The Phantom Coach

 The circumstances I am about to relate to you have truth to recommend them.
They happened to myself, and my recollection of them is as vivid as if they had
taken place only yesterday Twenty years, however, have gone by since that night.
During those twenty years I have told the story to but one other person. I tell
it now with a reluctance which I find it difficult to overcome. All I entreat,
meanwhile, is that you will abstain from forcing your own conclusions upon me. I
want nothing explained away I desire no arguments. My mind on this subject is
quite made up, and, having the testimony of my own senses to rely upon, I prefer
to abide by it.
Well! It was just twenty years ago, and within a day or two of the end of
the grouse season. I had been out all day with my gun, and had no sport to
speak of. The wind was due east; the month, December; the place, a bleak wide
moor in the far north of England. And I had lost my way It was not a pleasant
place in which to lose one's way, with the first feathery flakes of a coming
snowstorm just fluttering down upon the heather, and the leaden evening closing
in all around. I shaded my eyes with my hand, and stared anxiously into the
gathering darkness, where the purple moorland melted into a range of low hills,
some ten or twelve miles distant. Not the faintest smoke-wreath, not the tiniest
cultivated patch, or fence, or sheep-track, met my eyes in any direction. There
was nothing for it but to walk on, and take my chance of finding what shelter I
could, by the way So I shouldered my gun again, and pushed wearily forward; for
I had been on foot since an hour after daybreak, and had eaten nothing since
breakfast.
Meanwhile, the snow began to come down with ominous steadiness, and the wind
fell. After this, the cold became more intense, and the night came rapidly up.
As for me, my prospects darkened with the darkening sky, and my heart grew heavy
as I thought how my young wife was already watching for me through the window of
our little inn parlour, and thought of all the suffering in store for her
throughout this weary night. We had been married four months, and, having spent
our autumn in the Highlands, were now lodging in a remote little village
situated just on the verge of the great English moorlands. We were very much in
love, and, of course, very happy This morning, when we parted, she had implored
me to return before dusk, and I had promised her that I would. What would I not
have given to have kept my word!
Even now, weary as I was, I felt that with a supper, an hour's rest, and a
guide, I might still get back to her before midnight, if only guide and shelter
could be found.
And all this time, the snow fell and the night thickened. 1 stopped and
shouted every now and then, but my shouts seemed only to make the silence
deeper. Then a vague sense of uneasiness came upon me, and I began to remember
stories of travellers who had walked on and on in the falling snow until,
wearied out, they were fain to lie down and sleep their lives away Would it be
possible, I asked myself, to keep on thus through all the long dark night? Would
there not come a time when my limbs must fail, and my resolution give way? When
I, too, must sleep the sleep of death. Death! I shuddered. How hard to die just
now, when life lay all so bright before me! How hard for my darling, whose whole
loving heart but that thought was not to be borne! To banish it, I shouted
again, louder and longer, and then listened eagerly. Was my shout answered, or
did I only fancy that I heard a far-off cry? I halloed again, and again the echo
followed. Then a wavering speck of light came suddenly out of the dark,
shifting, disappearing, growing momentarily nearer and brighter. Running towards
it at full speed, I found myself, to my great joy, face to face with an old man
and a lantern.
'Thank God!' was the exclamation that burst involuntarily from my lips.
Blinking and frowning, he lifted his lantern and peered into my face.
'What for?' growled he, sulkily.
'Well-for you. I began to fear I should be lost in the snow.
'Eh, then, folks do get cast away hereabout fra' time to time, an' what's to
hinder you from bein' cast away likewise, if the Lord's so minded?'
'If the Lord is so minded that you and I shall be lost together, friend, we
must submit,' I replied; 'but I don't mean to be lost without you. How far am I
now from Dwolding?'
A gude twenty mile, more or less.' And the nearest village?'
'The nearest village is Wyke, an' that's twelve mile t'other side.'
'Where do you live, then?'
'Out yonder,' said he, with a vague jerk of the lantern.
'You're going home, I presume?'
'Maybe I am.'
'Then I'm going with you.'
The old man shook his head, and rubbed his nose reflectively with the handle
of the lantern.
'It ain't o' no use,' growled he. 'He 'ont let you in-not he.'
'We'll see about that,' I replied, briskly. 'Who is He?'
'The master.'
'Who is the master?'
'That's nowt to you,' was the unceremonious reply.
'Well, well; you lead the way, and I'll engage that the master shall give me
shelter and a supper tonight.'
'Eh, you can try him!' muttered my reluctant guide; and, still shaking his
head, he hobbled, gnome-like, away through the falling snow A large mass loomed
up presently out of the darkness, and a huge dog rushed out, barking furiously.
'Is this the house?' I asked.
'Ay, it's the house. Down, Bey!' And he fumbled in his pocket for the key.
I drew up close behind him, prepared to lose no chance of entrance, and saw
in the little circle of light shed by the lantern that the door was heavily
studded with iron nails, like the door of a prison. In another minute he had
turned the key and I had pushed past him into the house.
Once inside, I looked round with curiosity, and found myself in a great
raftered hall, which served, apparently, a variety of uses. One end was piled to
the roof with corn, like a barn. The other was stored with floursacks,
agricultural implements, casks, and all kinds of miscellaneous lumber; while
from the beams overhead hung rows of hams, flitches, and bunches of dried herbs
for winter use. In the centre of the floor stood some huge object gauntly
dressed in a dingy wrapping-cloth, and reaching half way to the rafters. Lifting
a corner of this cloth, I saw, to my surprise, a telescope of very considerable
size, mounted on a rude movable platform, with four small wheels. The tube was
made of painted wood, bound round with bands of metal rudely fashioned; the
speculum, so far as I could estimate its size in the dim light, measured at
least fifteen inches in diameter. While I was yet examining the instrument; and
asking myself whether it was not the work of some self-taught optician, a bell
rang sharply.
'That's for you,' said my guide, with a malicious grin. 'Yonder's his room.
He pointed to a low black door at the opposite side of the hall. I crossed
over, rapped somewhat loudly, and went in, without waiting for an invitation. A
huge, white-haired old man rose from a table covered with books and papers, and
confronted me sternly
'Who are you?' said he. 'How came you here? What do you want?'
'James Murray, barrister-at-law On foot across the moor. Meat, drink, and
sleep.'
He bent his bushy brows into a portentous frown.
'Mine is not a house of entertainment,' he said, haughtily. 'Jacob, how
dared you admit this stranger?'
'I didn't admit him,' grumbled the old man. 'He followed me over the muir,
and shouldered his way in before me. I'm no match for six foot two.'
'And pray, sir, by what right have you forced an entrance into my house?'
'The same by which I should have clung to your boat, if I were drowning. The
right of self-preservation.'
'Self-preservation?'
'There's an inch of snow on the ground already,' I replied, briefly; 'and it
would be deep enough to cover my body before daybreak.'
He strode to the window, pulled aside a heavy black curtain, and looked out.
'It is true,' he said. 'You can stay, if you choose, till morning. Jacob,
serve the supper.'
With this he waved me to a seat, resumed his own, and became at once
absorbed in the studies from which I had disturbed him.
I placed my gun in a corner, drew a chair to the hearth, and examined my
quarters at leisure. Smaller and less incongruous in its arrangements than the
hall, this room contained, nevertheless, much to awaken my curiosity. The floor
was carpetless. The whitewashed walls were in parts scrawled over with strange
diagrams, and in others covered with shelves crowded with philosophical
instruments, the uses of many of which were unknown to me. On one side of the
fireplace, stood a bookcase filled with dingy folios; on the other, a small
organ, fantastically decorated with painted carvings of medieval saints and
devils. Through the half-opened door of a cupboard at the further end of the
room, I saw a long array of geological specimens, surgical preparations,
crucibles, retorts, and jars of chemicals; while on the mantelshelf beside me,
amid a number of small objects, stood a model of the solar system, a small
galvanic battery, and a microscope. Every chair had its burden. Every corner was
