brother's saddle, after some kind old straying ox, I was always satisfied to go where the horse would go. He could see better than I, and he could hear better, and if he tramped peacefully, the land was certainly clear of any evil thing.
We crossed the long wooded hill clattering like a troop of the queen's cavalry, and turned down toward the great level bow which the road makes before it crosses the Gauley. There was a dim light rising beyond the flat lands where the crooked elves toiled with their backs against the golden moon. But they were under the world yet, with only the yellow haze shining through the door. This was the acre of ghosts. Tale after tale I had heard, sitting on the knee of the old grey negro Clabe, about the horrors of this haunted "bend" in the Gauley. There, when I was a child, had lived old Bodkin in a stone house, now a ruin, by the river,—a crooked, mean old devil with a great hump, and eyes like a toad. He came to own the land through some suspicious will about which there clung the atmosphere of crime, as men said. When I saw him first, I was riding behind my brother, and he stopped us and tried to induce Ward to buy his land. He was mounted on a red roan horse, and looked like an old knotty spider.
I can still remember how frightened I was, and how I hid my face against my brother's coat and hugged him until my arms ached. When Ward inquired why he wished to sell, he laughed in a sort of cackle, and replied that he was going to marry a wife and go to the moon.
Now, tradition told that he had married many a wife, but that they died quickly in the poisoned chamber of this spider. Ward looked the bridegroom over from his twisted feet to his hump, and there must have been some merry shadow in his face, for Bodkin leaned over the horn of his saddle and stretched out his hand, a putty-coloured hand, with long, bony fingers. "Do you see that?" he croaked. "If I ever get that hand on a woman, she's mine."
Then I began to cry, and Ward wished the old man a happy voyage to the cloud island, and we rode on.
He did marry a wife, and one morning, but little afterwards, two of my brother's drivers found her hanging to the limb of a dead apple tree with a bridle rein knotted to her neck, and her bare feet touching the tops of the timothy grass. When they came to look for Bodkin, he had disappeared with his red roan horse. Ward explained that he had ridden through the gap of the mountains into the South, but I thought, with the negroes, that someone ought to have seen him if he had gone that way; besides, I had heard him say that he was going to the moon. Later, old Bart and Levi Dillworth, returning from some frolic, had seen Bodkin riding his horse in a terrible gallop, with the dead woman across the horn of his saddle, on his way to the moon.
It was true that both Bart and Levi were long in the bow arm, and men who loved truth less than they loved laurels. Still the tale had splendid conditions precedent, and old Clabe arose to its support with many an eloquent wag of his head.
I was running through this very ghost story when El Mahdi stopped in the road and pricked up his ears. At the same moment Jud and Ump pulled up beside me. Perhaps their minds were in the same channel. We listened for full a minute. Far down in the marsh land I could hear the frogs chanting their mighty chorus to the stars, and the little screech-owl whining from some tree-top far up against the hill. I was about to ride on when Jud caught at the rein and put up his hand. Then I heard the sound that the horse was listening to, but at the great distance it was only a sound, a faint, wavering, indefinite echo, coming up from the far-away bend of the Gauley. The rim of the moon was rising now out of the under world, and I watched the road trailing away into a deep shadow by the river. As I watched, I saw something rise out of this gloom and sweep down the dim road. It passed for a moment through a belt of moonlight, and I saw that it was a horse ridden by a shadow.
Then we clearly heard long, heavy galloping. Jud dropped my rein and wrenched the Cardinal around on his haunches. He was not afraid of the living, but he was afraid of the dead. As the horse reared, Ump caught the bit under his jaw and, throwing the Bay Eagle against him, wedged the horse and Jud in between El Mahdi and himself. Ump was neither afraid of the living nor the dead. He called to me, and I seized the Cardinal's bit on my side, gripping the iron shank with my fingers through the rein rings.
Panic was on the giant Jud, and he lifted the horse into the air, dragging Ump and myself half out of our saddles. Men in their hopeless egotism have far underestimated the good sense of the horse. The Cardinal was in no wise frightened. At once, it seemed to me, he recognised the irresponsibility of his rider. In some moment of the struggle the bit slipped forward, and the horse clamped his powerful jaws on it and set the great muscles in his neck to help us hold.
The horses rocked and plunged, but we held them together. The Bay Eagle, quick-witted as any woman, crowded the Cardinal close, throwing her weight against his shoulders, and El Mahdi, indifferent, but stubborn as an ox, held his ground as though he were bolted to the road.
I heard Ump cursing, now Jud for his cowardice, now the ghost for its infernal riding. "Damn you, fool! Stay an' see it. Stay an' see it." And then, "Damn Bodkin an' his dead wife! If he rides this way, he stops here or he goes under to hell."
As for me, I was afraid. Only the swing and jamming of the struggle held me. The gallop of the advancing horse was now loud, clear, hammering like an anvil. It passed for a moment out of sight in a hollow of the road below. In the next instant it would be on us. The giant Jud made one last mighty effort. The Cardinal went straight into the air. I clung to the bit, dragged up out of the saddle. I felt my foot against the pommel, my knee against the steel shoulder of the great horse, my face under the Cardinal's wide red throat.
I heard the reins snap on both sides of the bit—pulled in two. And then the loud, harsh laugh of the man Ump.
"Hell! It's Jourdan an' Red Mike."
Chapter IV
Concerning Hawk Rufe
Old wise men in esoteric idiom, unintelligible to the vulgar, have endeavoured to write down in books how the human mind works in its house,—and I believe they have not succeeded very well. They have broken into this house when it was empty, and laboured to decipher the mystic hieroglyphics written on its walls, and learn to what uses the departed craftsman put the strange, delicate implements which they found fastened so primly in their places.
They have got at but little, as I have heard them say, deploring the brevity of life, and the tremendous magnitude of the labour. The learned, as one put it, had barely time to explain to his successor that he had found the problem unsolvable. I think they might as well have gone about tracking the rainbow, for all they have learned of this mysterious business.
In fewer moments than a singing maid takes to double back on her chorus, I had forgotten all about the ghost. I was sitting idly in the saddle now with the rein over my wrist. Jourdan's message from my brother had given enough to think of. I knew that Ward in the preceding autumn had bought the cattle of two great graziers south of the Valley River, to be taken up during the October month, but I did not know that on a summer afternoon he had sold these cattle to Woodford, binding himself to deliver them within three days after they were demanded.
The trade was fair enough when the two had made it. But now the price of beef cattle was off almost thirty dollars a bullock, and Woodford was in a position to lose more money than his bald-faced cattle-horse could carry in a sack. He had waited all along hoping for the tide to turn. Suddenly, to-day he had demanded his cattle.
To-day, when Ward was on his back and the cattle far to the south across the Valley River. It was the contract, and he had the right to do it, but it was like Woodford. Ward, helpless in his bed, had sent Jourdan on Red Mike to find us somewhere over the Gauley and bid us bring
