of a man what they hev got trapped
up yander at the still."

This initial devoir of his reformation, however, Wyatt found no easy
matter. The event had been craftily planned to seem an accident, a fall
from a cliff in pursuing the wagon, and only the most ardent and
cogent urgency on Wyatt's part prevailed at length. He argued that this
interpretation of the disaster would not satisfy the authorities. To
take the raider's life insured discovery, retribution. But as he had
been brought to the still in the night, it was obvious that if he
were conveyed under cover of darkness and by roundabout trails within
striking distance of the settlements, he could never again find his
way to the locality in the dense wilderness. In his detention he had
necessarily learned nothing fresh, for the only names he could have
overheard had long been obnoxious to suspicion of moonshining, and
afforded no proof. Thus humanity, masquerading as caution, finally
triumphed, and the officer, blindfolded, was conducted through devious
and winding ways many miles distant, and released within a day's travel
of the county town.

Walter Wyatt was scarcely welcomed back to life by the denizens of the
cove generally with the enthusiasm attendant on the first moments of his
resuscitation, so to speak. He never forgot the solemn ecstasy of
that experience, and in later years he was wont to annul any menace of
discord with his wife by the warning, half jocose, half tender: "Ye hed
better mind; ye'll be sorry some day fur treatin' me so mean. Remember,
I hev viewed ye a-weepin' over my grave before now."

A reformation, however complete and salutary, works no change of
identity, and although he developed into an orderly, industrious,
law-abiding citizen, his prankish temperament remained recognizable
in the fantastic fables which he delighted to recount at some genial
fireside of what he had seen and heard as a ghost.

"Pears like, Watt, ye hed more experiences whenst dead than living" said
an auditor, as these stories multiplied.

"I did, fur a fack," Watt protested. "I war a powerful onchancy, onquiet
ghost. I even did my courtin' whilst in my reg'lar line o' business
a-hanatin' a graveyard."

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

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HIS UNQUIET GHOST ***

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