The Internet Wiretap Electronic Edition of

               CAN SUCH THINGS BE
                       by
                 AMBROSE BIERCE

                    New York
        Johnathan Cape and Harrison Smith

   Copyright 1909 by Albert and Charles Boni Inc.

        This text is in the PUBLIC DOMAIN.
               Released July 1993

          Proofread by Rebecca Crowley 
             <rcrowley@zso.dec.com>


CONTENTS

THE DEATH OF HALPIN FRAYSER
THE SECRET OF MACARGER'S GULCH
ONE SUMMER NIGHT
THE MOONLIT ROAD
A DIAGNOSIS OF DEATH
MOXON'S MASTER
A TOUGH TUSSLE
ONE OF TWINS
THE HAUNTED VALLEY
A JUG OF SYRUP
STALEY FLEMING'S HALLUCINATION
A RESUMED IDENTITY
A BABY TRAMP
THE NIGHT-DOINGS AT 'DEADMAN'S'
BEYOND THE WALL
A PSYCHOLOGICAL SHIPWRECK
THE MIDDLE TOE OF THE RIGHT FOOT
JOHN MORTONSON'S FUNERAL
THE REALM OF THE UNREAL
JOHN BARTINE'S WATCH
THE DAMNED THING
HAITA THE SHEPHERD
AN INHABITANT OF CARCOSA
THE STRANGER


   THE DEATH OF HALPIN FRAYSER

	     1

  For by death is wrought greater change than hath been
shown. Whereas in general the spirit that removed cometh
back upon occasion, and is sometimes seen of those in flesh
(appearing in the form of the body it bore) yet it hath
happened that the veritable body without the spirit hath
walked. And it is attested of those encountering who have
lived to speak thereon that a lich so raised up hath no
natural affection, nor remembrance thereof, but only hate.
Also, it is known that some spirits which in life were benign
become by death evil altogether.--HALL.

ONE dark night in midsummer a man waking from
a dreamless sleep in a forest lifted his head from the
earth, and staring a few moments into the black-
ness, said: 'Catharine Larue.' He said nothing
more; no reason was known to him why he should
have said so much.
  The man was Halpin Frayser. He lived in St.
Helena, but where he lives now is uncertain, for he
is dead. One who practises sleeping in the woods
with nothing under him but the dry leaves and
the damp earth, and nothing over him but the
branches from which the leaves have fallen and the
sky from which the earth has fallen, cannot hope for
great longevity, and Frayser had already attained
the age of thirty-two. There are persons in this
world, millions of persons, and far and away the
best persons, who regard that as a very advanced
age. They are the children. To those who view the
voyage of life from the port of departure the
bark that has accomplished any considerable dis-
tance appears already in close approach to the far-
ther shore. However, it is not certain that Halpin
Frayser came to his death by exposure.
  He had been all day in the hills west of the Napa
Valley, looking for doves and such small game as
was in season. Late in the afternoon it had come
on to be cloudy, and he had lost his bearings; and al-
though he had only to go always downhill--every-
where the way to safety when one is lost--the ab-
sence of trails had so impeded him that he was
overtaken by night while still in the forest. Unable
in the darkness to penetrate the thickets of man-
zanita and other undergrowth, utterly bewildered
and overcome with fatigue, he had lain down near
the root of a large madrono and fallen into a dream-
less sleep. It was hours later, in the very middle of
the night, that one of God's mysterious messengers,
gliding ahead of the incalculable host of his com-
panions sweeping westward with the dawn line,
pronounced the awakening word in the ear of the
sleeper, who sat upright and spoke, he knew not
why, a name, he knew not whose.
  Halpin Frayser was not much of a philosopher,
nor a scientist. The circumstance that, waking from
a deep sleep at night in the midst of a forest, he had
spoken aloud a name that he had not in memory
and hardly had in mind did not arouse an en-
lightened curiosity to investigate the phenomenon.
He thought it odd, and with a little perfunctory
shiver, as if in deference to a seasonal presumption
that the night was chill, he lay down again and
went to sleep. But his sleep was no longer dreamless.
  He thought he was walking along a dusty road
that showed white in the gathering darkness of a
summer night. Whence and whither it led, and why
he travelled it, he did not know, though all seemed
simple and natural, as is the way in dreams; for in
the Land Beyond the Bed surprises cease from
troubling and the judgment is at rest. Soon he came
to a parting of the ways; leading from the highway
was a road less travelled, having the appearance, in-
deed, of having been long abandoned, because, he
thought, it led to something evil; yet he turned into
it without hesitation, impelled by some imperious
necessity.
  As he pressed forward he became conscious that
his way was haunted by invisible existences whom
he could not definitely figure to his mind. From
among the trees on either side he caught broken
and incoherent whispers in a strange tongue which
yet he partly understood. They seemed to him
fragmentary utterances of a monstrous conspiracy
against his body and soul.
  It was now long after nightfall, yet the intermi-
nable forest through which he journeyed was lit with
a wan glimmer having no point of diffusion, for in
its mysterious lumination nothing cast a shadow. A
shallow pool in the guttered depression of an old
wheel rut, as from a recent rain, met his eye with
a crimson gleam. He stooped and plunged his hand
into it. It stained his fingers; it was blood! Blood,
he then observed, was about him everywhere. The
weeds growing rankly by the roadside showed it in
blots and splashes on their big, broad leaves. Patches
of dry dust between the wheel-ways were pitted
and spattered as with a red rain. Defiling the trunks
of the trees were broad maculations of crimson, and
blood dripped like dew from their foliage.
  All this he observed with a terror which seemed
not incompatible with the fulfilment of a natural
expectation. It seemed to him that it was all in expi-
ation of some crime which, though conscious of his
guilt, he could not rightly remember. To the menaces
and mysteries of his surroundings the consciousness
was an added horror. Vainly he sought, by tracing
life backward in memory, to reproduce the moment
of his sin; scenes and incidents came crowding
tumultuously into his mind, one picture effacing an-
other, or commingling with it in confusion and ob-
scurity, but nowhere could he catch a glimpse of
what he sought. The failure augmented his terror;
he felt as one who has murdered in the dark, not
knowing whom nor why. So frightful was the situa-
tion--the mysterious light burned with so silent
and awful a menace; the noxious plants, the trees
that by common consent are invested with a mel-
ancholy or baleful character, so openly in his sight
conspired against his peace; from overhead and all
about came so audible and startling whispers and
the sighs of creatures so obviously not of earth--
that he could endure it no longer, and with a great
effort to break some malign spell that bound his
faculties to silence and inaction, he shouted with the
full strength of his lungs! His voice, broken, it
seemed, into an infinite multitude of unfamiliar
sounds, went babbling and stammering away into
the distant reaches of the forest, died into silence,
and all was as before. But he had made a beginning
at resistance and was encouraged. He said:
  'I will not submit unheard. There may be powers
that are not malignant travelling this accursed road.
I shall leave them a record and an appeal. I shall
relate my wrongs, the persecutions that I endure--
I, a helpless mortal, a penitent, an unoffending
poet!' Halpin Frayser was a poet only as he was
a penitent: in his dream.
  Taking from his clothing a small red-leather
pocket-book one half of which was leaved for mem-
oranda, he discovered that he was without a pencil.
He broke a twig from a bush, dipped it into a pool
of blood and wrote rapidly. He had hardly touched
the paper with the point of his twig when a low, wild
peal of laughter broke out at a measureless distance
away, and growing ever louder, seemed approach-
ing ever nearer; a soulless, heartless, and unjoyous
laugh, like that of the loon, solitary by the lake-
side at midnight; a laugh which culminated in an
unearthly shout close at hand, then died away
by slow gradations, as if the accursed being that
uttered it had withdrawn over the verge of the
world whence it had come. But the man felt that
this was not so--that it was near by and had not
moved.
  A strange sensation began slowly to take posses-
sion of his body and his mind. He could not have
said which, if any, of his senses was affected; he felt
it rather as a consciousness--a mysterious mental
assurance of some overpowering presence--some
supernatural malevolence different in kind from
the invisible existences that swarmed about him, and
superior to them in power. He knew that it had
uttered that hideous laugh. And now it seemed to be
approaching him; from what direction he did not
know--dared not conjecture. All his former fears
were forgotten or merged in the gigantic terror that
now held him in thrall. Apart from that, he had but
one thought: to complete his written appeal to the
benign powers who, traversing the haunted wood,
might sometime rescue him if he should be denied
the blessing of annihilation. He wrote with terrible
rapidity, the twig in his fingers rilling blood without
renewal; but in the middle of a sentence his hands
denied their service to his will, his arms fell to his
sides, the book to the earth; and powerless to move
or cry out, he found himself staring into the sharply
drawn face and blank, dead eyes of his own mother,
standing white and silent in the garments of the
grave!

