ccident,
it was thought, the boat got away when he was befuddled with drink in a
wood-chopper's cabin--a stout, trig little craft it was! When he found
it was gone, he was wild, for although he saw it afloat at a
considerable distance down the Mississippi, it suddenly disappeared near
Bogue Holauba, cargo and all. No trace of its fate was ever discovered.
He haunted these banks then--whatever he may have done since--screaming
out his woes for his losses, and his rage and curses on the miscreants
who had set the craft adrift--for he fully believed it was done in
malice--beating his breast and tearing his hair. The Civil War came on
presently, and the man was lost sight of in the national commotions. No
one thought of him again till suddenly something--an apparition, an
illusion, the semblance of a man--began to patrol the banks of Bogue
Holauba, and beat its breast and tear its hair and bewail its woes in
pantomime, and set the whole country-side aghast, for always disasters
follow its return."

"And how do you account for that phase?" asked Gordon, obviously
steadying his voice by an effort of the will.

"The apparition always shows up at low water,--the disasters are usually
typhoid," replied the physician.

"Mr. Keene died from malaria," Geraldine murmured musingly.

The two men glanced significantly at each other. Then Rigdon resumed: "I
mustered the hardihood on one occasion to row up to the bank of Bogue
Holauba for a closer survey. The thing vanished on my approach. There
was a snag hard by, fast anchored in the bottom of the Bogue. It played
slackly to and fro with the current, but I could not see any way by
which it or its shadow could have produced the illusion."

"Is this what you had to tell me?" demanded Geraldine pertinently. "I
knew all that already."

"No, no," replied the Doctor reluctantly. "Will you tell it, Mr. Gordon,
or shall I?"

"You, by all means, if you will," said Gordon gloomily. "God knows I
should be glad never to speak of it."

"Well," Rigdon began slowly, "Mr. Gordon was made by his cousin Jasper
Keene not only the executor of his will, but the repository of a
certain confession, which he may destroy or make public as he sees
proper. It seems that in Mr. Keene's gay young days, running wild in his
vacation from college on a secluded plantation, he often lacked
congenial companionship, and he fell in with an uncouth fellow of a
lower social grade, who led him into much detrimental