come into my room and listen to a sound that I have been hearing for some time.”

“Doors creaking,” suggested David, as he began to dress.

“Nothing of the kind,” was all she said.

They walked up the stairway, and along the upper hall to the door of the unused room. Something was wrong with the lock and the door would not stay fastened, as I have said.

Something that was not fear thrilled their hearts as they pushed the door further ajar, and stood where they could see every foot of the vacant floor. One of their own boxes stood in the middle of the room, but aside from that, nothing was to be seen, and they looked at one another in silence.

“Hold the lamp a minute, Maggie,” David said, at last, and then he went all over the room, and looked more particularly at its emptiness, and even felt the walls.

“Secret panels, you know,” he said, with a smile, but it was a very puzzled smile indeed.

“I can’t see what it could have been,” Margaret said, as they went down the stairs.

“No, I can’t see, either, but I’m going to see,” said David. “That was a chain, and chains don’t drag around by themselves, you know. A ghost could not drag a chain, if he were to try.”

“The conventional ghost very often drags chains,” said Margaret, as she closed the door of her room.

And then she lay awake all night and listened for the conventional ghost that dragged a chain, but it seemed that the weight of the chain must have wearied him, for he was not heard again.

The mother had slept through it all, and next morning they gave her a vivid account of the night’s adventure.

“Perhaps it was someone in the house,” she said, in alarm. There were no ghosts within the bounds of possibility, so far as she was concerned, but burglars were very possible, indeed.

Then Margaret and David both laughed more than ever.

“What fun it would be,” said David, “for a burglar to get into this house and try to find something worth carrying away!”

So they went on to the next night, all three fully determined to spend the night in listening for the ghost, and running him to earth if possible.

But it was Margaret that heard the ghost, after all. She had been sleeping and was suddenly startled wide awake, and there, overhead, was the sound of the chain dragging; and just as she was on the point of springing out of bed to call her brother, the chain seemed to go out of the upper room. She lay still and listened, and in a moment she heard it again.

It was coming down the stairs.

There was no carpet on the stairs, and she could hear the chain drop from step to step, until it had come the whole way down. There it was, almost at the door of her room, and something that was strangely like fear kept her lying still, listening in horrified silence.

Then it went along the hall, dragging close to the door; and then further away; and back and forth for awhile; and then it began dragging back up the stairs again. Step by step she could hear it drawn over the edge of every step--and by the time it had reached the top she remembered herself and called David.

Again did the brother and sister make a tour of the upper room, with the lamp. Not only that, but they looked into every nook and corner of the upper part of the house, and at last came back, baffled. They had seen nothing extraordinary, and they had not heard a sound.

“I’m going to see that ghost to-night,” David said to his sister the next evening.

“How?”

“I’m going to sit up all night at the head of the stairs. Don’t say anything about it to mother; it might make her uneasy.”

So, after the household were all quiet, David slipped into his place at the head of the stairs, and sat down to his vigil. He had placed a screen at the head of the stairway so that it hid him from view--as if a ghost cared for a screen--and he established himself behind it, and prepared to be as patient as he could.

It seemed to him that hours so long had never been devised as those the town clocks tolled off that night. He bore it until midnight moderately well, because, he argued with himself, if there were any ghosts about they would surely walk then; but they were not in a humor for walking; and still the hours rolled on without any developments. He took the fidgets, and had nervous twitches all over him, and at last he could endure it no longer, and had leaned his head back against the wall and was going blissfully to sleep when----

He heard a chain dragging just beyond the open door of that unused room.

In spite of himself a shiver ran down his back. There was no mistaking it; it was a real chain, if he had ever heard one. More than that, it had left the room, and was coming straight towards the stairs. The hall was dark, and it was impossible for him to see anything, although he strained his eyes in the direction of the sound. And even while he looked it had passed behind the screen, and was going down the stairs, dropping from step to step with a clank.

Half way down a narrow strip of moonlight from a stair-window lay directly across the steps. Whatever the thing was, it must pass through that patch of light, and David leaned forward and watched.

Down it went from step to step, and presently it had slipped through the light, and was down; and a little later it came back again, through the light, and up the stairs, and back into that unused room.

And then David slapped his knees jubilantly, and ran down to his room, and slept all the rest of the night.

Next morning he was very mysterious about his discoveries of the night before.

“Oh, yes, I saw the ghost,” he said to Maggie. “There; don’t ask so many questions; I’ll tell you more about it to-morrow, maybe.”

And that was all the information she could get from him. It was very provoking.

That day David made a purchase down town and brought home a bulky bundle, which he hid in his own room and would not let his sister even peep at.

“I’m going to try to catch a ghost to-night,” he said, “and you know how it is; if I brag too much beforehand, I shall be sure to fail.”

He was working with something in the hall after the others had retired; but he did not sit up this time. He went to bed, and Margaret listened at his door and found that he was soon asleep.

But away in the night they were all awakened by a squealing that brought them all into the hall in a great hurry; and there, at the head of the stairs, they found the huge rat-trap that David had set a few hours before, and in the midst of the toils was a rat.

“Why, David,” exclaimed the mother, “I didn’t know that there was a rat in the house.”

And then, all at once, she saw that there was a long chain hanging from a little iron collar around the creature’s neck, and she and Margaret cried together.