		2

  In his youth Halpin Frayser had lived with his
parents in Nashville, Tennessee. The Fraysers were
well-to-do, having a good position in such society as
had survived the wreck wrought by civil war. Their
children had the social and educational opportunities
of their time and place, and had responded to good
associations and instruction with agreeable manners
and cultivated minds. Halpin being the youngest
and not over robust was perhaps a trifle 'spoiled.'
He had the double disadvantage of a mother's
assiduity and a father's neglect. Frayser pere was
what no Southern man of means is not--a poli-
tician. His country, or rather his section and State,
made demands upon his time and attention so ex-
acting that to those of his family he was compelled
to turn an ear partly deafened by the thunder of
the political captains and the shouting, his own
included.
  Young Halpin was of a dreamy, indolent and
rather romantic turn, somewhat more addicted to
literature than law, the profession to which he was
bred. Among those of his relations who professed
the modern faith of heredity it was well understood
that in him the character of the late Myron Bayne,
a maternal great-grandfather, had revisited the
glimpses of the moon--by which orb Bayne had
in his lifetime been sufficiently affected to be a poet
of no small Colonial distinction. If not specially ob-
served, it was observable that while a Frayser who
was not the proud possessor of a sumptuous copy
of the ancestral 'poetical works' (printed at the
family expense, and long ago withdrawn from an
inhospitable market) was a rare Frayser indeed,
there was an illogical indisposition to honour the
great deceased in the person of his spiritual succes-
sor. Halpin was pretty generally deprecated as an
intellectual black sheep who was likely at any mo-
ment to disgrace the flock by bleating in metre. The
Tennessee Fraysers were a practical folk--not
practical in the popular sense of devotion to sordid
pursuits, but having a robust contempt for any
qualities unfitting a man for the wholesome voca-
tion of politics.
  In justice to young Halpin it should be said that
while in him were pretty faithfully reproduced most
of the mental and moral characteristics ascribed by
history and family tradition to the famous Colonial
bard, his succession to the gift and faculty divine
was purely inferential. Not only had he never been
known to court the Muse, but in truth he could not
have written correctly a line of verse to save him-
self from the Killer of the Wise. Still, there was no
knowing when the dormant faculty might wake and
smite the lyre.
  In the meantime the young man was rather a
loose fish, anyhow. Between him and his mother was
the most perfect sympathy, for secretly the lady was
herself a devout disciple of the late and great Myron
Bayne, though with the tact so generally and justly
admired in her sex (despite the hardy calumniators
who insist that it is essentially the same thing as
cunning) she had always taken care to conceal her
weakness from all eyes but those of him who shared
it. Their common guilt in respect of that was an
added tie between them. If in Halpin's youth his
mother had 'spoiled' him he had assuredly done
his part toward being spoiled. As he grew to such
manhood as is attainable by a Southerner who does
not care which way elections go, the attachment be-
tween him and his beautiful mother--whom from
early childhood he had called Katy--became yearly
stronger and more tender. In these two romantic
natures was manifest in a signal way that neglected
phenomenon, the dominance of the sexual element
in all the relations of life, strengthening, softening,
and beautifying even those of consanguinity. The
two were nearly inseparable, and by strangers ob-
serving their manners were not infrequently mis-
taken for lovers.
  Entering his mother's boudoir one day Halpin
Frayser kissed her upon the forehead, toyed for a
moment with a lock of her dark hair which had es-
caped from its confining pins, and said, with an ob-
vious effort at calmness:
  'Would you greatly mind, Katy, if I were called
away to California for a few weeks?'
  It was hardly needful for Katy to answer with her
lips a question to which her tell-tale cheeks had made
instant reply. Evidently she would greatly mind;
and the tears, too, sprang into her large brown eyes
as corroborative testimony.
  'Ah, my son,' she said, looking up into his face
with infinite tenderness,' I should have known that
this was coming. Did I not lie awake a half of the
night weeping because, during the other half, Grand-
father Bayne had come to me in a dream, and stand-
ing by his portrait--young, too, and handsome as
that--pointed to yours on the same wall? And
when I looked it seemed that I could not see the
features; you had been painted with a face cloth,
such as we put upon the dead. Your father has
laughed at me, but you and I, dear, know that such
things are not for nothing. And I saw below the edge
of the cloth the marks of hands on your throat--
forgive me, but we have not been used to keep such
things from each other. Perhaps you have another
interpretation. Perhaps it does not mean that you
will go to California. Or maybe you will take me
with you?'
  It must be confessed that this ingenious interpre-
tation of the dream in the light of newly discovered
evidence did not wholly commend itself to the son's
more logical mind; he had, for the moment at least,
a conviction that it foreshadowed a more simple and
immediate, if less tragic, disaster than a visit to the
Pacific Coast. It was Halpin Frayser's impression
that he was to be garroted on his native heath.
  'Are there not medicinal springs in California?'
Mrs. Frayser resumed before he had time to give her
the true reading of the dream--'places where one
recovers from rheumatism and neuralgia? Look--
my fingers feel so stiff; and I am almost sure they
have been giving me great pain while I slept.'
She held out her hands for his inspection. What
diagnosis of her case the young man may have
thought it best to conceal with a smile the historian
is unable to state, but for himself he feels bound to
say that fingers looking less stiff, and showing fewer
evidences of even insensible pain, have seldom been
submitted for medical inspection by even the fairest
patient desiring a prescription of unfamiliar scenes.
The outcome of it was that of these two odd per-
sons having equally odd notions of duty, the one
went to California, as the interest of his client re-
quired, and the other remained at home in com-
pliance with a wish that her husband was scarcely
conscious of entertaining.
  While in San Francisco Halpin Frayser was walk-
ing one dark night along the water-front of the city,
when, with a suddenness that surprised and dis-
concerted him, he became a sailor. He was in fact
'shanghaied' aboard a gallant, gallant ship, and
sailed for a far countree. Nor did his misfortunes
end with the voyage; for the ship was cast ashore
on an island of the South Pacific, and it was six years
afterward when the survivors were taken off by a
venturesome trading schooner and brought back to
San Francisco.
  Though poor in purse, Frayser was no less proud
in spirit than he had been in the years that seemed
ages and ages ago. He would accept no assistance
from strangers, and it was while living with a fellow
survivor near the town of St. Helena, awaiting news
and remittances from home, that he had gone gun-
ning and dreaming.

		3

The apparition confronting the dreamer in the
haunted wood--the thing so like, yet so unlike, his
mother--was horrible! It stirred no love nor long-
ings in his heart; it came unattended with pleasant
memories of a golden past--inspired no sentiment
of any kind; all the finer emotions were swallowed
up in fear. He tried to turn and run from before it,
but his legs were as lead; he was unable to lift his
feet from the ground. His arms hung helpless at his
sides; of his eyes only he retained control, and these
he dared not remove from the lustreless orbs of the
apparition, which he knew was not a soul without
a body, but that most dreadful of all existences in-
festing that haunted wood--a body without a soul!
In its blank stare was neither love, nor pity, nor
intelligence--nothing to which to address an ap-
peal for mercy. 'An appeal will not lie,' he thought,
with an absurd reversion to professional slang, mak-
ing the situation more horrible, as the fire of a cigar
might light up a tomb.
  For a time, which seemed so long that the world
grew grey with age and sin, and the haunted forest,
having fulfilled its purpose in this monstrous cul-
mination of its terrors, vanished out of his conscious-
ness with all its sights and sounds, the apparition
stood within a pace, regarding him with the mind-
less malevolence of a wild brute; then thrust its
hands forward and sprang upon him with appalling
ferocity! The act released his physical energies with-
out unfettering his will; his mind was still spell-
bound, but his powerful body and agile limbs,
endowed with a blind, insensate life of their own, re-
sisted stoutly and well. For an instant he seemed to
see this unnatural contest between a dead intelli-
gence and a breathing mechanism only as a spectator
--such fancies are in dreams; then he regained
his identity almost as if by a leap forward into his
body, and the straining automaton had a direct-
ing will as alert and fierce as that of its hideous
antagonist.
  But what mortal can cope with a creature of his
dream? The imagination creating the enemy is al-
ready vanquished; the combat's result is the com-
bat's cause. Despite his struggles--despite his
strength and activity, which seemed wasted in a
void, he felt the cold fingers close upon his throat.
Borne backward to the earth, he saw above him the
dead and drawn face within a hand's-breadth of his
own, and then all was black. A sound as of the beat-
ing of distant drums--a murmur of swarming
voices, a sharp, far cry signing all to silence, and
Halpin Frayser dreamed that he was dead.

