The Fourth Ghost Story MEGAPACK ®. Sarah Orne Jewett

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 down the steep road, dwindling in the sheeny distance, the covert and half-suppressed laughter of the sepulchral escort was of so keen a relish that it was well that the scraping of the locked wheel aided the distance to mask the incongruous sound.

      “What ailed you-uns ter name me as the corpus, ’Gene Barker?” demanded Walter Wyatt, when he had regained the capacity of coherent speech.

      “Oh, I hed ter do suddint murder on somebody,” declared the driver, all bluff and reassured and red-faced again, “an’ I couldn’t think quick of nobody else. Besides, I helt a grudge agin’ you fer not stuffin’ mo’ straw ’twixt them jimmyjohns in the coffin-box.”

      “That’s a fac’. Ye air too triflin’ ter be let ter live, Watt,” cried one of their comrades. “I hearn them jugs clash tergether in the coffin-box when ’Gene checked the team up suddint, I tell you. An’ them men sure ’peared ter me powerful suspectin’.”

      “I hearn the clash of them jimmyjohns,” chimed in the driver. “I really thunk my hour war come. Some informer must hev set them men ter spyin’ round fer moonshine.”

      “Oh, surely nobody wouldn’t dare,” urged one of the group, uneasily; for the identity of an informer was masked in secrecy, and his fate, when discovered, was often gruesome.

      “They couldn’t hev noticed the clash of them jimmyjohns, nohow,” declared the negligent Watt, nonchalantly. “But namin’ me fur the dead one! Supposin’ they air revenuers fur true, an’ hed somebody along, hid out in the bresh, ez war acquainted with me by sight—”

      “Then they’d hev been skeered out’n thar boots, that’s all,” interrupted the self-sufficient ’Gene. “They would hev ’lowed they hed viewed yer brazen ghost, bold ez brass, standin’ at the head of yer own coffin-box.”

      “Or mebbe they mought hev recognized the Wyatt favor, ef they warn’t acquainted with me,” persisted Watt, with his unique sense of injury.

      Eugene Barker defended the temerity of his inspiration. “They would hev jes thought ye war kin ter the deceased, an’ at-tendin’ him ter his long home.”

      “’Gene don’t keer much fur ye ter be alive nohow, Watt Wyatt,” one of the others suggested tactlessly, “’count o’ Minta Elladine Biggs.”

      Eugene Barker’s off-hand phrase was incongruous with his sudden gravity and his evident rancor as he declared: “I ain’t carin’ fur sech ez Watt Wyatt. An’ they do say in the cove that Minta Elladine Biggs hev gin him the mitten, anyhow, on account of his gamesome ways, playin’ kyerds, a-bet-tin’ his money, drinkin’ apple-jack, an’ sech.”

      The newly constituted ghost roused himself with great vitality as if to retort floutingly; but as he turned, his jaw suddenly fell; his eyes widened with a ghastly distension. With an unsteady arm extended he pointed silently. Distinctly outlined on the lid of-the coffin was the simulacrum of the figure of aman.

      One of his comrades, seated on the tailboard of the wagon, had discerned a significance in the abrupt silence. As he turned, he, too, caught a fleeting glimpse of that weird image on the coffin-lid. But he was of a more mundane pulse. The apparition roused in him only a wonder whence could come this shadow in the midst of the moon-flooded road. He lifted his eyes to the verge of the bluff above, and there he descried an indistinct human form, which suddenly disappeared as he looked, and at that moment the simulacrum vanished from the lid of the box.

      The mystery was of instant elucidation. They were suspected, followed. The number of their pursuers of course they could not divine, but at least one of the revenue-officers had trailed the wagon between the precipice and the great wall of the ascent on the right, which had gradually dwindled to a diminished height. Deep gullies were here and there washed out by recent rains, and one of these indentations might have afforded an active man access to the summit. Thus the pursuer had evidently kept abreast of them, speeding along in great leaps through the lush growth of huckleberry bushes, wild grasses, pawpaw thickets, silvered by the moon, all fringing the great forests that had given way on the shelving verge of the steeps where the road ran. Had he overheard their unguarded, significant words? Who could divine, so silent were the windless mountains, so deep a-dream the darksome woods, so spellbound the mute and mystic moonlight?

      The group maintained a cautious reticence now, each revolving the problematic disclosure of their secret, each canvassing the question whether the pursuer himself was aware of his betrayal of his stealthy proximity. Not till they had reached the ford of the river did they venture on a low-toned colloquy. The driver paused in midstream and stepped out on the pole between the horses to let down the check-reins, as the team manifested an inclination to drink in transit; and thence, as he stood thus perched, he gazed to and fro, the stretch of dark and lustrous ripples baffling all approach within ear-shot, the watering of the horses justifying the pause and cloaking its significance to any distant observer.

      But the interval was indeed limited; the mental processes of such men are devoid of