anxiety when the drought
had become excessive and threatened the later crops, and the services of
the cheera-taghe were necessary to invoke and with wild barbaric
ceremonials bring down the lightning and thunder to clear the atmosphere
and the rain to refresh the soil, it was not ascertained that the
prophets had definitely disappeared.

Then it was that excitement supervened, search, anxiety, grief, fear.
There began to be vague rumors of untoward sounds, remembered rather
than noticed at the time. Faint explosions had been heard in the night
as if under the ground, and again in broad daylight as if in the air.
None could imagine that the doomed men had sought to attract the
attention of the town by firing off their pistols, thus utilizing their
scanty ammunition. The strain grew intense; superstitious fancies
supplemented the real mystery; the place was finally abandoned, and thus
Nilaque Great became a "waste town."

It was ten years, perhaps, after this blight had fallen upon it, that
one day as the pack-train came down the valley of the Little Tennessee,
on its autumnal return trip to Charlestown, the snow began to sift down.
An unseasonable storm it was, for the winter had hardly set in. A north
wind sprang up; the snow was soon heavily driving; within an hour the
woods, still in the red leafage of autumn, were covered with snow and
encased in ice. Only by a strenuous effort would the train be able to
pass the old "waste town" before the early dusk,--a mile or two at most;
but it was hoped that this might suffice to keep the ghosts out of the
bounds of visibility. The roaring bacchanalian glees with which the
pack-men set the melancholy sheeted woods aquiver might well send the
ghosts out of earshot, presuming them endowed with volition.

Suddenly Cuddy Barnett discovered that one of the pack-horses of his own
especial charge was missing,--a good bay with a load of fine dressed
deerskins to take to Charlestown, then the great mart of all this far
region. A recollection of a sharp curve in the trading-path, running
dangerously near a bluff bank, came abruptly into his mind. Drifts had
lodged in its jagged crevices, and it might well have chanced that here
the animal had lost his footing and slipped out of the steadily trotting
file along the river bank unnoticed in the blinding snow.

This theory seemed eminently plausible to his comrades, but when they
learned that he was of the opinion that the disaster had ha