		4

  A warm, clear night had been followed by a
morning of drenching fog. At about the middle of
the afternoon of the preceding day a little whiff of
light vapour--a mere thickening of the atmos-
phere, the ghost of a cloud--had been observed
clinging to the western side of Mount St. Helena,
away up along the barren altitudes near the sum-
mit. It was so thin, so diaphanous, so like a fancy
made visible, that one would have said: 'Look
quickly! in a moment it will be gone.'
  In a moment it was visibly larger and denser.
While with one edge it clung to the mountain, with
the other it reached farther and farther out into the
air above the lower slopes. At the same time it ex-
tended itself to north and south, joining small
patches of mist that appeared to come out of the
mountain-side on exactly the same level, with an in-
telligent design to be absorbed. And so it grew and
grew until the summit was shut out of view from
the valley, and over the valley itself was an ever-
extending canopy, opaque and grey. At Calistoga,
which lies near the head of the valley and the foot
of the mountain, there were a starless night and a
sunless morning. The fog, sinking into the valley,
had reached southward, swallowing up ranch after
ranch, until it had blotted out the town of St.
Helena, nine miles away. The dust in the road was
laid; trees were adrip with moisture; birds sat
silent in their coverts; the morning light was wan
and ghastly, with neither colour nor fire.
  Two men left the town of St. Helena at the first
glimmer of dawn, and walked along the road north-
ward up the valley toward Calistoga. They carried
guns on their shoulders, yet no one having knowledge
of such matters could have mistaken them for
hunters of bird or beast. They were a deputy sheriff
from Napa and a detective from San Francisco--
Holker and Jaralson, respectively. Their business
was man-hunting.
  'How far is it?' inquired Holker, as they strode
along, their feet stirring white the dust beneath the
damp surface of the road.
  'The White Church? Only a half mile farther,'
the other answered. 'By the way,' he added, 'it
is neither white nor a church; it is an abandoned
schoolhouse, grey with age and neglect. Religious
services were once held in it--when it was white,
and there is a graveyard that would delight a poet.
Can you guess why I sent for you, and told you to
come armed?'
  'Oh, I never have bothered you about things of
that kind. I've always found you communicative
when the time came. But if I may hazard a guess,
you want me to help you arrest one of the corpses
in the graveyard.'
  'You remember Branscom?' said Jaralson, treat-
ing his companion's wit with the inattention that it
deserved.
  'The chap who cut his wife's throat? I ought; I
wasted a week's work on him and had my expenses
for my trouble. There is a reward of five hundred
dollars, but none of us ever got a sight of him. You
don't mean to say--'
  'Yes, I do. He has been under the noses of you
fellows all the time. He comes by night to the old
graveyard at the White Church.'
  'The devil! That's where they buried his wife.'
  'Well, you fellows might have had sense enough
to suspect that he would return to her grave some
time! '
  'The very last place that anyone would have ex-
pected him to return to.'
  'But you had exhausted all the other places.
Learning your failure at them, I "laid for him"
there.'
  'And you found him?'
  'Damn it! he found me. The rascal got the drop
on me--regularly held me up and made me travel.
It's God's mercy that he didn't go through me.
Oh, he's a good one, and I fancy the half of that
reward is enough for me if you're needy.'
  Holker laughed good-humouredly, and explained
that his creditors were never more importunate.
  'I wanted merely to show you the ground, and
arrange a plan with you,' the detective explained.
'I thought it as well for us to be armed, even in
daylight.'
  'The man must be insane,' said the deputy sheriff.
'The reward is for his capture and conviction. If
he's mad he won't be convicted.'
  Mr. Holker was so profoundly affected by that
possible failure of justice that he involuntarily
stopped in the middle of the road, then resumed his
walk with abated zeal.
  'Well, he looks it,' assented Jaralson. 'I'm bound
to admit that a more unshaven, unshorn, unkempt,
and uneverything wretch I never saw outside the
ancient and honourable order of tramps. But I've
gone in for him, and can't make up my mind to let
go. There's glory in it for us, anyhow. Not another
soul knows that he is this side of the Mountains of
the Moon.'
  'All right,' Holker said; 'we will go and view the
ground,' and he added, in the words of a once
favourite inscription for tombstones: '"where you
must shortly lie"--I mean if old Branscom ever
gets tired of you and your impertinent intrusion.
By the way, I heard the other day that "Brans-
com" was not his real name.'
  'What is?'
  'I can't recall it. I had lost all interest in the
wretch. and it did not fix itself in my memory--
something like Pardee. The woman whose throat he
had the bad taste to cut was a widow when he met
her. She had come to California to look up some
relatives--there are persons who will do that some-
times. But you know all that.'
  'Naturally.'
  'But not knowing the right name, by what happy
inspiration did you find the right grave? The man
who told me what the name was said it had been cut
on the headboard.'
  'I don't know the right grave.' Jaralson was ap-
parently a trifle reluctant to admit his ignorance of
so important a point of his plan. 'I have been watch-
ing about the place generally. A part of our work
this morning will be to identify that grave. Here is
the White Church.'
  For a long distance the road had been bordered by
fields on both sides, but now on the left there was a
forest of oaks, madronos, and gigantic spruces whose
lower parts only could be seen, dim and ghostly in
the fog. The undergrowth was, in places, thick, but
nowhere impenetrable. For some moments Holker
saw nothing of the building, but as they turned into
the woods it revealed itself in faint grey outline
through the fog, looking huge and far away. A few
steps more, and it was within an arm's length, dis-
tinct, dark with moisture, and insignificant in size.
It had the usual country-schoolhouse form--be-
longed to the packing-box order of architecture;
had an underpinning of stones, a moss-grown roof,
and blank window spaces, whence both glass and
sash had long departed. It was ruined, but not a ruin
--a typical Californian substitute for what are
known to guide-bookers abroad as 'monuments of
the past.' With scarcely a glance at this uninterest-
ing structure Jaralson moved on into the dripping
undergrowth beyond.
  'I will show you where he held me up,' he said.
'This is the graveyard.'
  Here and there among the bushes were small en-
closures containing graves, sometimes no more than
one. They were recognized as graves by the dis-
coloured stones or rotting boards at head and foot,
leaning at all angles, some prostrate; by the ruined
picket fences surrounding them; or, infrequently, by
the mound itself showing its gravel through the
fallen leaves. In many instances nothing marked
the spot where lay the vestiges of some poor mortal
--who, leaving 'a large circle of sorrowing friends,'
had been left by them in turn--except a depression
in the earth, more lasting than that in the spirits of
the mourners. The paths, if any paths had been,
were long obliterated; trees of a considerable size
had been permitted to grow up from the graves and
thrust aside with root or branch the enclosing
fences. Over all was that air of abandonment and
decay which seems nowhere so fit and significant
as in a village of the forgotten dead.
  As the two men, Jaralson leading, pushed their
way through the growth of young trees, that enter-
prising man suddenly stopped and brought up his
shotgun to the height of his breast, uttered a low
note of warning, and stood motionless, his eyes
fixed upon something ahead. As well as he could,
obstructed by brush, his companion, though
seeing nothing, imitated the posture and so
stood, prepared for what might ensue. A moment
later Jaralson moved cautiously forward, the other
following.
  Under the branches of an enormous spruce lay the
dead body of a man. Standing silent above it they
noted such particulars as first strike the attention--
the face, the attitude, the clothing; whatever most
promptly and plainly answers the unspoken ques-
tion of a sympathetic curiosity.
  The body lay upon its back, the legs wide apart.
One arm was thrust upward, the other outward; but
the latter was bent acutely, and the hand was near
the throat. Both hands were tightly clenched. The
whole attitude was that of desperate but ineffectual
resistance to--what?
  Near by lay a shotgun and a game bag through
the meshes of which was seen the plumage of shot
birds. All about were evidences of a furious strug-
gle; small sprouts of poison-oak were bent and
denuded of leaf and bark; dead and rotting leaves
had been pushed into heaps and ridges on both sides
of the legs by the action of other feet than theirs;
alongside the hips were unmistakable impressions
of human knees.
  The nature of the struggle was made clear by a
glance at the dead man's throat and face. While
breast and hands were white, those were purple--
almost black. The shoulders lay upon a low mound,
and the head was turned back at an angle otherwise
impossible, the expanded eyes staring blankly back-
ward in a direction opposite to that of the feet. From
the froth filling the open mouth the tongue pro-
truded, black and swollen. The throat showed hor-
rible contusions; not mere finger-marks, but bruises
and lacerations wrought by two strong hands that
must have buried themselves in the yielding flesh,
maintaining their terrible grasp until long after
death. Breast, throat, face, were wet; the clothing
was saturated; drops of water, condensed from the
fog, studded the hair and moustache.
  All this the two men observed without speaking--
almost at a glance. Then Holker said:
  'Poor devil! he had a rough deal.'
  Jaralson was making a vigilant circumspection of
the forest, his shotgun held in both hands and at full
cock, his finger upon the trigger.
  'The work of a maniac,' he said, without with-
drawing his eyes from the enclosing wood. 'It was
done by Branscom--Pardee.'
  Something half hidden by the disturbed leaves on
the earth caught Holker's attention. It was a red-
leather pocket-book. He picked it up and opened it.
It contained leaves of white paper for memoranda,
and upon the first leaf was the name 'Halpin Fray-
ser.' Written in red on several succeeding leaves--
scrawled as if in haste and barely legible--were
the following lines, which Holker read aloud, while
his companion continued scanning the dim grey
confines of their narrow world and hearing matter
of apprehension in the drip of water from every bur-
dened branch:

'Enthralled by some mysterious spell, I stood
 In the lit gloom of an enchanted wood.
  The cypress there and myrtle twined their
    boughs,
 Significant, in baleful brotherhood.

'The brooding willow whispered to the yew;
 Beneath, the deadly nightshade and the rue,
  With immortelles self-woven into strange
 Funereal shapes, and horrid nettles grew.

'No song of bird nor any drone of bees,
 Nor light leaf lifted by the wholesome breeze:
  The air was stagnant all, and Silence was
 A living thing that breathed among the trees.

'Conspiring spirits whispered in the gloom,
 Half-heard, the stilly secrets of the tomb.
  With blood the trees were all adrip; the leaves
 Shone in the witch-light with a ruddy bloom.

'I cried aloud!--the spell, unbroken still,
 Rested upon my spirit and my will.
  Unsouled, unhearted, hopeless and forlorn,
 I strove with monstrous presages of ill!

'At last the viewless--'

  Holker ceased reading; there was no more to
read. The manuscript broke off in the middle of a
line.
  'That sounds like Bayne,' said Jaralson, who was
something of a scholar in his way. He had abated
his vigilance and stood looking down at the body.
  'Who's Bayne?' Holker asked rather incuriously.
  'Myron Bayne, a chap who flourished in the
early years of the nation--more than a century
ago. Wrote mighty dismal stuff; I have his collected
works. That poem is not among them, but it must
have been omitted by mistake.'
  'It is cold,' said Holker; 'let us leave here; we
must have up the coroner from Napa.'
  Jaralson said nothing, but made a movement in
compliance. Passing the end of the slight elevation
of earth upon which the dead man's head and
shoulders lay, his foot struck some hard substance
under the rotting forest leaves, and he took the
trouble to kick it into view. It was a fallen head-
board, and painted on it were the hardly de-
cipherable words, 'Catharine Larue.'
  'Larue, Larue!' exclaimed Holker, with sudden
animation. 'Why, that is the real name of Brans-
com--not Pardee. And--bless my soul! how it all
comes to me--the murdered woman's name had
been Frayser!'
  'There is some rascally mystery here,' said De-
tective Jaralson. 'I hate anything of that kind.'
There came to them out of the fog--seemingly
from a great distance--the sound of a laugh, a low,
deliberate, soulless laugh which had no more of joy
than that of a hyena night-prowling in the desert; a
laugh that rose by slow gradation, louder and louder,
clearer, more distinct and terrible, until it seemed
barely outside the narrow circle of their vision; a
laugh so unnatural, so unhuman, so devilish, that
it filled those hardy man-hunters with a sense of
dread unspeakable! They did not move their weap-
ons nor think of them; the menace of that horrible
sound was not of the kind to be met with arms.
As it had grown out of silence, so now it died away;
from a culminating shout which had seemed almost
in their ears, it drew itself away into the distance
until its failing notes, joyous and mechanical to the
last, sank to silence at a measureless remove.


