The Project Gutenberg EBook of His Unquiet Ghost, by
Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

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Title: His Unquiet Ghost
1911

Author: Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

Release Date: November 19, 2007 [EBook #23556]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by David Widger

HIS UNQUIET GHOST

By Charles Egbert Craddock

1911

The moon was high in the sky. The wind was laid. So silent was the vast
stretch of mountain wilderness, aglint with the dew, that the tinkle of
a rill far below in the black abyss seemed less a sound than an evidence
of the pervasive quietude, since so slight a thing, so distant, could
compass so keen a vibration. For an hour or more the three men who
lurked in the shadow of a crag in the narrow mountain-pass, heard
nothing else. When at last they caught the dull reverberation of a slow
wheel and the occasional metallic clank of a tire against a stone, the
vehicle was fully three miles distant by the winding road in the valley.
Time lagged. Only by imperceptible degrees the sound of deliberate
approach grew louder on the air as the interval of space lessened. At
length, above their ambush at the summit of the mountain's brow the
heads of horses came into view, distinct in the moonlight between the
fibrous pines and the vast expanse of the sky above the valley. Even
then there was renewed delay. The driver of the wagon paused to rest the
team.

The three lurking men did not move; they scarcely ventured to breathe.
Only when there was no retrograde possible, no chance of escape, when
the vehicle was fairly on the steep declivity of the road, the precipice
sheer on one side, the wall of the ridge rising perpendicularly on the
other, did two of them, both revenue-raiders disguised as mountaineers,
step forth from the shadow. The other, the informer, a genuine
mountaineer, still skulked motionless in the darkness. The "revenuers,"
ascending the road, maintained a slow, lunging gait, as if they had
toiled from far.

Their abrupt appearance had the effect of a galvanic shock to the man
ha