heaped high with books. The very floor was littered over with maps, casts,
papers, tracings, and learned lumber of all conceivable kinds.
I stared about me with an amazement increased by every fresh object upon
which my eyes chanced to rest. So strange a room I had never seen yet seemed it
stranger still, to find such a room in a lone farmhouse amid those wild and
solitary moors! Over and over again, I looked from my host to his surroundings,
and from his surroundings back to my host, asking myself who and what he could
be? His head was singularly fine; but it was more the head of a poet than of a
philosopher. Broad in the temples, prominent over the eyes, and clothed with a
rough profusion of
perfectly white hair, it had all the ideality and much of the ruggedness
that characterises the head of Louis von Beethoven. There were the same deep
lines about the mouth, and the same stern furrows in the brow There was the same
concentration of expression. While I was yet observing him, the door opened, and
Jacob brought in the supper. His master then closed his book, rose, and with
more courtesy of manner than he had yet shown, invited me to the table.
A dish of ham and eggs, a loaf of brown bread, and a bottle of admirable
sherry, were placed before me.
'I have but the homeliest farmhouse fare to offer you, sir,' said my
entertainer. 'Your appetite, I trust, will make up for the deficiencies of our
larder.'
I had already fallen upon the viands, and now protested, with the enthusiasm
of a starving sportsman, that I had never eaten anything so delicious.
He bowed stiffly, and sat down to his own supper, which consisted,
primitively, of a jug of milk and a basin of porridge. We ate in silence, and,
when we had done, Jacob removed the tray. I then drew my chair back to the
fireside. My host, somewhat to my surprise, did the same, and turning abruptly
towards me, said:
'Sir, I have lived here in strict retirement for three-and-twenty years.
During that time, I have not seen as many strange faces, and I have not read a
single newspaper. You are the first stranger who has crossed my threshold for
more than four years. Will you favour me with a few words of information
respecting that outer world from which I have parted company so long?'
'Pray interrogate me,' I replied. 'I am heartily at your service.'
He bent his head in acknowledgment, leaned forward, with his elbows resting
on his knees and his chin supported in the palms of his hands; stared fixedly
into the fire; and proceeded to question me.
His inquiries related chiefly to scientific matters, with the later progress
of which, as applied to the practical purposes of life, he was almost wholly
unacquainted. No student of science myself, I replied as well as my slight
information permitted; but the task was far from easy, and I was much relieved
when, passing from interrogation to discussion, he began pouring forth his own
conclusions upon the facts which I had been attempting to place before him. He
talked, and I listened spellbound. He talked till I believe he almost forgot my
presence, and only thought aloud. I had never heard anything like it then; I
have never heard anything like it since. Familiar with all systems of all
philosophies, subtle in analysis, bold in generalisation, he poured forth his
thoughts in an uninterrupted stream, and, still leaning forward in the same
moody attitude with his eyes fixed upon the fire, wandered from topic to topic,
from speculation to speculation, like an inspired dreamer. From practical
science to mental philosophy; from electricity in the wire to electricity in the
nerve; from Watts to Mesmer, from Mesmer to Reichenbach, from Reichenbach to
Swedenborg, Spinoza, Condillac, Descartes, Berkeley, Aristotle, Plato, and the
Magi and mystics of the East, were transitions which, however bewildering in
their variety and scope, seemed easy and harmonious upon his lips as sequences
in music. 13y-and-by-I forget now by what link of conjecture or illustration-he
passed on to that field which lies beyond the boundary line of even conjectural
philosophy, and reaches no man knows whither. He spoke of the soul and its
aspirations; of the spirit and its powers; of second sight; of prophecy; of
those phenomena which, under the names of ghosts, spectres, and supernatural
appearances, have been denied by the sceptics and attested by the credulous, of
all ages.
'The world,' he said, 'grows hourly more and more sceptical of all that lies
beyond its own narrow radius; and our men of science foster the fatal tendency.
They condemn as fable all that resists experiment. They reject as false all that
cannot be brought to the test of the laboratory or the dissecting-room. Against
what superstition have they waged so long and obstinate a war, as against the
belief in apparitions? And yet what superstition has maintained its hold upon
the minds of men so long and so firmly? Show me any fact in physics, in history,
in archeology, which is supported by testimony so wide and so various. Attested
by all races of men, in all ages, and in all climates, by the soberest sages of
antiquity, by the rudest savage of today, by the Christian, the Pagan, the
Pantheist, the Materialist, this phenomenon is treated as a nursery tale by the
philosophers of our century. Circumstantial evidence weighs with them as a
feather in the balance. The comparison of causes with effects, however valuable
in physical science, is put aside as worthless and unreliable. The evidence of
competent witnesses, however conclusive in a court of justice, counts for
nothing. He who pauses before he pronounces, is condemned as a trifler. He who
believes, is a dreamer or a fool.'
He spoke with bitterness, and, having said thus, relapsed for some minutes
into silence. Presently he raised his head from his hands, and added, with an
altered voice and manner,
'I, sir, paused, investigated, believed, and was not ashamed to state my
convictions to the world. I, too, was branded as a visionary, held up to
ridicule by my contemporaries, and hooted from that field of science in which I
had laboured with honour during all the best years of my life. These things
happened just three-and-twenty years ago. Since then, I
have lived as you see me living now, and the world has forgotten me, as I
have forgotten the world. You have my history.'
'It is a very sad one,' I murmured, scarcely knowing what to answer.
'It is a very, common one,' he replied. 'I have only suffered for the truth,
as many a better and wiser man has suffered before me.
He rose, as if desirous of ending the conversation, and went over to the
window
'It has ceased snowing,' he observed, as he dropped the curtain, and came
back to the fireside.
'Ceased!' I exclaimed, starting eagerly to my feet. 'Oh, if it were only
possible-but no! it is hopeless. Even if I could find my way across the moor, I
could not walk twenty miles tonight.'
'Walk twenty miles tonight!' repeated my host. 'What are you thinking of?'
'Of my wife,' I replied, impatiently. 'Of my young wife, who does not know
that I have lost my way, and who is at this moment breaking her heart with
suspense and terror.'
'Where is she?'
At Dwolding, twenty miles away.'
'At Dwolding,' he echoed, thoughtfully. 'Yes, the distance, it is true, is
twenty miles; but-are you so very anxious to save the next six or eight hours?'
'So very, very anxious, that I would give ten guineas at this moment for a
guide and a horse.'
'Your wish can be gratified at a less costly rate,' said he, smiling. 'The
night mail from the north, which changes horses at Dwolding, passes within five
miles of this spot, and will be due at a certain cross-road in about an hour and
a quarter. If Jacob were to go with you across the moor, and put you into the
old coach-road, you could find your way, I suppose, to where it joins the new
one?'
'Easily-gladly.'
He smiled again, rang the bell, gave the old servant his directions, and,
taking a bottle of whisky and a wineglass from the cupboard in which he kept his
chemicals, said:
'The snow lies deep, and it will be difficult walking tonight on the moor. A
glass of usquebaugh before you start?'
I would have declined the spirit, but he pressed it on me, and I drank it.
It went down my throat like liquid flame, and almost took my breath away.
'It is strong,' he said; 'but it will help to keep out the cold. And now you
have no moments to spare. Good night!'
I thanked him for his hospitality, and would have shaken hands, but that he
had turned away before I could finish my sentence. In another minute I had
traversed the hall, Jacob had locked the outer door behind me, and we were out
on the wide white moor.
Although the wind had fallen, it was still bitterly cold. Not a star
glimmered in the black vault overhead Not a sound, save the rapid crunching of
the snow beneath our feet, disturbed the heavy stillness of the night. Jacob,
not too well pleased With his mission, shambled on before in sullen silence, his
lantern in h~5 hand, and his shadow at his feet. I followed, with my gun over my