THE SECRET OF MACARGER'S GULCH

NORTHWESTWARDLY from Indian Hill, about nine
miles as the crow flies, is Macarger's Gulch. It is not
much of a gulch--a mere depression between two
wooded ridges of inconsiderable height. From its
mouth up to its head--for gulches, like rivers, have
an anatomy of their own--the distance does not
exceed two miles, and the width at bottom is at
only one place more than a dozen yards; for most of
the distance on either side of the little brook which
drains it in winter, and goes dry in the early spring,
there is no level ground at all; the steep slopes of the
hills, covered with an almost inpenetrable growth of
manzanita and chemisal, are parted by nothing but
the width of the watercourse. No one but an occa-
sional enterprising hunter of the vicinity ever goes
into Macarger's Gulch, and five miles away it is un-
known, even by name. Within that distance in any
direction are far more conspicuous topographical
features without names, and one might try in vain
to ascertain by local inquiry the origin of the name
of this one.
  About midway between the head and the mouth
of Macarger's Gulch, the hill on the right as you
ascend is cloven by another gulch, a short dry one,
and at the junction of the two is a level space of two
or three acres, and there a few years ago stood an
old board house containing one small room. How
the component parts of the house, few and simple as
they were, had been assembled at that almost inac-
cessible point is a problem in the solution of which
there would be greater satisfaction than advantage.
Possibly the creek bed is a reformed road. It is
certain that the gulch was at one time pretty thor-
oughly prospected by miners, who must have had
some means of getting in with at least pack animals
carrying tools and supplies; their profits, apparently,
were not such as would have justified any consider-
able outlay to connect Macarger's Gulch with any
centre of civilization enjoying the distinction of a
sawmill. The house, however, was there, most of it.
It lacked a door and a window frame, and the
chimney of mud and stones had fallen into an un-
lovely heap, overgrown with rank weeds. Such
humble furniture as there may once have been and
much of the lower weather-boarding, had served as
fuel in the camp fires of hunters; as had also, prob-
ably, the kerbing of an old well, which at the time I
write of existed in the form of a rather wide but
not very deep depression near by.
  One afternoon in the summer of 1874, I passed up
Macarger's Gulch from the narrow valley into which
it opens, by following the dry bed of the brook. I
was quail-shooting and had made a bag of about a
dozen birds by the time I had reached the house
described, of whose existence I was until then un-
aware. After rather carelessly inspecting the ruin I
resumed my sport, and having fairly good success
prolonged it until near sunset, when it occurred to
me that I was a long way from any human habita-
tion--too far to reach one by nightfall. But in my
game bag was food, and the old house would afford
shelter, if shelter were needed on a warm and dew-
less night in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada,
where one may sleep in comfort on the pine needles,
without covering. I am fond of solitude and love the
night, so my resolution to 'camp out' was soon
taken, and by the time that it was dark I had made
my bed of boughs and grasses in a corner of the
room and was roasting a quail at a fire that I had
kindled on the hearth. The smoke escaped out of
the ruined chimney, the light illuminated the room
with a kindly glow, and as I ate my simple meal of
plain bird and drank the remains of a bottle of red
wine which had served me all the afternoon in place
of the water, which the region did not supply, I ex-
perienced a sense of comfort which better fare and
accommodations do not always give.
  Nevertheless, there was something lacking. I had
a sense of comfort, but not of security. I detected
myself staring more frequently at the open doorway
and blank window than I could find warrant for
doing. Outside these apertures all was black, and I
was unable to repress a certain feeling of apprehen-
sion as my fancy pictured the outer world and filled
it with unfriendly entities, natural and supernatural
--chief among which, in their respective classes
were the grizzly bear, which I knew was occasionally
still seen in that region, and the ghost, which I had
reason to think was not. Unfortunately, our feelings
do not always respect the law of probabilities, and to
me that evening, the possible and the impossible
were equally disquieting.
  Every one who has had experience in the matter
must have observed that one confronts the actual
and imaginary perils of the night with far less appre-
hension in the open air than in a house with an open
doorway. I felt this now as I lay on my leafy couch
in a corner of the room next to the chimney and per-
mitted my fire to die out. So strong became my
sense of the presence of something malign and men-
acing in the place, that I found myself almost un-
able to withdraw my eyes from the opening, as in
the deepening darkness it became more and more
indistinct. And when the last little flame flickered
and went out I grasped the shotgun which I had
laid at my side and actually turned the muzzle in
the direction of the now invisible entrance, my
thumb on one of the hammers, ready to cock the
piece, my breath suspended, my muscles rigid
and tense. But later I laid down the weapon
with a sense of shame and mortification. What
did I fear, and why?--I, to whom the night had
been
   
             a more familiar face
         Than that of man--

I, in whom that element of hereditary superstition
from which none of us is altogether free had given
to solitude and darkness and silence only a more
alluring interest and charm! I was unable to com-
prehend my folly, and losing in the conjecture the
thing conjectured of, I fell asleep. And then I
dreamed.
  I was in a great city in a foreign land--a city
whose people were of my own race, with minor
differences of speech and costume; yet precisely
what these were I could not say; my sense of them
was indistinct. The city was dominated by a great
castle upon an overlooking height whose name I
knew, but could not speak. I walked through many
streets, some broad and straight with high, modern
buildings, some narrow, gloomy, and tortuous, be-
tween the gables of quaint old houses whose over-
hanging stories, elaborately ornamented with carv-
ings in wood and stone, almost met above my head.
  I sought some one whom I had never seen, yet
knew that I should recognize when found. My quest
was not aimless and fortuitous; it had a definite
method. I turned from one street into another with-
out hesitation and threaded a maze of intricate
passages, devoid of the fear of losing my way.
  Presently I stopped before a low door in a plain
stone house which might have been the dwelling of
an artisan of the better sort, and without announc-
ing myself, entered. The room, rather sparely fur-
nished, and lighted by a single window with small
diamond-shaped panes, had but two occupants. a
man and a woman. They took no notice of my
intrusion, a circumstance which, in the manner
of dreams, appeared entirely natural. They were
not conversing; they sat apart, unoccupied and
sullen.
  The woman was young and rather stout, with fine
large eyes and a certain grave beauty; my memory
of her expression is exceedingly vivid, but in dreams
one does not observe the details of faces. About
her shoulders was a plaid shawl. The man was older,
dark, with an evil face made more forbidding by a
long scar extending from near the left temple di-
agonally downward into the black moustache;
though in my dreams it seemed rather to haunt the
face as a thing apart--I can express it no other-
wise--than to belong to it. The moment that I
found the man and woman I knew them to be hus-
band and wife.
  What followed, I remember indistinctly; all was
confused and inconsistent--made so, I think, by
gleams of consciousness. It was as if two pictures, the
scene of my dream, and my actual surroundings,
had been blended, one overlying the other, until
the former, gradually fading, disappeared, and I
was broad awake in the deserted cabin, entirely and
tranquilly conscious of my situation.
  My foolish fear was gone, and opening my eyes
I saw that my fire, not altogether burned out, had
revived by the falling of a stick and was again
lighting the room. I had probably slept only a few
minutes, but my commonplace dream had somehow
so strongly impressed me that I was no longer
drowsy; and after a little while I rose, pushed the
embers of my fire together, and lighting my pipe pro-
ceeded in a rather ludicrously methodical way to
meditate upon my vision.
  It would have puzzled me then to say in what re-
spect it was worth attention. In the first moment of
serious thought that I gave to the matter I recog-
nized the city of my dream as Edinburgh, where
I had never been; so if the dream was a memory
it was a memory of pictures and description. The
recognition somehow deeply impressed me; it was
as if something in my mind insisted rebelliously
against will and reason on the importance of all
this. And that faculty, whatever it was, asserted also
a control of my speech. 'Surely,' I said aloud, quite
involuntarily, 'the MacGregors must have come
here from Edinburgh.'
  At the moment, neither the substance of this re-
mark nor the fact of my making it surprised me in
the least; it seemed entirely natural that I should
know the name of my dreamfolk and something of
their history. But the absurdity of it all soon dawned
upon me: I laughed aloud, knocked the ashes from
my pipe and again stretched myself upon my bed
of boughs and grass, where I lay staring absently
into my failing fire, with no further thought of
either my dream or my surroundings. Suddenly the
single remaining flame crouched for a moment,
then, springing upward, lifted itself clear of its
embers and expired in air. The darkness was
absolute.
  At that instant--almost, it seemed, before the
gleam of the blaze had faded from my eyes--there
was a dull, dead sound, as of some heavy body fall-
ing upon the floor, which shook beneath me as I lay.
I sprang to a sitting posture and groped at my side
for my gun; my notion was that some wild beast
had leaped in through the open window. While the
flimsy structure was still shaking from the impact I
heard the sound of blows, the scuffling of feet upon
the floor, and then--it seemed to come from almost
within reach of my hand, the sharp shrieking of a
woman in mortal agony. So horrible a cry I had
never heard nor conceived; it utterly unnerved me;
I was conscious for a moment of nothing but my
own terror! Fortunately my hand now found the
weapon of which it was in search, and the familiar
touch somewhat restored me. I leaped to my feet,
straining my eyes to pierce the darkness. The
violent sounds had ceased, but more terrible than
these, I heard, at what seemed long intervals, the
faint intermittent gasping of some living, dying
thing!
  As my eyes grew accustomed to the dim light of
the coals in the fireplace, I saw first the shapes of
the door and window looking blacker than the black
of the walls. Next, the distinction between wall and
floor became discernible, and at last I was sensible to
the form and full expanse of the floor from end to
end and side to side. Nothing was visible and the
silence was unbroken.
  With a hand that shook a little, the other still
grasping my gun, I restored my fire and made a
critical examination of the place. There was nowhere
any sign that the cabin had been entered. My own
tracks were visible in the dust covering the floor, but
there were no others. I relit my pipe, provided fresh
fuel by ripping a thin board or two from the inside
of the house--I did not care to go into the darkness
out of doors--and passed the rest of the night
smoking and thinking, and feeding my fire; not for
added years of life would I have permitted that little
flame to expire again.

  Some years afterward I met in Sacramento a man
named Morgan, to whom I had a note of introduc-
tion from a friend in San Francisco. Dining with
him one evening at his home I observed various
'trophies' upon the wall, indicating that he was fond
of shooting. It turned out that he was, and in re-
lating some of his feats he mentioned having been
in the region of my adventure.
  'Mr. Morgan,' I asked abruptly, 'do you know
a place up there called Macarger's Gulch? '
  'I have good reason to,' he replied; 'it was I who
gave to the newspapers, last year, the accounts of
the finding of the skeleton there."
  I had not heard of it; the accounts had been pub-
lished, it appeared, while I was absent in the East.
  'By the way,' said Morgan, 'the name of the
gulch is a corruption; it should have been called
"MacGregor's." My dear,' he added, speaking to
his wife, 'Mr. Elderson has upset his wine.'
  That was hardly accurate--I had simply dropped
it, glass and all.
  'There was an old shanty once in the gulch,' Mor-
gan resumed when the ruin wrought by my awk-
wardness had been repaired, 'but just previously to
my visit it had been blown down, or rather blown
away, for its debris was scattered all about, the very
floor being parted, plank from plank. Between two
of the sleepers still in position I and my companion
observed the remnant of a plaid shawl, and examin-
ing it found that it was wrapped about the shoulders
of the body of a woman; of course but little re-
mained besides the bones, partly covered with frag-
ments of clothing, and brown dry skin. But we will
spare Mrs. Morgan,' he added with a smile. The
lady had indeed exhibited signs of disgust rather
than sympathy.
  'It is necessary to say, however,' he went on,
'that the skull was fractured in several places, as by
blows of some blunt instrument; and that instru-
ment itself--a pick-handle, still stained with blood
--lay under the boards near by.'
  Mr. Morgan turned to his wife. 'Pardon me, my
dear,' he said with affected solemnity, 'for men-
tioning these disagreeable particulars, the natural
though regrettable incidents of a conjugal quarrel--
resulting, doubtless, from the luckless wife's insub-
ordination.'
  'I ought to be able to overlook it,' the lady re-
plied with composure; 'you have so many times
asked me to in those very words.'
  I thought he seemed rather glad to go on with
his story.
  'From these and other circumstances,' he said,
'the coroner's jury found that the deceased, Janet
MacGregor, came to her death from blows inflicted
by some person to the jury unknown; but it was
added that the evidence pointed strongly to her hus-
band, Thomas MacGregor, as the guilty person. But
Thomas MacGregor has never been found nor heard
of. It was learned that the couple came from Edin-
burgh, but not--my dear, do you not observe that
Mr. Elderson's bone-plate has water in it?'
  I had deposited a chicken bone in my finger bowl.
  'In a little cupboard I found a photograph of
MacGregor, but it did not lead to his capture.'
  'Will you let me see it?' I said.
  The picture showed a dark man with an evil face
made more forbidding by a long scar extending from
near the temple diagonally downward into the black
moustache.
  'By the way, Mr. Elderson,' said my affable host,
'may I know why you asked about "Macarger's
Gulch"?'
  'I lost a mule near there once,' I replied, 'and
the mischance has--has quite--upset me.'
  'My dear,' said Mr. Morgan, with the mechanical
intonation of an interpreter translating, 'the loss of
Mr. Elderson's mule has peppered his coffee.'


ONE SUMMER NIGHT

THE fact that Henry Armstrong was buried did not
seem to him to prove that he was dead: he had al-
ways been a hard man to convince. That he really
was buried, the testimony of his senses compelled
him to admit. His posture--flat upon his back, with
his hands crossed upon his stomach and tied with
something that he easily broke without profitably
altering the situation--the strict confinement of
his entire person, the black darkness and profound
silence, made a body of evidence impossible to
controvert and he accepted it without cavil.
  But dead--no; he was only very, very ill. He had,
withal, the invalid's apathy and did not greatly con-
cern himself about the uncommon fate that had been
allotted to him. No philosopher was he--just a
plain, commonplace person gifted, for the time be-
ing, with a pathological indifference: the organ that
he feared consequences with was torpid. So, with
no particular apprehension for his immediate fu-
ture, he fell asleep and all was peace with Henry
Armstrong.
  But something was going on overhead. It was a
dark summer night, shot through with infrequent
shimmers of lightning silently firing a cloud lying
low in the west and portending a storm. These brief,
stammering illuminations brought out with ghastly
distinctness the monuments and headstones of the
cemetery and seemed to set them dancing. It was
not a night in which any credible witness was likely
to be straying about a cemetery, so the three men
who were there, digging into the grave of Henry
Armstrong, felt reasonably secure.
  Two of them were young students from a medi-
cal college a few miles away; the third was a gigan-
tic negro known as Jess. For many years Jess had
been employed about the cemetery as a man-of-all-
work and it was his favourite pleasantry that he
knew 'every soul in the place.' From the nature of
what he was now doing it was inferable that the
place was not so populous as its register may have
shown it to be.
  Outside the wall, at the part of the grounds
farthest from the public road, were a horse and a
light wagon, waiting.
  The work of excavation was not difficult: the
earth with which the grave had been loosely filled a
few hours before offered little resistance and was
soon thrown out. Removal of the casket from its box
was less easy, but it was taken out, for it was a
perquisite of Jess, who carefully unscrewed the
cover and laid it aside, exposing the body in black
trousers and white shirt. At that instant the air
sprang to flame, a cracking shock of thunder shook
the stunned world and Henry Armstrong tranquilly
sat up. With inarticulate cries the men fled in terror,
each in a different direction. For nothing on earth
could two of them have been persuaded to return.
But Jess was of another breed.
  In the grey of the morning the two students,
pallid and haggard from anxiety and with the terror
of their adventure still beating tumultuously in their
blood, met at the medical college.
  'You saw it?' cried one.
  'God! yes--what are we to do?'
  They went around to the rear of the building,
where they saw a horse, attached to a light wagon,
hitched to a gatepost near the door of the dissecting-
room. Mechanically they entered the room. On a
bench in the obscurity sat the negro Jess. He rose,
grinning, all eyes and teeth.
  'I'm waiting for my pay,' he said.
  Stretched naked on a long table lay the body of
Henry Armstrong, the head defiled with blood and
clay from a blow with a spade.


THE MOONLIT ROAD

1: Statement of Joel Hetman, Jr.

I AM the most unfortunate of men. Rich, respected,
fairly well educated and of sound health--with
many other advantages usually valued by those
having them and coveted by those who have them
not--I sometimes think that I should be less un-
happy if they had been denied me, for then the
contrast between my outer and my inner life would
not be continually demanding a painful attention. In
the stress of privation and the need of effort I might
sometimes forget the sombre secret ever baffling the
conjecture that it compels.
  I am the only child of Joel and Julia Hetman. The
one was a well-to-do country gentleman, the other
a beautiful and accomplished woman to whom he
was passionately attached with what I now know
to have been a jealous and exacting devotion.
The family home was a few miles from Nash-
ville, Tennessee, a large, irregularly built dwell-
ing of no particular order of architecture, a
little way off the road, in a park of trees and
shrubbery.
  At the time of which I write I was nineteen years
old, a student at Yale. One day I received a tele-
gram from my father of such urgency that in com-
pliance with its unexplained demand I left at once
for home. At the railway station in Nashville a dis-
tant relative awaited me to apprise me of the reason
for my recall: my mother had been barbarously
murdered--why and by whom none could conjec-
ture, but the circumstances were these.
  My father had gone to Nashville, intending to re-
turn the next afternoon. Something prevented his
accomplishing the business in hand, so he returned
on the same night, arriving just before the dawn.
In his testimony before the coroner he explained
that having no latchkey and not caring to disturb the
sleeping servants, he had, with no clearly defined
intention, gone round to the rear of the house. As he
turned an angle of the building, he heard a sound as
of a door gently closed, and saw in the darkness, in-
distinctly, the figure of a man, which instantly dis-
appeared among the trees of the lawn. A hasty pur-
suit and brief search of the grounds in the belief
that the trespasser was some one secretly visiting
a servant proving fruitless, he entered at the un-
locked door and mounted the stairs to my mother's
chamber. Its door was open, and stepping into black
darkness he fell headlong over some heavy object
on the floor. I may spare myself the details; it was
my poor mother, dead of strangulation by human
hands!
  Nothing had been taken from the house, the serv-
ants had heard no sound, and excepting those ter-
rible finger-marks upon the dead woman's throat--
dear God! that I might forget them!--no trace of
the assassin was ever found.
  I gave up my studies and remained with my
father, who, naturally, was greatly changed. Always
of a sedate, taciturn disposition, he now fell into so
deep a dejection that nothing could hold his atten-
tion, yet anything--a footfall, the sudden closing
of a door--aroused in him a fitful interest; one
might have called it an apprehension. At any small
surprise of the senses he would start visibly and
sometimes turn pale, then relapse into a melancholy
apathy deeper than before. I suppose he was what
is called a 'nervous wreck.' As to me, I was younger
then than now--there is much in that. Youth is
Gilead, in which is balm for every wound. Ah, that
I might again dwell in that enchanted land! Un-
acquainted with grief, I knew not how to appraise
my bereavement; I could not rightly estimate the
strength of the stroke.
  One night, a few months after the dreadful event,
my father and I walked home from the city. The
full moon was about three hours above the eastern
horizon; the entire countryside had the solemn still-
ness of a summer night; our footfalls and the cease-
less song of the katydids were the only sound, aloof.
Black shadows of bordering trees lay athwart the
road, which, in the short reaches between, gleamed
a ghostly white. As we approached the gate to our
dwelling, whose front was in shadow, and in which
no light shone, my father suddenly stopped and
clutched my arm, saying, hardly above his breath:
  'God! God! what is that?'
  'I hear nothing,' I replied.
  'But see--see!' he said, pointing along the road,
directly ahead.
  I said: 'Nothing is there. Come, father, let us go
in--you are ill.'
  He had released my arm and was standing rigid
and motionless in the centre of the illuminated road-
way, staring like one bereft of sense. His face in the
moonlight showed a pallor and fixity inexpressibly
distressing. I pulled gently at his sleeve, but he had
forgotten my existence. Presently he began to re-
tire backward, step by step, never for an instant
removing his eyes from what he saw, or thought he
saw. I turned half round to follow, but stood ir-
resolute. I do not recall any feeling of fear, unless
a sudden chill was its physical manifestation. It
seemed as if an icy wind had touched my face and
enfolded my body from head to foot; I could feel the
stir of it in my hair.
  At that moment my attention was drawn to a
light that suddenly streamed from an upper window
of the house: one of the servants, awakened by what
mysterious premonition of evil who can say, and in
obedience to an impulse that she was never able to
name, had lit a lamp. When I turned to look for my
father he was gone, and in all the years that have
passed no whisper of his fate has come across the
borderland of conjecture from the realm of the
unknown.

2: Statement of Caspar Grattan

  To-day I am said to live, to-morrow, here in this
room, will lie a senseless shape of clay that all too
long was I. If anyone lift the cloth from the face of
that unpleasant thing it will be in gratification of a
mere morbid curiosity. Some, doubtless, will go
further and inquire, 'Who was he?' In this writing
I supply the only answer that I am able to make--
Caspar Grattan. Surely, that should be enough.
The name has served my small need for more than
twenty years of a life of unknown length. True, I
gave it to myself, but lacking another I had the right.
In this world one must have a name; it prevents
confusion, even when it does not establish identity.
Some, though, are known by numbers, which also
seem inadequate distinctions.
  One day, for illustration, I was passing along a
street of a city, far from here, when I met two men
in uniform, one of whom, half pausing and looking
curiously into my face, said to his companion, 'That
man looks like 767.' Something in the number
seemed familiar and horrible. Moved by an uncon-
trollable impulse, I sprang into a side street and ran
until I fell exhausted in a country lane.
  I have never forgotten that number, and always
it comes to memory attended by gibbering obscenity,
peals of joyless laughter, the clang of iron doors. So
I say a name, even if self-bestowed, is better than a
number. In the register of the potter's field I shall
soon have both. What wealth!
  Of him who shall find this paper I must beg a
little consideration. It is not the history of my life;
the knowledge to write that is denied me. This is only
a record of broken and apparently unrelated memo-
ries, some of them as distinct and sequent as brilliant
beads upon a thread, others remote and strange,
having the character of crimson dreams with inter-
spaces blank and black--witch-fires glowing still
and red in a great desolation.
  Standing upon the shore of eternity, I turn for a
last look landward over the course by which I came.
There are twenty years of footprints fairly distinct,
the impressions of bleeding feet. They lead through
poverty and pain, devious and unsure, as of one
staggering beneath a burden--

      Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow.