shoulder, as little inclined for conversation as himself. My thoughts were full
of my late host. His voice yet rang in my ears. His eloquence yet held my
imagination captive. I remember to this day, with surprise, how my over-excited
brain retained whole sentences and parts of sentences, troops of brilliant
images, and fragments of splendid reasoning, in the very words in which he had
uttered them. Musing thus over what I had heard, and striving to recall a lost
link here and there, I strode on at the heels of my guide, absorbed and
unobservant. Presently-at the end, as it seemed to me, of only a few minutes-he
came to a sudden halt, and said:
'Yon's your road. Keep the stone fence to your right hand, and you can't
fail of the way.
'This, then, is the old coach-road?' Ay, 'tis the old coach-road.'
'And how far do I go, before I reach the cross-roads?' 'Nigh upon three
mile.'
I pulled out my purse, and he became more communicative.
The roads a fair road enough,' said he, 'for foot passengers; but 'twas over
steep and narrow for the northern traffic. You'll mind where the parapets broken
away, close again the sign-post It's never been mended since the accident,'
'What accident?'
'Eh, the night mail pitched right over into the valley below-a gude fifty
feet an' more-just at the worst bit o' road in the whole county.'
Horrible! Were many lives lost?'
'All. Four were found dead, and t'other two died next morning.'
'How long is it since this happened?'
'Just nine year.'
'Near the sign-post, you say? I will bear it in mind. Good night.'
'Gude night, sir, and thankee.' Jacob pocketed his half-crown, made a faint
pretence of touching his hat, and trudged back by the way he had come.
I watched the light of his lantern till it quite disappeared, and then
turned to pursue my way alone. This was no longer matter of the slightest
difficulty, for, despite the dead darkness overhead, the line of stone fence
showed distinctly enough against the pale gleam of the snow How silent it seemed
now, with only my footsteps to listen to; how silent and how solitary! A strange
disagreeable sense of loneliness stole over me. I walked faster. I hummed a
fragment of a tune. I cast up enormous sums in my head, and accumulated them at
compound interest. I did my best, in short, to forget the startling speculations
to which I had but just been listening, and, to some extent, I succeeded.
Meanwhile the night air seemed to become colder and colder, and though I
walked fast I found it impossible to keep myself warm. My feet were like ice. I
lost sensation in my hands, and grasped my gun mechanically I even breathed with
difficulty, as though, instead of traversing a quiet north country highway, I
were scaling the uppermost heights of some gigantic Alp. This last symptom
became presently so distressing, that I was forced to stop for a few minutes,
and lean against the stone fence. As I did so, I chanced to look back up the
road, and there, to my infinite relief, I saw a distant point of light, like the
gleam of an approaching lantern. I at first concluded that Jacob had retraced
his steps and followed me; but even as the conjecture presented itself, a second
light flashed into sight-a light evidently parallel with the first, and
approaching at the same rate of motion. It needed no second thought to show me
that these must be the carriage-lamps of some private vehicle, though it seemed
strange that any private vehicle should take a road professedly disused and
dangerous.
There could be no doubt, however, of the fact, for the lamps grew larger and
brighter every moment, and I even fancied I could already see the dark outline
of the carriage between them. It was coming up very fast, and quite noiselessly,
the snow being nearly a foot deep under the wheels.
And now the body of the vehicle became distinctly visible behind the lamps.
It looked strangely lofty. A sudden suspicion flashed upon me. Was it possible
that I had passed the cross-roads in the dark without observing the sign-post,
and could this be the very coach which I had come to meet?
No need to ask myself that question a second time, for here it came round
the bend of the road, guard and driver, one outside passenger, and four steaming
greys, all wrapped in a soft haze of light, through which the lamps blazed out,
like a pair of fiery meteors.
I jumped forward, waved my hat, and shouted. The mail came down at full
speed, and passed me. For a moment I feared that I had not been seen or heard,
but it was only for a moment. The coachman pulled up; the guard, muffled to the
eyes in capes and comforters, and apparently sound asleep in the rumble, neither
answered my hail nor made the slightest effort to dismount; the outside
passenger did not even turn his head. I opened the door for myself, and looked
in. There were but three travellers inside, so I stepped in, shut the door,
slipped into the vacant corner and congratulated myself on my good fortune.
The atmosphere of the coach seemed, if possible, colder than that of the
outer air, and was pervaded by a singularly damp and disagreeable smell. I
looked round at my fellow-passengers. They were all three, men, and all silent.
They did not seem to be asleep, but each leaned back in his corner of the
vehicle, as if absorbed in his own reflections. I attempted to open a
conversation.
'How intensely cold it is tonight,' I said, addressing my opposite
neighbour.
He lifted his head, looked at me, but made no reply.
'The winter,' I added, 'seems to have begun in earnest.'
Although the corner, in which he sat was so dim that I could distinguish
none of his features very clearly, I saw that his eyes were still turned full
upon me. And yet he answered never a word.
At any other time I should have felt, and perhaps expressed, some annoyance,
but at the moment I felt too ill to do either. The icy coldness of the night air
had struck a chill to my very marrow, and the strange smell inside the coach was
affecting me with an intolerable nausea. I shivered from head to foot, and,
turning to my left-hand neighbour, asked if he had any objection to an open
window?
He neither spoke nor stirred.
I repeated the question somewhat more loudly, but with the same result. Then
I lost patience, and let the sash down. As I did so the leather strap broke in
my hand', and I observed that the glass was covered with a thick coat of mildew,
the accumulation, apparently, of years. My attention being thus drawn to the
condition of the coach, I examined it more narrowly, and saw by the uncertain
light of the outer lamps that it was in [he last stage of dilapidation. Every
part of it was not only out of repair, but in a condition of decay. The sashes
splintered at a touch. The leather fittings were crusted over with mould, and
literally rotting from the woodwork. The floor was almost breaking away beneath
my feet. The whole machine, in short, was foul with damp, and had evidently been
dragged from some outhouse in which it had been mouldering away for years, to do
another day or two of duty on the road.
I turned to the third passenger, whom I had not yet addressed, and hazarded
one more remark.
'This coach,' I said, 'is in a deplorable condition. The regular mail, I
suppose, is under repair?'
He moved his head slowly, and looked me in the face, without speaking a
word. I shall never forget that look while I live. I turned cold at heart under
it. I turn cold at heart even now when I recall it. His eyes glowed with a fiery
unnatural lustre. His face was livid as the face of a corpse. His bloodless lips
were drawn back as if in the agony of death, and showed the gleaming teeth
between.
The words that I was about to utter died upon my lips, and a strange
horror-a dreadful horror-came upon me. My sight had by this time become used to
the gloom of the coach, and I could see with tolerable distinctness. I turned to
my opposite neighbour. He, too, was looking at me, with the same startling
pallor in his face, and the same stony glitter in his eyes. I passed my hand
across my brow I turned to the passenger on the seat beside my own, and saw-oh
Heaven! how shall I describe what I saw? I saw that he was no living man-that
none of them were living, men, like myself! A pale phosphorescent light-the
light of putrefaction-played upon their awful faces; upon their hair, dank with
the dews of the grave; upon their clothes, earth-stained and dropping to pieces;
upon their hands, which were as the hands of corpses long buried. Only their
eyes, their terrible eyes, were living; and those eyes were all turned
menacingly upon me!
A shriek of terror, a wild unintelligible cry for help and mercy, burst from
my lips as I flung myself against the door, and strove in vain to open it.
In that single instant, brief and vivid as a landscape beheld in the flash
of summer lightning, I saw the moon shining down through a rift of stormy
cloud-the ghastly sign-post rearing its warning finger by the wayside-the broken
parapet-the plunging horses-the black gulf below Then, the coach reeled like a
ship at sea. Then, came a mighty crash-a sense of crushing pain-and then,
darkness.