  Ah, the poet's prophecy of Me--how admirable,
how dreadfully admirable!
  Backward beyond the beginning of this via do-
lorosa--this epic of suffering with episodes of sin
--I see nothing clearly; it comes out of a cloud.
I know that it spans only twenty years, yet I am an
old man.
  One does not remember one's birth--one has to
be told. But with me it was different; life came to
me full-handed and dowered me with all my facul-
ties and powers. Of a previous existence I know no
more than others, for all have stammering intima-
tions that may be memories and may be dreams.
I know only that my first consciousness was of ma-
turity in body and mind--a consciousness accepted
without surprise or conjecture. I merely found myself
walking in a forest, half-clad, footsore, unutterably
weary and hungry. Seeing a farmhouse, I approached
and asked for food, which was given me by one
who inquired my name. I did not know, yet knew
that all had names. Greatly embarrassed, I retreated,
and night coming on, lay down in the forest and
slept.
  The next day I entered a large town which I shall
not name. Nor shall I recount further incidents of
the life that is now to end--a life of wandering,
always and everywhere haunted by an overmaster-
ing sense of crime in punishment of wrong and of
terror in punishment of crime. Let me see if I can
reduce it to narrative.
  I seem once to have lived near a great city, a
prosperous planter, married to a woman whom I
loved and distrusted. We had, it sometimes seems,
one child, a youth of brilliant parts and promise.
He is at all times a vague figure, never clearly
drawn, frequently altogether out of the picture.
  One luckless evening it occurred to me to test my
wife's fidelity in a vulgar, commonplace way fa-
miliar to everyone who has acquaintance with the
literature of fact and fiction. I went to the city, tell-
ing my wife that I should be absent until the follow-
ing afternoon. But I returned before daybreak and
went to the rear of the house, purposing to enter by
a door with which I had secretly so tampered that it
would seem to lock, yet not actually fasten. As I
approached it, I heard it gently open and close, and
saw a man steal away into the darkness. With mur-
der in my heart, I sprang after him, but he had
vanished without even the bad luck of identification.
Sometimes now I cannot even persuade myself that
it was a human being.
  Crazed with jealousy and rage, blind and bestial
with all the elemental passions of insulted manhood,
I entered the house and sprang up the stairs to the
door of my wife's chamber. It was closed, but having
tampered with its lock also, I easily entered, and
despite the black darkness soon stood by the side of
her bed. My groping hands told me that although
disarranged it was unoccupied.
  'She is below,' I thought, 'and terrified by my
entrance has evaded me in the darkness of the hall.'
With the purpose of seeking her I turned to leave
the room, but took a wrong direction--the right
one! My foot struck her, cowering in a corner of the
room. Instantly my hands were at her throat, stifling
a shriek, my knees were upon her struggling body;
and there in the darkness, without a word of accusa-
tion or reproach, I strangled her till she died!
There ends the dream. I have related it in the past
tense, but the present would be the fitter form, for
again and again the sombre tragedy re-enacts itself
in my consciousness--over and over I lay the plan,
I suffer the confirmation, I redress the wrong. Then
all is blank; and afterward the rains beat against the
grimy windowpanes, or the snows fall upon my
scant attire, the wheels rattle in the squalid streets
where my life lies in poverty and mean employment.
If there is ever sunshine I do not recall it; if there
are birds they do not sing.
  There is another dream, another vision of the
night. I stand among the shadows in a moonlit road.
I am aware of another presence, but whose I cannot
rightly determine. In the shadow of a great dwelling
I catch the gleam of white garments; then the figure
of a woman confronts me in the road--my mur-
dered wife! There is death in the face; there are
marks upon the throat. The eyes are fixed on mine
with an infinite gravity which is not reproach, nor
hate, nor menace, nor anything less terrible than
recognition. Before this awful apparition I retreat in
terror--a terror that is upon me as I write. I can
no longer rightly shape the words. See! they--
  Now I am calm, but truly there is no more to tell:
the incident ends where it began--in darkness and
in doubt.
  Yes, I am again in control of myself: 'the captain
of my soul.' But that is not respite; it is another stage
and phase of expiation. My penance, constant in de-
gree, is mutable in kind: one of its variants is tran-
quillity. After all, it is only a life-sentence. 'To Hell
for life'--that is a foolish penalty: the culprit
chooses the duration of his punishment. To-day my
term expires.
  To each and all, the peace that was not mine.

3: Statement of the Late Julia Hetman, through the
Medium Bayrolles

  I had retired early and fallen almost immediately
into a peaceful sleep, from which I awoke with that
indefinable sense of peril which is, I think, a com-
mon experience in that other, earlier life. Of its
unmeaning character, too, I was entirely persuaded,
yet that did not banish it. My husband, Joel Het-
man, was away from home; the servants slept in
another part of the house. But these were familiar
conditions; they had never before distressed me.
Nevertheless, the strange terror grew so insupport-
able that conquering my reluctance to move I sat
up and lit the lamp at my bedside. Contrary to my
expectation this gave me no relief; the light seemed
rather an added danger, for I reflected that it would
shine out under the door, disclosing my presence to
whatever evil thing might lurk outside. You that
are still in the flesh, subject to horrors of the imagi-
nation, think what a monstrous fear that must be
which seeks in darkness security from malevolent
existences of the night. That is to spring to close
quarters with an unseen enemy--the strategy of
despair!
  Extinguishing the lamp I pulled the bedclothing
about my head and lay trembling and silent, unable
to shriek, forgetful to pray. In this pitiable state I
must have lain for what you call hours--with us
there are no hours, there is no time.
  At last it came--a soft, irregular sound of footfalls
on the stairs! They were slow, hesitant, uncertain,
as of something that did not see its way; to my dis-
ordered reason all the more terrifying for that, as
the approach of some blind and mindless malevo-
lence to which is no appeal. I even thought that I
must have left the hall lamp burning and the grop-
ing of this creature proved it a monster of the night.
This was foolish and inconsistent with my previous
dread of the light, but what would you have? Fear
has no brains; it is an idiot. The dismal witness that
it bears and the cowardly counsel that it whispers
are unrelated. We know this well, we who have
passed into the Realm of Terror, who skulk in
eternal dusk among the scenes of our former lives,
invisible even to ourselves, and one another, yet
hiding forlorn in lonely places; yearning for speech
with our loved ones, yet dumb, and as fearful of
them as they of us. Sometimes the disability is re-
moved, the law suspended: by the deathless power
of love or hate we break the spell--we are seen by
those whom we would warn, console, or punish. What
form we seem to them to bear we know not; we
know only that we terrify even those whom we most
wish to comfort, and from whom we most crave
tenderness and sympathy.
  Forgive, I pray you, this inconsequent digression
by what was once a woman. You who consult us in
this imperfect way--you do not understand. You
ask foolish questions about things unknown and
things forbidden. Much that we know and could
impart in our speech is meaningless in yours. We
must communicate with you through a stammering
intelligence in that small fraction of our language
that you yourselves can speak. You think that we
are of another world. No, we have knowledge of no
world but yours, though for us it holds no sunlight,
no warmth, no music, no laughter, no song of birds,
nor any companionship. O God! what a thing it is
to be a ghost, cowering and shivering in an altered
world, a prey to apprehension and despair!
  No, I did not die of fright: the Thing turned and
went away. I heard it go down the stairs, hurriedly,
I thought, as if itself in sudden fear. Then I rose to
call for help. Hardly had my shaking hand found
the door-knob when--merciful heaven!--I heard
it returning. Its footfalls as it remounted the stairs
were rapid, heavy and loud; they shook the house. I
fled to an angle of the wall and crouched upon the
floor. I tried to pray. I tried to call the name of my
dear husband. Then I heard the door thrown open.
There was an interval of unconsciousness, and when
I revived I felt a strangling clutch upon my throat--
felt my arms feebly beating against something that
bore me backward--felt my tongue thrusting itself
from between my teeth! And then I passed into this
life.
  No, I have no knowledge of what it was. The sum
of what we knew at death is the measure of what we
know afterward of all that went before. Of this exist-
ence we know many things, but no new light falls
upon any page of that; in memory is written all of it
that we can read. Here are no heights of truth over-
looking the confused landscape of that dubitable
domain. We still dwell in the Valley of the Shadow,
lurk in its desolate places, peering from brambles and
thickets at its mad, malign inhabitants. How should
we have new knowledge of that fading past?
  What I am about to relate happened on a night.
We know when it is night, for then you retire to your
houses and we can venture from our places of con-
cealment to move unafraid about our old homes, to
look in at the windows, even to enter and gaze upon
your faces as you sleep. I had lingered long near the
dwelling where I had been so cruelly changed to what
I am, as we do while any that we love or hate re-
main. Vainly I had sought some method of manifes-
tation, some way to make my continued existence
and my great love and poignant pity understood by
my husband and son. Always if they slept they
would wake, or if in my desperation I dared ap-
proach them when they were awake, would turn
toward me the terrible eyes of the living, frightening
me by the glances that I sought from the purpose
that I held.
  On this night I had searched for them without
success, fearing to find them; they were nowhere
in the house, nor about the moonlit dawn. For, al-
though the sun is lost to us for ever, the moon, full-
orbed or slender, remains to us. Sometimes it shines
by night, sometimes by day, but always it rises and
sets, as in that other life.
  I left the lawn and moved in the white light and
silence along the road, aimless and sorrowing. Sud-
denly I heard the voice of my poor husband in
exclamations of astonishment, with that of my son
in reassurance and dissuasion; and there by the
shadow of a group of trees they stood--near, so
near! Their faces were toward me, the eyes of the
elder man fixed upon mine. He saw me--at last, at
last, he saw me! In the consciousness of that, my
terror fled as a cruel dream. The death-spell was
broken: Love had conquered Law! Mad with exulta-
tion I shouted--I must have shouted,' He sees, he
sees: he will understand!' Then, controlling myself,
I moved forward, smiling and consciously beautiful,
to offer myself to his arms, to comfort him with en-
dearments, and, with my son's hand in mine, to
speak words that should restore the broken bonds
between the living and the dead.
  Alas! alas! his face went white with fear, his eyes
were as those of a hunted animal. He backed away
from me, as I advanced, and at last turned and fled
into the wood--whither, it is not given to me to
know.
  To my poor boy, left doubly desolate, I have never
been able to impart a sense of my presence. Soon he,
too, must pass to this Life Invisible and be lost to
me for ever.


A DIAGNOSIS OF DEATH

'I AM not so superstitious as some of your phy-
sicians--men of science, as you are pleased to be
called,' said Hawver, replying to an accusation that
had not been made. 'Some of you--only a few, I
confess--believe in the immortality of the soul,
and in apparitions which you have not the honesty
to call ghosts. I go no further than a conviction that
the living are sometimes seen where they are not,
but have been--where they have lived so long, per-
haps so intensely, as to have left their impress on
everything about them. I know, indeed, that one's
environment may be so affected by one's personality
as to yield, long afterward, an image of one's self
to the eyes of another. Doubtless the impressing
personality has to be the right kind of personality as
the perceiving eyes have to be the right kind of
eyes--mine, for example.'
  'Yes, the right kind of eyes, conveying sensa-
tions to the wrong kind of brains,' said Dr. Frayley,
smiling.
  'Thank you; one likes to have an expectation
gratified; that is about the reply that I supposed
you would have the civility to make.'
  'Pardon me. But you say that you know. That is
a good deal to say, don't you think? Perhaps you
will not mind the trouble of saying how you learned.'
  'You will call it an hallucination,' Hawver
said, 'but that does not matter.' And he told the
story.
  'Last summer I went, as you know, to pass the
hot weather term in the town of Meridian. The rela-
tive at whose house I had intended to stay was ill, so
I sought other quarters. After some difficulty I suc-
ceeded in renting a vacant dwelling that had been
occupied by an eccentric doctor of the name of
Mannering, who had gone away years before, no
one knew where, not even his agent. He had built
the house himself and had lived in it with an old
servant for about ten years. His practice, never very
extensive, had after a few years been given up en-
tirely. Not only so, but he had withdrawn himself
almost altogether from social life and become a
recluse. I was told by the village doctor, about the
only person with whom he held any relations, that
during his retirement he had devoted himself to
a single line of study, the result of which he had
expounded in a book that did not commend itself to
the approval of his professional brethren, who, in-
deed, considered him not entirely sane. I have not
seen the book and cannot now recall the title of it, but
I am told that it expounded a rather startling theory.
He held that it was possible in the case of many a
person in good health to forecast his death with
precision, several months in advance of the event.
The limit, I think, was eighteen months. There were
local tales of his having exerted his powers of prog-
nosis, or perhaps you would say diagnosis; and it
was said that in every instance the person whose
friends he had warned had died suddenly at the
appointed time, and from no assignable cause. All
this, however, has nothing to do with what I have
to tell; I thought it might amuse a physician.
  'The house was furnished, just as he had lived in
it. It was a rather gloomy dwelling for one who was
neither a recluse nor a student, and I think it gave
something of its character to me--perhaps some
of its former occupant's character; for always I felt
in it a certain melancholy that was not in my natural
disposition, nor, I think, due to loneliness. I had no
servants that slept in the house, but I have always
been, as you know, rather fond of my own society,
being much addicted to reading, though little to
study. Whatever was the cause, the effect was dejec-
tion and a sense of impending evil; this was espe-
cially so in Dr. Mannering's study, although that
room was the lightest and most airy in the house.
The doctor's life-size portrait in oil hung in that
room, and seemed completely to dominate it. There
was nothing unusual in the picture; the man was
evidently rather good looking, about fifty years old,
with iron-grey hair, a smooth-shaven face and dark,
serious eyes. Something in the picture always drew
and held my attention. The man's appearance
became familiar to me, and rather "haunted"
me.
  'One evening I was passing through this room to
my bedroom, with a lamp--there is no gas in Me-
ridian. I stopped as usual before the portrait, which
seemed in the lamplight to have a new expression,
not easily named, but distinctly uncanny. It inter-
ested but did not disturb me. I moved the lamp from
one side to the other and observed the effects of the
altered light. While so engaged I felt an impulse to
turn round. As I did so I saw a man moving across
the room directly toward me! As soon as he came
near enough for the lamplight to illuminate the face
I saw that it was Dr. Mannering himself; it was
as if the portrait were walking!
  '"I beg your pardon," I said, somewhat coldly,
"but if you knocked I did not hear."
  'He passed me, within an arm's length, lifted his
right forefinger, as in warning, and without a word
went on out of the room, though I observed his
exit no more than I had observed his entrance.
  'Of course, I need not tell you that this was what
you will call a hallucination and I call an appari-
tion. That room had only two doors, of which one
was locked; the other led into a bedroom, from
which there was no exit. My feeling on realizing this
is not an important part of the incident.
  'Doubtless this seems to you a very commonplace
"ghost story"--one constructed on the regular
lines laid down by the old masters of the art. If that
were so I should not have related it, even if it were
true. The man was not dead; I met him to-day in
Union Street. He passed me in a crowd.'
  Hawver had finished his story and both men were
silent. Dr. Frayley absently drummed on the table
with his fingers.
  'Did he say anything to-day?' he asked--'any-
thing from which you inferred that he was not
dead?'
  Hawver stared and did not reply.
  'Perhaps,' continued Frayley,' he made a sign, a
gesture--lifted a finger, as in warning. It's a trick
he had--a habit when saying something serious--
announcing the result of a diagnosis, for example.'
  'Yes, he did--just as his apparition had done.
But, good God! did you ever know him?'
  Hawver was apparently growing nervous.
  'I knew him. I have read his book, as will every
physician some day. It is one of the most striking
and important of the century's contributions to medi-
cal science. Yes, I knew him; I attended him in an
illness three years ago. He died.'
  Hawver sprang from his chair, manifestly dis-
turbed. He strode forward and back across the
room; then approached his friend, and in a voice
not altogether steady, said: 'Doctor, have you any-
thing to say to me--as a physician? '
  'No, Hawver; you are the healthiest man I ever
knew. As a friend I advise you to go to your room.
You play the violin like an angel. Play it; play some-
thing light and lively. Get this cursed bad business
off your mind.'
  The next day Hawver was found dead in his room,
the violin at his neck, the bow upon the string, his
music open before him at Chopin's Funeral March.