It seemed as if years had gone by when I awoke one morning from a deep
sleep, and found my wife watching by my bedside. I will pass over the' scene
that ensued, and give you, in half a dozen words, the tale she told me with
tears of thanksgiving. I had fallen over a precipice, close against the junction
of the old coach-road and the new, and had only been saved from certain death by
lighting upon a deep snowdrift that had accumulated at the foot of the rock
beneath. In this snowdrift I was discovered at daybreak, by a couple of
shepherds, who carried me to the nearest shelter, and brought a surgeon to my
aid. The surgeon found me in a state of raving delirium, with a broken arm and a
compound fracture of the skull. The letters in my pocket-book showed my name and
address; my wife was summoned to nurse me; and, thanks to youth and a fine
constitution, I came out of danger at last. The place of my fall, I need
scarcely say, was precisely that at which a frightful accident had happened to
the north mail nine years before.
I never told my wife the fearful events which I have just related to you. I
told the surgeon who attended me; but he treated the whole adventure as a mere
dream born of the fever in my brain. We discussed the question over and over
again, until we found that we could discuss it with temper no longer, and then
we dropped it. Others may form what conclusions they please-I know that twenty
years ago I was the fourth inside passenger in that Phantom Coach.

By Amelia B. Edwards

Jimmy Goggles the God

"It isn't every one who's been a god," said the sunburnt man. "But
it's happened to me. Among other things."

I intimated my sense of his condescension.

"It don't leave much for ambition, does it?" said the sunburnt man.

"I was one of those men who were saved from the Ocean Pioneer.
Gummy! how time flies! It's twenty years ago. I doubt if you'll
remember anything of the Ocean Pioneer?"

The name was familiar, and I tried to recall when and where I had
read it. The Ocean Pioneer? "Something about gold dust," I said
vaguely, "but the precise--"

"That's it," he said. "In a beastly little channel she hadn't no
business in--dodging pirates. It was before they'd put the kybosh
on that business. And there'd been volcanoes or something and all
the rocks was wrong. There's places about by Soona where you fair
have to follow the rocks about to see where they're going next.
Down she went in twenty fathoms before you could have dealt for whist,
with fifty thousand pounds worth of gold aboard, it was said,
in one form or another."

"Survivors?"

"Three."

"I remember the case now," I said. "There was something about salvage--"

But at the word salvage the sunburnt man exploded into language so
extraordinarily horrible that I stopped aghast. He came down to more
ordinary swearing, and pulled himself up abruptly. "Excuse me,"
he said, "but--salvage!"

He leant over towards me. "I was in that job," he said. "Tried to make
myself a rich man, and got made a god instead. I've got my feelings--

"It ain't all jam being a god," said the sunburnt man, and for some
time conversed by means of such pithy but unprogressive axioms.
At last he took up his tale again.

"There was me," said the sunburnt man, "and a seaman named Jacobs,
and Always, the mate of the Ocean Pioneer. And him it was that set
the whole thing going. I remember him now, when we was in the
jolly-boat, suggesting it all to our minds just by one sentence.
He was a wonderful hand at suggesting things. 'There was forty
thousand pounds,' he said, 'on that ship, and it's for me to say
just where she went down.' It didn't need much brains to tumble
to that. And he was the leader from the first to the last. He got
hold of the Sanderses and their brig; they were brothers, and
the brig was the Pride of Banya, and he it was bought the diving-dress--
a second-hand one with a compressed air apparatus instead of pumping.
He'd have done the diving too, if it hadn't made him sick going down.
And the salvage people were mucking about with a chart he'd cooked up,
as solemn as could be, at Starr Race, a hundred and twenty miles away.

"I can tell you we was a happy lot aboard that brig, jokes and drink
and bright hopes all the time. It all seemed so neat and clean
and straightforward, and what rough chaps call a 'cert.' And we
used to speculate how the other blessed lot, the proper salvagers,
who'd started two days before us, were getting on, until our sides
fairly ached. We all messed together in the Sanderses' cabin--it
was a curious crew, all officers and no men--and there stood the
diving-dress waiting its turn. Young Sanders was a humorous sort of
chap, and there certainly was something funny in the confounded
thing's great fat head and its stare, and he made us see it too.
'Jimmie Goggles,' he used to call it, and talk to it like a Christian.
Asked if he was married, and how Mrs. Goggles was, and all the little
Goggleses. Fit to make you split. And every blessed day all of us
used to drink the health of Jimmy Goggles in rum, and unscrew his eye
and pour a glass of rum in him, until, instead of that nasty
mackintosheriness, he smelt as nice in his inside as a cask of rum.
It was jolly times we had in those days, I can tell you--little
suspecting, poor chaps! what was a-coming.

"We weren't going to throw away our chances by any blessed hurry,
you know, and we spent a whole day sounding our way towards where
the Ocean Pioneer had gone down, right between two chunks of ropy
grey rock--lava rocks that rose nearly out of the water. We had
to lay off about half a mile to get a safe anchorage, and there was
a thundering row who should stop on board. And there she lay just
as she had gone down, so that you could see the top of the masts
that was still standing perfectly distinctly. The row ending in
all coming in the boat. I went down in the diving-dress on Friday
morning directly it was light.

"What a surprise it was! I can see it all now quite distinctly.
It was a queer-looking place, and the light was just coming. People
over here think every blessed place in the tropics is a flat shore
and palm trees and surf, bless 'em! This place, for instance,
wasn't a bit that way. Not common rocks they were, undermined
by waves; but great curved banks like ironwork cinder heaps,
with green slime below, and thorny shrubs and things just waving
upon them here and there, and the water glassy calm and clear,
and showing you a kind of dirty grey-black shine, with huge flaring
red-brown weeds spreading motionless, and crawling and darting
things going through it. And far away beyond the ditches and pools
and the heaps was a forest on the mountain flank, growing again after
the fires and cinder showers of the last eruption. And the other way
forest, too, and a kind of broken--what is it?--ambytheatre of black
and rusty cinders rising out of it all, and the sea in a kind of bay
in the middle.

"The dawn, I say, was just coming, and there wasn't much colour
about things, and not a human being but ourselves anywhere in sight
up or down the channel. Except the Pride of Banya, lying out beyond
a lump of rocks towards the line of the sea.

"Not a human being in sight," he repeated, and paused.

"I don't know where they came from, not a bit. And we were feeling
so safe that we were all alone that poor young Sanders was a-singing.
I was in Jimmy Goggles, all except the helmet. 'Easy,' says Always,
'there's her mast.' And after I'd had just one squint over the gunwale,
I caught up the bogey and almost tipped out as old Sanders brought
the boat round. When the windows were screwed and everything was
all right, I shut the valve from the air belt in order to help
my sinking, and jumped overboard, feet foremost--for we hadn't
a ladder. I left the boat pitching, and all of them staring down
into the water after me, as my head sank down into the weeds and
blackness that lay about the mast. I suppose nobody, not the most
cautious chap in the world, would have bothered about a lookout
at such a desolate place. It stunk of solitude.

"Of course you must understand that I was a greenhorn at diving.
None of us were divers. We'd had to muck about with the thing to get
the way of it, and this was the first time I'd been deep. It feels
damnable. Your ears hurt beastly. I don't know if you've ever hurt
yourself yawning or sneezing, but it takes you like that, only ten
times worse. And a pain over the eyebrows here--splitting--and a
feeling like influenza in the head. And it isn't all heaven in your
lungs and things. And going down feels like the beginning of a lift,
only it keeps on. And you can't turn your head to see what's above you,
and you can't get a fair squint at what's happening to your feet
without bending down something painful. And being deep it was dark,
let alone the blackness of the ashes and mud that formed the bottom.
It was like going down out of the dawn back into the night, so to speak.