MOXON'S MASTER

'ARE you serious?--do you really believe that a
machine thinks?'
  I got no immediate reply; Moxon was apparently
intent upon the coals in the grate, touching them
deftly here and there with the fire-poker till they
signified a sense of his attention by a brighter glow.
For several weeks I had been observing in him a
growing habit of delay in answering even the most
trivial of commonplace questions. His air, however,
was that of preoccupation rather than deliberation:
one might have said that he had 'something on his
mind.'
  Presently he said:
  'What is a "machine"? The word has been va-
riously defined. Here is one definition from a popu-
lar dictionary: "Any instrument or organization by
which power is applied and made effective, or a
desired effect produced." Well, then, is not a man a
machine? And you will admit that he thinks--or
thinks he thinks.'
  'If you do not wish to answer my question,'
said, rather testily, 'why not say so?--all
that you say is mere evasion. You know well
enough that when I say "machine" I do not mean
a man, but something that man has made and con-
trols.'
  'When it does not control him,' he said, rising
abruptly and looking out of a window, whence noth-
ing was visible in the blackness of a stormy night.
A moment later he turned about and with a smile
said: 'I beg your pardon; I had no thought of eva-
sion. I considered the dictionary man's unconscious
testimony suggestive and worth something in the
discussion. I can give your question a direct answer
easily enough: I do believe that a machine thinks
about the work that it is doing.'
  That was direct enough, certainly. It was not al-
together pleasing, for it tended to confirm a sad
suspicion that Moxon's devotion to study and work
in his machine-shop had not been good for him. I
knew, for one thing, that he suffered from insomnia,
and that is no light affliction. Had it affected his
mind? His reply to my question seemed to me then
evidence that it had; perhaps I should think dif-
ferently about it now. I was younger then, and
among the blessings that are not denied to youth
is ignorance. Incited by that great stimulant to con-
troversy, I said:
  'And what, pray, does it think with--in the ab-
sence of a brain?'
  The reply, coming with less than his customary
delay, took his favourite form of counter-interroga-
tion:
  'With what does a plant think--in the absence of
a brain?'
  'Ah, plants also belong to the philosopher class!
I should be pleased to know some of their conclu-
sions; you may omit the premises.'
  'Perhaps,' he replied, apparently unaffected by
my foolish irony, 'you may be able to infer their
convictions from their acts. I will spare you the
familiar examples of the sensitive mimosa, the sev-
eral insectivorous flowers and those whose stamens
bend down and shake their pollen upon the enter-
ing bee in order that he may fertilize their distant
mates. But observe this. In an open spot in my
garden I planted a climbing vine. When it was barely
above the surface I set a stake into the soil a yard
away. The vine at once made for it, but as it was
about to reach it after several days I removed it
a few feet. The vine at once altered its course, mak-
ing an acute angle, and again made for the stake.
This manoeuvre was repeated several times, but
finally, as if discouraged, the vine abandoned the
pursuit and ignoring further attempts to divert it,
travelled to a small tree, farther away, which it
climbed.
  'Roots of the eucalyptus will prolong themselves
incredibly in search of moisture. A well-known horti-
culturist relates that one entered an old drain-pipe
and followed it until it came to a break, where a
section of the pipe had been removed to make way
for a stone wall that had been built across its course.
The root left the drain and followed the wall until
it found an opening where a stone had fallen out. It
crept through and following the other side of the
wall back to the drain, entered the unexplored part
and resumed its journey.'
  'And all this?'
  'Can you miss the significance of it? It shows the
consciousness of plants. It proves that they think.'
  'Even if it did--what then? We were speaking,
not of plants, but of machines. They may be com-
posed partly of wood--wood that has no longer vi-
tality--or wholly of metal. Is thought an attribute
also of the mineral kingdom?'
  'How else do you explain the phenomena, for
example, of crystallization?'
  'I do not explain them.'
  'Because you cannot without affirming what you
wish to deny, namely, intelligent co-operation, among
the constituent elements of the crystals. When sol-
diers form lines, or hollow squares, you call it reason.
When wild geese in flight take the form of a letter
V you say instinct. When the homogeneous atoms of
a mineral, moving freely in solution, arrange them-
selves into shapes mathematically perfect, or par-
ticles of frozen moisture into the symmetrical and
beautiful forms of snowflakes, you have nothing to
say. You have not even invented a name to conceal
your heroic unreason.'
  Moxon was speaking with unusual animation and
earnestness. As he paused I heard in an adjoining
room known to me as his 'machine-shop,' which no
one but himself was permitted to enter, a singular
thumping sound, as of someone pounding upon a
table with an open hand. Moxon heard it at the same
moment and, visibly agitated, rose and hurriedly
passed into the room whence it came. I thought it
odd that anyone else should be in there, and my
interest in my friend--with doubtless a touch of
unwarrantable curiosity--led me to listen intently,
though, I am happy to say, not at the keyhole. There
were confused sounds, as of a struggle or scuffle;
the floor shook. I distinctly heard hard breathing and
a hoarse whisper which said 'Damn you!' Then
all was silent, and presently Moxon reappeared and
said, with a rather sorry smile:
  'Pardon me for leaving you so abruptly. I have a
machine in there that lost its temper and cut up
rough.'
  Fixing my eyes steadily upon his left cheek, which
was traversed by four parallel excoriations showing
blood, I said:
  'How would it do to trim its nails?'
I could have spared myself the jest; he gave it no
attention, but seated himself in the chair that he had
left and resumed the interrupted monologue as if
nothing had occurred:
  'Doubtless you do not hold with those (I need not
name them to a man of your reading) who have
taught that all matter is sentient, that every atom
is a living, feeling, conscious being. I do. There is no
such thing as dead, inert matter: it is all alive; all
instinct with force, actual and potential; all sensitive
to the same forces in its environment and susceptible
to the contagion of higher and subtler ones residing
in such superior organisms as it may be brought into
relation with, as those of man when he is fashioning
it into an instrument of his will. It absorbs some-
thing of his intelligence and purpose--more of them
in proportion to the complexity of the resulting ma-
chine and that of its work.
  'Do you happen to recall Herbert Spencer's defi-
nition of "Life"? I read it thirty years ago. He may
have altered it afterward, for anything I know, but
in all that time I have been unable to think of a
single word that could profitably be changed or
added or removed. It seems to me not only the best
definition, but the only possible one.
  '"Life," he says, "is a definite combination of
heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and suc-
cessive, in correspondence with external coexistences
and sequences."'
  'That defines the phenomenon,' I said, 'but gives
no hint of its cause.'
  'That,' he replied, 'is all that any definition can
do. As Mill points out, we know nothing of cause
except as an antecedent--nothing of effect except as
a consequent. Of certain phenomena, one never oc-
curs without another, which is dissimilar: the first in
point of time we call cause, the second, effect. One
who had many times seen a rabbit pursued by a dog,
and had never seen rabbits and dogs otherwise,
would think the rabbit the cause of the dog.
  'But I fear,' he added, laughing naturally enough,
'that my rabbit is leading me a long way from the
track of my legitimate quarry: I'm indulging in the
pleasure of the chase for its own sake. What I want
you to observe is that in Herbert Spencer's defini-
tion of "life" the activity of a machine is included
--there is nothing in the definition that is not ap-
plicable to it. According to this sharpest of observers
and deepest of thinkers, if a man during his period
of activity is alive, so is a machine when in opera-
tion. As an inventor and constructor of machines I
know that to be true.'
  Moxon was silent for a long time, gazing absently
into the fire. It was growing late and I thought it
time to be going, but somehow I did not like the
notion of leaving him in that isolated house, all alone
except for the presence of some person of whose
nature my conjectures could go no further than that
it was unfriendly, perhaps malign. Leaning toward
him and looking earnestly into his eyes while making
a motion with my hand through the door of his
workshop, I said:
  'Moxon, whom have you in there?'
  Somewhat to my surprise he laughed lightly and
answered without hesitation:
  'Nobody; the incident that you have in mind was
caused by my folly in leaving a machine in action
with nothing to act upon, while I undertook the in-
terminable task of enlightening your understanding.
Do you happen to know that Consciousness is the
creature of Rhythm?'
  'O bother them both!' I replied, rising and laying
hold of my overcoat. 'I'm going to wish you good
night; and I'll add the hope that the machine which
you inadvertently left in action will have her gloves
on the next time you think it needful to stop her.'
  Without waiting to observe the effect of my shot I
left the house.
  Rain was falling, and the darkness was intense. In
the sky beyond the crest of a hill toward which I
groped my way along precarious plank sidewalks
and across miry, unpaved streets I could see the
faint glow of the city's lights, but behind me nothing
was visible but a single window of Moxon's house.
It glowed with what seemed to me a mysterious and
fateful meaning. I knew it was an uncurtained aper-
ture in my friend's 'machine-shop,' and I had little
doubt that he had resumed the studies interrupted
by his duties as my instructor in mechanical con-
sciousness and the fatherhood of Rhythm. Odd, and
in some degree humorous, as his convictions seemed
to me at that time, I could not wholly divest myself
of the feeling that they had some tragic relation to
his life and character--perhaps to his destiny--al-
though I no longer entertained the notion that they
were the vagaries of a disordered mind. Whatever
might be thought of his views, his exposition of them
was too logical for that. Over and over, his last words
came back to me: 'Consciousness is the creature of
Rhythm.' Bald and terse as the statement was, I now
found it infinitely alluring. At each recurrence it
broadened in meaning and deepened in suggestion.
Why, here (I thought) is something upon which to
found a philosophy. If Consciousness is the product
of Rhythm all things are conscious, for all have mo-
tion, and all motion is rhythmic. I wondered if
Moxon knew the significance and breadth of his
thought--the scope of this momentous generaliza-
tion; or had he arrived at his philosophic faith by
the tortuous and uncertain road of observation?
That faith was then new to me, and all Moxon's
expounding had failed to make me a convert; but
now it seemed as if a great light shone about me, like
that which fell upon Saul of Tarsus; and out there in
the storm and darkness and solitude I experienced
what Lewes calls 'The endless variety and excite-
ment of philosophic thought.' I exulted in a new
sense of knowledge, a new pride of reason. My feet
seemed hardly to touch the earth; it was as if I were
uplifted and borne through the air by invisible
wings.
  Yielding to an impulse to seek further light from
him whom I now recognized as my master and guide,
I had unconsciously turned about, and almost before
I was aware of having done so found myself again
at Moxon's door. I was drenched with rain, but felt
no discomfort. Unable in my excitement to find the
doorbell I instinctively tried the knob. It turned and,
entering, I mounted the stairs to the room that I had
so recently left. All was dark and silent; Moxon, as
I had supposed, was in the adjoining room--the
'machine-shop.' Groping along the wall until
found the communicating door I knocked loudly
several times, but got no response, which I attributed
to the uproar outside, for the wind was blowing a
gale and dashing the rain against the thin walls in
sheets. The drumming upon the shingle roof span-
ning the unceiled room was loud and incessant.
I had never been invited into the machine-shop--
had, indeed, been denied admittance, as had all
others, with one exception, a skilled metal worker,
of whom no one knew anything except that his name
was Haley and his habit silence. But in my spiritual
exaltation, discretion and civility were alike for-
gotten, and I opened the door. What I saw took
all philosophical speculation out of me in short
order.
  Moxon sat facing me at the farther side of a small
table upon which a single candle made all the light
that was in the room. Opposite him, his back toward
me, sat another person. On the table between the two
was a chess-board; the men were playing. I knew
little of chess, but as only a few pieces were on the
board it was obvious that the game was near its
close. Moxon was intensely interested--not so
much, it seemed to me, in the game as in his antago-
nist, upon whom he had fixed so intent a look that,
standing though I did directly in the line of his
vision, I was altogether unobserved. His face was
ghastly white, and his eyes glittered like diamonds.
Of his antagonist I had only a back view, but that
was sufficient; I should not have cared to see his
face.
  He was apparently not more than five feet in
height, with proportions suggesting those of a go-
rilla--a tremendous breadth of shoulders, thick,
short neck and broad, squat head, which had a
tangled growth of black hair and was topped with
a crimson fez. A tunic of the same colour, belted
tightly to the waist, reached the seat--apparently a
box--upon which he sat; his legs and feet were not
seen. His left forearm appeared to rest in his lap;
he moved his pieces with his right hand, which
seemed disproportionately long.
  I had shrunk back and now stood a little to one
side of the doorway and in shadow. If Moxon had
looked farther than the face of his opponent he
could have observed nothing now, except that the
door was open. Something forbade me either to
enter or to retire, a feeling--I know not how it
came--that I was in the presence of an imminent
tragedy and might serve my friend by remaining.
With a scarcely conscious rebellion against the in-
delicacy of the act I remained.
  The play was rapid. Moxon hardly glanced at the
board before making his moves, and to my un-
skilled eye seemed to move the piece most con-
venient to his hand, his motions in doing so being
quick, nervous and lacking in precision. The response
of his antagonist, while equally prompt in the incep-
tion, was made with a slow, uniform, mechanical and,
I thought, somewhat theatrical movement of the
arm, that was a sore trial to my patience. There
was something unearthly about it all, and I caught
myself shuddering. But I was wet and cold.
Two or three times after moving a piece the
stranger slightly inclined his head, and each time I
observed that Moxon shifted his king. All at once
the thought came to me that the man was dumb.
And then that he was a machine--an automaton
chess-player! Then I remembered that Moxon had
once spoken to me of having invented such a piece
of mechanism, though I did not understand that it
had actually been constructed. Was all his talk about
the consciousness and intelligence of machines
merely a prelude to eventual exhibition of this de-
vice--only a trick to intensify the effect of its
mechanical action upon me in my ignorance of its
secret?
  A fine end, this, of all my intellectual transports
--my 'endless variety and excitement of philo-
sophic thought'! I was about to retire in disgust
when something occurred to hold my curiosity. I
observed a shrug of the thing's great shoulders, as
if it were irritated: and so natural was this--so
entirely human--that in my new view of the matter
it startled me. Nor was that all, for a moment later
it struck the table sharply with its clenched hand.
At that gesture Moxon seemed even more startled
than I: he pushed his chair a little backward, as in
alarm.
  Presently Moxon, whose play it was, raised his
hand high above the board, pounced upon one of his
pieces like a sparrow-hawk and with the exclama-
tion 'check-mate!' rose quickly to his feet and
stepped behind his chair. The automaton sat mo-
tionless.
  The wind had now gone down, but I heard, at
lessening intervals and progressively louder, the
rumble and roll of thunder. In the pauses between
I now became conscious of a low humming or buzz-
ing which, like the thunder, grew momentarily
louder and more distinct. It seemed to come from
the body of the automaton, and was unmistakably
a whirring of wheels. It gave me the impression of
a disordered mechanism which had escaped the re-
pressive and regulating action of some controlling
part--an effect such as might be expected if a
pawl should be jostled from the teeth of a ratchet-
wheel. But before I had time for much conjecture
as to its nature my attention was taken by the
strange motions of the automaton itself. A slight but
continuous convulsion appeared to have possession
of it. In body and head it shook like a man with palsy
or an ague chill, and the motion augmented every
moment until the entire figure was in violent agita-
tion. Suddenly it sprang to its feet and with a move-
ment almost too quick for the eye to fol