"The mast came up like a ghost out of the black, and then a lot of
fishes, and then a lot of flapping red seaweed, and then whack I came
with a kind of dull bang on the deck of the Ocean Pioneer, and the
fishes that had been feeding on the dead rose about me like a swarm of
flies from road stuff in summer time. I turned on the compressed air
again--for the suit was a bit thick and mackintoshery after all, in
spite of the rum--and stood recovering myself. It struck coolish down
there, and that helped take off the stuffiness a bit.

"When I began to feel easier, I started looking about me. It was
an extraordinary sight. Even the light was extraordinary, a kind
of reddy-coloured twilight, on account of the streamers of seaweed
that floated up on either side of the ship. And far overhead just
a moony, deep green-blue. The deck of the ship, except for a slight
list to starboard, was level, and lay all dark and long between
the weeds, clear except where the masts had snapped when she rolled,
and vanishing into black night towards the forecastle. There wasn't
any dead on the decks, most were in the weeds alongside, I suppose;
but afterwards I found two skeletons lying in the passengers' cabins,
where death had come to them. It was curious to stand on that deck
and recognise it all, bit by bit; a place against the rail where I'd
been fond of smoking by starlight, and the corner where an old chap
from Sydney used to flirt with a widow we had aboard. A comfortable
couple they'd been, only a month ago, and now you couldn't have
got a meal for a baby crab off either of them.

"I've always had a bit of a philosophical turn, and I dare say I
spent the best part of five minutes in such thoughts before I went
below to find where the blessed dust was stored. It was slow work
hunting, feeling it was for the most part, pitchy dark, with confusing
blue gleams down the companion. And there were things moving about,
a dab at my glass once, and once a pinch at my leg. Crabs, I expect.
I kicked a lot of loose stuff that puzzled me, and stooped and
picked up something all knobs and spikes. What do you think?
Backbone! But I never had any particular feeling for bones. We
had talked the affair over pretty thoroughly, and Always knew just
where the stuff was stowed. I found it that trip. I lifted a box
one end an inch or more."

He broke off in his story. "I've lifted it," he said, "as near as
that! Forty thousand pounds worth of pure gold! Gold! I shouted
inside my helmet as a kind of cheer and hurt my ears. I was getting
confounded stuffy and tired by this time--I must have been down
twenty-five minutes or more--and I thought this was good enough.
I went up the companion again, and as my eyes came up flush with
the deck, a thundering great crab gave a kind of hysterical jump
and went scuttling off sideways. Quite a start it gave me. I stood
up clear on deck and shut the valve behind the helmet to let the air
accumulate to carry me up again--I noticed a kind of whacking
from above, as though they were hitting the water with an oar,
but I didn't look up. I fancied they were signalling me to come up.

"And then something shot down by me--something heavy, and stood
a-quiver in the planks. I looked, and there was a long knife I'd
seen young Sanders handling. Thinks I, he's dropped it, and I was
still calling him this kind of fool and that--for it might have hurt
me serious--when I began to lift and drive up towards the daylight.
Just about the level of the top spars of the Ocean Pioneer, whack!
I came against something sinking down, and a boot knocked in front
of my helmet. Then something else, struggling frightful. It was
a big weight atop of me, whatever it was, and moving and twisting
about. I'd have thought it a big octopus, or some such thing, if it
hadn't been for the boot. But octopuses don't wear boots. It was
all in a moment, of course. I felt myself sinking down again, and
I threw my arms about to keep steady, and the whole lot rolled
free of me and shot down as I went up--"

He paused.

"I saw young Sanders's face, over a naked black shoulder, and a spear
driven clean through his neck, and out of his mouth and neck what
looked like spirts of pink smoke in the water. And down they went
clutching one another, and turning over, and both too far gone
to leave go. And in another second my helmet came a whack, fit
to split, against the niggers' canoe. It was niggers! Two canoes full.

"It was lively times, I tell you! Overboard came Always with three
spears in him. There was the legs of three or four black chaps
kicking about me in the water. I couldn't see much, but I saw
the game was up at a glance, gave my valve a tremendous twist,
and went bubbling down again after poor Always, in as awful a state
of scare and astonishment as you can well imagine. I passed young
Sanders and the nigger going up again and struggling still a bit,
and in another moment I was standing in the dim again on the deck
of the Ocean Pioneer.

"'Gummy,' thinks I, 'here's a fix!' Niggers? At first I couldn't see
anything for it but Stifle below or Stabs above. I didn't properly
understand how much air there was to last me, but I didn't feel like
standing very much more of it down below. I was hot and frightfully
heady--quite apart from the blue funk I was in. We'd never repined
with these beastly natives, filthy Papuan beasts. It wasn't any good,
coming up where I was, but I had to do something. On the spur
of the moment, I clambered over the side of the brig and landed
among the weeds, and set off through the darkness as fast as I could.
I just stopped once and knelt, and twisted back my head in the helmet
and had a look up. It was a most extraordinary bright green-blue above,
and the two canoes and the boat floating there very small and distant
like a kind of twisted H. And it made me feel sick to squint up at it,
and think what the pitching and swaying of the three meant.

"It was just about the most horrible ten minutes I ever had, blundering
about in that darkness, pressure something awful, like being buried
in sand, pain across the chest, sick with funk, and breathing nothing
as it seemed but the smell of rum and mackintosh. Gummy! After a bit,
I found myself going up a steepish sort of slope. I had another
squint to see if anything was visible of the canoes and boats,
and then kept on. I stopped with my head a foot from the surface,
and tried to see where I was going, but, of course, nothing was
to be seen but the reflection of the bottom. Then out I dashed like
knocking my head through a mirror. Directly I got my eyes out of
the water, I saw I'd come up a kind of beach near the forest. I had a
look round, but the natives and the brig were both hidden by a big,
hummucky heap of twisted lava, the born fool in me suggested a run
for the woods. I didn't take the helmet off, but eased open one of
the windows, and, after a bit of a pant, went on out of the water.
You'd hardly imagine how clean and light the air tasted.

"Of course, with four inches of lead in your boot soles, and your
head in a copper knob the size of a football, and been thirty-five
minutes under water, you don't break any records running. I ran like
a ploughboy going to work. And half way to the trees I saw a dozen
niggers or more, coming out in a gaping, astonished sort of way
to meet me.

"I just stopped dead, and cursed myself for all the fools out of
London. I had about as much chance of cutting back to the water as
a turned turtle. I just screwed up my window again to leave my hands
free, and waited for them. There wasn't anything else for me to do.

"But they didn't come on very much. I began to suspect why. 'Jimmy
Goggles,' I says, 'it's your beauty does it.' I was inclined to be a
little light-headed, I think, with all these dangers about and the
change in the pressure of the blessed air. 'Who're ye staring at?' I
said, as if the savages could hear me. 'What d'ye take me for? I'm
hanged if I don't give you something to stare at,' I said, and with
that I screwed up the escape valve and turned on the compressed air
from the belt, until I was swelled out like a blown frog. Regular
imposing it must have been. I'm blessed if they'd come on a step;
and presently one and then another went down on their hands and knees.
They didn't know what to make of me, and they was doing the extra
polite, which was very wise and reasonable of them. I had half a mind
to edge back seaward and cut and run, but it seemed too hopeless. A
step back and they'd have been after me. And out of sheer desperation
I began to march towards them up the beach, with slow, heavy steps,
and waving my blown-out arms about, in a dignified manner. And inside
of me I was singing as small as a tomtit.

"But there's nothing like a striking appearance to help a man over a
difficulty,--I've found that before and since. People like ourselves,
who're up to diving-dresses by the time we're seven, can scarcely
imagine the effect of one on a simple-minded savage. One or two
of these niggers cut and run, the others started in a great hurry
trying to knock their brains out on the ground. And on I went as
slow and solemn and silly-looking and artful as a jobbing plumber.
It was evident they took me for something immense.

"Then up jumped one and began pointing, making extraordinary gestures
to me as he did so, and all the others began sharing their attention
between me and something out at sea. 'What's the matter now?' I said.
I turned slowly on account of my dignity, and there I saw, coming
round a point, the poor old Pride of Banya towed by a couple of canoes.
The sight fairly made me sick. But they evidently expected some
recognition, so I waved my arms in a striking sort of non-committal
manner. And then I turned and stalked on towards the trees again.
At that time I was praying like mad, I remember, over and over again:
'Lord help me through with it! Lord help me through with it!' It's
only fools who know nothing of dangers can afford to laugh at praying.

"But these niggers weren't going to let me walk through and away
like that. They started a kind of bowing dance about me, and sort of
pressed me to take a pathway that lay through the trees. It was
clear to me they didn't take me for a British citizen, whatever
else they thought of me, and for my own part I was never less anxious
to own up to the old country.

"You'd hardly believe it, perhaps, unless you're familiar with
savages, but these poor misguided, ignorant creatures took me
straight to their kind of joss place to present me to the blessed
old black stone there. By this time I was beginning to sort of realise
the depth of their ignorance, and directly I set eyes on this deity
I took my cue. I started a baritone howl, 'wow-wow,' very long
on one note, and began waving my arms about a lot, and then very
slowly and ceremoniously turned their image over on its side and
sat down on it. I wanted to sit down badly, for diving-dresses ain't
much wear in the tropics. Or, to put it different like, they're
a sight too much. It took away their breath, I could see, my sitting
on their joss, but in less time than a minute they made up their
minds and were hard at work worshipping me. And I can tell you
I felt a bit relieved to see things turning out so well, in spite
of the weight on my shoulders and feet.

"But what made me anxious was what the chaps in the canoes might
think when they came back. If they'd seen me in the boat before
I went down, and without the helmet on--for they might have been
spying and hiding since over night--they would very likely take
a different view from the others. I was in a deuce of a stew about
that for hours, as it seemed, until the shindy of the arrival began.

"But they took it down--the whole blessed village took it down.
At the cost of sitting up stiff and stern, as much like those sitting
Egyptian images one sees as I could manage, for pretty nearly
twelve hours, I should guess at least, on end, I got over it. You'd
hardly think what it meant in that heat and stink. I don't think
any of them dreamt of the man inside. I was just a wonderful leathery
great joss that had come up with luck out of the water. But the fatigue!
the heat! the beastly closeness! the mackintosheriness and the rum!
and the fuss! They lit a stinking fire on a kind of lava slab there
was before me, and brought in a lot of gory muck--the worst parts
of what they were feasting on outside, the Beasts--and burnt it
all in my honour. I was getting a bit hungry, but I understand now
how gods manage to do without eating, what with the smell of burnt
offerings about them. And they brought in a lot of the stuff they'd
got off the brig and, among other stuff, what I was a bit relieved
to see, the kind of pneumatic pump that was used for the compressed
air affair, and then a lot of chaps and girls came in and danced
about me something disgraceful. It's extraordinary the different ways
different people have of showing respect. If I'd had a hatchet handy
I'd have gone for the lot of them--they made me feel that wild.
All this time I sat as stiff as company, not knowing anything better
to do. And at last, when nightfall came, and the wattle joss-house
place got a bit too shadowy for their taste--all these here savages
are afraid of the dark, you know--and I started a sort of 'Moo' noise,
they built big bonfires outside and left me alone in peace in the
darkness of my hut, free to unscrew my windows a bit and think
things over, and feel just as bad as I liked. And, Lord! I was sick.

"I was weak and hungry, and my mind kept on behaving like a beetle
on a pin, tremendous activity and nothing done at the end of it.
Come round just where it was before. There was sorrowing for the other
chaps, beastly drunkards certainly, but not deserving such a fate,
and young Sanders with the spear through his neck wouldn't go out
of my mind. There was the treasure down there in the Ocean Pioneer,
and how one might get it and hide it somewhere safer, and get away
and come back for it. And there was the puzzle where to get anything
to eat. I tell you I was fair rambling. I was afraid to ask by signs
for food, for fear of behaving too human, and so there I sat and
hungered until very near the dawn. Then the village got a bit quiet,
and I couldn't stand it any longer, and I went out and got some stuff
like artichokes in a bowl and some sour milk. What was left of these
I put away among the other offerings, just to give them a hint
of my tastes. And in the morning they came to worship, and found
me sitting up stiff and respectable on their previous god, just as
they'd left me overnight. I'd got my back against the central pillar
of the hut, and, practically, I was asleep. And that's how I became
a god among the heathen--a false god no doubt, and blasphemous,
but one can't always pick and choose.

"Now, I don't want to crack myself up as a god beyond my merits,
but I must confess that while I was god to these people they was
extraordinary successful. I don't say there's anything in it,
mind you. They won a battle with another tribe--I got a lot of
offerings I didn't want through it--they had wonderful fishing,
and their crop of pourra was exceptional fine. And they counted
the capture of the brig among the benefits I brought 'em. I must
say I don't think that was a poor record for a perfectly new hand.
And, though perhaps you'd scarcely credit it, I was the tribal god
of those beastly savages for pretty nearly four months. . . .

"What else could I do, man? But I didn't wear that diving-dress
all the time. I made 'em rig me up a sort of holy of holies, and
a deuce of a time I had too, making them understand what it was
I wanted them to do. That indeed was the great difficulty--making
them understand my wishes. I couldn't let myself down by talking their
lingo badly--even if I'd been able to speak at all--and I couldn't
go flapping a lot of gestures at them. So I drew pictures in sand
and sat down beside them and hooted like one o'clock. Sometimes
they did the things I wanted all right, and sometimes they did them
all wrong. They was always very willing, certainly. All the while
I was puzzling how I was to get the confounded business settled.
Every night before the dawn I used to march out in full rig and go off
to a place where I could see the channel in which the Ocean Pioneer
lay sunk, and once even, one moonlight night, I tried to walk out
to her, but the weeds and rocks and dark clean beat me. I didn't get
back till full day, and then I found all those silly niggers out on
the beach praying their sea-god to return to them. I was that vexed
and tired, messing and tumbling about, and coming up and going down
again, I could have punched their silly heads all round when they
started rejoicing. I'm hanged if I like so much ceremony.

"And then came the missionary. That missionary! It was in the afternoon,
and I was sitting in state in my outer temple place, sitting on
that old black stone of theirs when he came. I heard a row outside
and jabbering, and then his voice speaking to an interpreter.
'They worship stocks and stones,' he said, and I knew what was up,
in a flash. I had one of my windows out for comfort, and I sang out
straight away on the spur of the moment. 'Stocks and stones!' I says.
'You come inside,' I says, 'and I'll punch your blooming head.'
There was a kind of silence and more jabbering, and in he came,
Bible in hand, after the manner of them--a little sandy chap in specks
and a pith helmet. I flatter myself that me sitting there in
the shadows, with my copper head and my big goggles, struck him
a bit of a heap at first. 'Well,' I says, 'how's the trade in calico?'
for I don't hold with missionaries.

"I had a lark with that missionary. He was a raw hand, and quite
outclassed with a man like me. He gasped out who was I, and I told
him to read the inscription at my feet if he wanted to know. Down
he goes to read, and his interpreter, being of course as superstitious
as any of them, took it as an act of worship and plumped down like
a shot. All my people gave a howl of triumph, and there wasn't
any more business to be done in my village after that journey,
not by the likes of him.

"But, of course, I was a fool to choke him off like that. If I'd had
any sense I should have told him straight away of the treasure
and taken him into Co. I've no doubt he'd have come into Co. A child,
with a few hours to think it over, could have seen the connection
between my diving-dress and the loss of the Ocean Pioneer. A week
after he left I went out one morning and saw the Motherhood, the
salver's ship from Starr Race, towing up the channel and sounding.
The whole blessed game was up, and all my trouble thrown away. Gummy!
How wild I felt! And guying it in that stinking silly dress! Four
months!"

The sunburnt man's story degenerated again. "Think of it," he said,
when he emerged to linguistic purity once more. "Forty thousand
pounds worth of gold."

"Did the little missionary come back?" I asked.

"Oh, yes! Bless him! And he pledged his reputation there was a man
inside the god, and started out to see as much with tremendous
ceremony. But there wasn't--he got sold again. I always did hate
scenes and explanations, and long before he came I was out of it
all--going home to Banya along the coast, hiding in bushes by day,
and thieving food from the villages by night. Only weapon, a spear.
No clothes, no money. Nothing. My face was my fortune, as the saying
is. And just a squeak of eight thousand pounds of gold--fifth share.
But the natives cut up rusty, thank goodness, because they thought
it was him had driven their luck away."

H.G. Wells

the late April book of the month

O Captain My Captain

O Captain my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up--for you the flag is flung for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You've fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

Walt Whitman

My Favorite Murder

Having murdered my mother under circumstances of singular atrocity, I was arrested and put upon my trial, which lasted seven years. In charging the jury, the judge of the Court of Acquittal remarked that it was one of the most ghastly crimes that he had ever been called upon to explain away.
At this, my attorney rose and said:
"May it please your Honor, crimes are ghastly or agreeable only by comparison. If you were familiar with the details of my client's previous murder of his uncle you would discern in his later offence (if offence it may be called) something in the nature of tender forbearance and filial consideration for the feelings of the victim. The appalling ferocity of the former assassination was indeed inconsistent with any hypothesis but that of guilt; and had it not been for the fact that the honorable judge before whom he was tried was the president of a life insurance company that took risks on hanging, and in which my client held a policy, it is hard to see how he could decently have been acquitted. If your Honor would like to hear about it for instruction and guidance of your Honor's mind, this unfortunate man, my client, will consent to give himself the pain of relating it under oath."
The district attorney said: "Your Honor, I object. Such a statement would be in the nature of evidence, and the testimony in this case is closed. The prisoner's statement should have been introduced three years ago, in the spring of 1881."
"In a statutory sense," said the judge, "you are right, and in the Court of Objections and Technicalities you would get a ruling in your favor. But not in a Court of Acquittal. The objection is overruled."
"I except," said the district attorney.
"You cannot do that," the judge said. "I must remind you that in order to take an exception you must first get this case transferred for a time to the Court of Exceptions on a formal motion duly supported by affidavits. A motion to that effect by your predecessor in office was denied by me during the first year of this trial. Mr. Clerk, swear the prisoner."
The customary oath having been administered, I made the following statement, which impressed the judge with so strong a sense of the comparative triviality of the offence for which I was on trial that he made no further search for mitigating circumstances, but simply instructed the jury to acquit, and I left the court, without a stain upon my reputation:

"I was born in I856 in Kalamakee, Mich., of honest and reputable parents, one of whom Heaven has mercifully spared to comfort me in my later years. In I867 the family came to California and settled near Nigger Head, where my father opened a road agency and prospered beyond the dreams of avarice. He was a reticent, saturnine man then, though his increasing years have now somewhat relaxed the austerity of his disposition, and I believe that nothing but his memory of the sad event for which I am now on trial prevents him from manifesting a genuine hilarity.
"Four years after we had set up the road agency an itinerant preacher came along, and having no other way to pay for the night's lodging that we gave him, favored us with an exhortation of such power that, praise God, we were all converted to religion. My father at once sent for his brother the Hon. William Ridley of Stockton, and on his arrival turned over the agency to him, charging him nothing for the franchise nor plant - the latter consisting of a Winchester rifle, a sawed-off shotgun, and an assortment of masks made out of flour sacks. The family then moved to Ghost Rock and opened a dance house. It was called 'The Saints' Rest Hurdy-Gurdy,' and the proceedings each night began with prayer. It was there that my now sainted mother, by her grace in the dance, acquired the sobriquet of 'The Bucking Walrus.'
"In the fall of '75 I had occasion to visit Coyote, on the road to Mahala, and took the stage at Ghost Rock. There were four other passengers. About three miles beyond Nigger Head, persons whom I identified as my Uncle William and his two sons held up the stage. Finding nothing in the express box, they went through the passengers. I acted a most honorable part in the affair, placing myself in line with the others, holding up my hands and permitting myself to be deprived of forty dollars and a gold watch. From my behavior no one could have suspected that I knew the gentlemen who gave the entertainment. A few days later, when I went to Nigger Head and asked for the return of my money and watch my uncle and cousins swore they knew nothing of the matter, and they affected a belief that my father and I had done the job ourselves in dishonest violation of commercial good faith. Uncle William even threatened to retaliate by starting an opposition dance house at Ghost Rock. As 'The Saints' Rest' had become rather unpopular, I saw that this would assuredly ruin it and prove a paying enterprise, so I told my uncle that I was willing to overlook the past if he would take me into the scheme and keep the partnership a secret from my father. This fair offer he rejected, and I then perceived that it would be better and more satisfactory if he were dead.

"My plans to that end were soon perfected, and communicating them to my dear parents I had the gratification of receiving their approval. My father said he was proud of me, and my mother promised that although her religion forbade her to assist in taking human life I should have the advantage of her prayers for my success. As a preliminary measure looking to my security in case of detection I made an application for membership in that powerful order, the Knights of Murder, and in due course was received as a member of the Ghost Rock commandery. On the day that my probation ended I was for the first time permitted to inspect the records of the order and learn who belonged to it - all the rites of initiation having been conducted in masks. Fancy my delight when, in looking over the roll of membership, I found the third name to be that of my uncle, who indeed was junior vice-chancellor of the order! Here was an opportunity exceeding my wildest dreams - to murder I could add insubordination and treachery. It was what my good mother would have called 'a special Providence.'
"At about this time something occurred which caused my cup of joy, already full, to overflow on all sides, a circular cataract of bliss. Three men, strangers in that locality, were arrested for the stage robbery in which I had lost my money and watch. They were brought to trial and, despite my efforts to clear them and fasten the guilt upon three of the most respectable and worthy citizens of Ghost Rock, convicted on the clearest proof. The murder would now be as wanton and reasonless as I could wish.
"One morning I shouldered my Winchester rifle, and going over to my uncle's house, near Nigger Head, asked my Aunt Mary, his wife, if he were at home, adding that I had come to kill him. My aunt replied with her peculiar smile that so many gentleman called on that errand and were afterward carried away without having performed it that I must excuse her for doubting my good faith in the matter. She said I did not look as if I would kill anybody, so, as a proof of good faith I levelled my rifle and wounded a Chinaman who happened to be passing the house. She said she knew whole families that could do a thing of that kind, but Bill Ridley was a horse of another color. She said, however, that I would find him over on the other side of the creek in the sheep lot; and she added that she hoped the best man would win.

"My Aunt Mary was one of the most fair-minded women that I have ever met.
"I found my uncle down on his knees engaged in skinning a sheep. Seeing that he had neither gun nor pistol handy I had not the heart to shoot him, so I approached him, greeted him pleasantly and struck him a powerful blow on the head with the butt of my rifle. I have a very good delivery and Uncle William lay down on his side, then rolled over on his back, spread out his fingers and shivered. Before he could recover the use of his limbs I seized the knife that he had been using and cut his hamstrings. You know, doubtless, that when you sever the Achilles tendon, the patient has no further use of his leg; it is just the same as if he had no leg. Well, I parted them both, and when he revived he was at my service. As soon as he comprehended the situation, he said:
" 'Samuel, you have got the drop on me and can afford to be generous. I have only one thing to ask of you, and that is that you carry me to the house and finish me in the bosom of my family.'
"I told him I thought that a pretty reasonable request and I would do so if he would let me put him into a wheat sack; he would be easier to carry that way and if we were seen by the neighbors en route it would cause less remark. He agreed to that, and going to the barn I got a sack. This, however, did not fit him; it was too short and much wider than he; so I bent his legs, forced his knees up against his breast and got him into it that way, tying the sack above his head. He was a heavy man and I had all that I could do to get him on my back, but I staggered along for some distance until I came to a swing that some of the children had suspended to the branch of an oak. Here I laid him down and sat upon him to rest, and the sight of the rope gave me a happy inspiration. In twenty minutes my uncle, still in the sack, swung free to the sport of the wind.

"I had taken down the rope, tied one end tightly about the mouth of the bag, thrown the other across the limb and hauled him up about five feet from the ground. Fastening the other end of the rope also about the mouth of the sack, I had the satisfaction to see my uncle converted into a large, fine pendulum. I must add that he was not himself entirely aware of the nature of the change that he had undergone in his relation to the exterior world, though in justice to a good man's memory I ought to say that I do not think he would in any case have wasted much of my time in vain remonstrance.
"Uncle William had a ram that was famous in all that region as a fighter. It was in a state of chronic constitutional indignation. Some deep disappointment in early life had soured its disposition and it had declared war upon the whole world. To say that it would butt anything accessible is but faintly to express the nature and scope of its military activity: the universe was its antagonist; its methods that of a projectile. It fought like the angels and devils, in mid-air, cleaving the atmosphere like a bird, describing a parabolic curve and descending upon its victim at just the exact angle of incidence to make the most of its velocity and weight. Its momentum, calculated in foot-tons, was something incredible. It had been seen to destroy a four year old bull by a single impact upon that animal's gnarly forehead. No stone wall had ever been known to resist its downward swoop; there were no trees tough enough to stay it; it would splinter them into matchwood and defile their leafy honors in the dust. This irascible and implacable brute - this incarnate thunderbolt - this monster of the upper deep, I had seen reposing in the shade of an adjacent tree, dreaming dreams of conquest and glory. It was with a view to summoning it forth to the field of honor that I suspended its master in the manner described.
"Having completed my preparations, I imparted to the avuncular pendulum a gentle oscillation, and retiring to cover behind a contiguous rock, lifted up my voice in a long rasping cry whose diminishing final note was drowned in a noise like that of a swearing cat, which emanated from the sack. Instantly that formidable sheep was upon its feet and had taken in the military situation at a glance. In a few moments it had approached, stamping, to within fifty yards of the swinging foeman, who, now retreating and anon advancing, seemed to invite the fray. Suddenly I saw the beast's head drop earthward as if depressed by the weight of its enormous horns; then a dim, white, wavy streak of sheep prolonged itself from that spot in a generally horizontal direction to within about four yards of a point immediately beneath the enemy. There it struck sharply upward, and before it had faded from my gaze at the place whence it had set out I heard a horrid thump and a piercing scream, and my poor uncle shot forward, with a slack rope higher than the limb to which he was attached. Here the rope tautened with a jerk, arresting his flight, and back he swung in a breathless curve to the other end of his arc. The ram had fallen, a heap of indistinguishable legs, wool and horns, but pulling itself together and dodging as its antagonist swept downward it retired at random, alternately shaking its head and stamping its fore-feet. When it had backed about the same distance as that from which it had delivered the assault it paused again, bowed its head as if in prayer for victory and again shot forward, dimly visible as before - a prolonging white streak with monstrous undulations, ending with a sharp ascension. Its course this time was at a right angle to its former one, and its impatience so great that it struck the enemy before he had nearly reached the lowest point of his arc. In consequence he went flying round and round in a horizontal circle whose radius was about equal to half the length of the rope, which I forgot to say was nearly twenty feet long. His shrieks, crescendo in approach and diminuendo in recession, made the rapidity of his revolution more obvious to the ear than to the eye. He had evidently not yet been struck in a vital spot. His posture in the sack and the distance from the ground at which he hung compelled the ram to operate upon his lower extremities and the end of his back. Like a plant that has struck its root into some poisonous mineral, my poor uncle was dying slowly upward.

"After delivering its second blow the ram had not again retired. The fever of battle burned hot in its heart; its brain was intoxicated with the wine of strife. Like a pugilist who in his rage forgets his skill and fights ineffectively at half-arm's length, the angry beast endeavored to reach its fleeting foe by awkward vertical leaps as he passed overhead, sometimes, indeed, succeeding in striking him feebly, but more frequently overthrown by its own misguided eagerness. But as the impetus was exhausted and the man's circles narrowed in scope and diminished in speed, bringing him nearer to the ground, these tactics produced better results, eliciting a superior quality of screams, which I greatly enjoyed.
"Suddenly, as if the bugles had sung truce, the ram suspended hostilities and walked away, thoughtfully wrinkling and smoothing its great aquiline nose, and occasionally cropping a bunch of grass and slowly munching it. It seemed to have tired of war's alarms and resolved to beat the sword into a plowshare and cultivate the arts of peace. Steadily it held its course away from the field of fame until it had gained a distance of nearly a quarter of a mile. There it stopped and stood with its rear to the foe, chewing its cud and apparently half asleep. I observed, however, an occasional slight turn of its head, as if its apathy were more affected than real.
"Meantime Uncle William's shrieks had abated with his motion, and nothing was heard from him but long, low moans, and at long intervals my name, uttered in pleading tones exceedingly grateful to my ear. Evidently the man had not the faintest notion of what was being done to him, and was inexpressibly terrified. When Death comes cloaked in mystery he is terrible indeed. Little by little my uncle's oscillations diminished, and finally he hung motionless. I went to him and was about to give him the coup de grace, when I heard and felt a succession of smart shocks which shook the ground like a series of light earthquakes, and turning in the direction of the ram, saw a long cloud of dust approaching me with inconceivable rapidity and alarming effect! At a distance of some thirty yards away it stopped short, and from the near end of it rose into the air what I at first thought a great white bird. Its ascent was so smooth and easy and regular that I could not realize its extraordinary celerity, and was lost in admiration of its grace. To this day the impression remains that it was a slow, deliberate movement, the ram - for it was that animal - being upborne by some power other than its own impetus, and supported through the successive stages of its flight with infinite tenderness and care. My eyes followed its progress through the air with unspeakable pleasure, all the greater by contrast with my former terror of its approach by land. Onward and upward the noble animal sailed, its head bent down almost between its knees, its fore-feet thrown back, its hinder legs trailing to rear like the legs of a soaring heron.

"At a height of forty or fifty feet, as fond recollection presents it to view, it attained its zenith and appeared to remain an instant stationary; then, tilting suddenly forward without altering the relative position of its parts, it shot downward on a steeper and steeper course with augmenting velocity, passed immediately above me with a noise like the rush of a cannon shot and struck my poor uncle almost squarely on the top of the head! So frightful was the impact that not only the man's neck was broken, but the rope too; and the body of the deceased, forced against the earth, was crushed to pulp beneath the awful front of that meteoric sheep! The concussion stopped all the clocks between Lone Hand and Dutch Dan's, and Professor Davidson, a distinguished authority in matters seismic, who happened to be in the vicinity, promptly explained that the vibrations were from north to southwest.
"Altogether, I cannot help thinking that in point of artistic atrocity my murder of Uncle William has seldom been excelled."

By Ambrose Bierce