tty straight--that he'd just lost a hundred dollars at poker.
A hundred dollars may not sound like a very big loss in these days of
bridge, but it was large for that place, and it represented to Radnor
exactly two months' pay. As overseer of the plantation, the Colonel paid
him six hundred dollars a year, a little enough sum considering the work
he did. Rad had nothing in his own right; aside from his salary he was
entirely dependent on his father, and it struck me as more than foolish
for a young man who was contemplating marriage to throw away two months'
earnings in a single game of poker. The conviction crossed my mind that
perhaps after all Polly was wise to delay.

I heard another rumor however which was graver than the poker affair; it
was only a rumor, and when traced to its source turned out to be nothing
more tangible than somebody's hazarded guess, but without the slightest
cause the same suspicion had already presented itself to me. And that
was, that the ha'nt was a very flesh and blood woman. Radnor was clearly
in some sort of trouble; he was moody and irritable, so sharp with the
farm hands that several of them left, and unusually taciturn with the
Colonel and me. To make matters worse Polly Mathers was treating him
with marked indifference, and openly bestowing her smiles upon Mattison;
what the trouble was I could only conjecture, but I feared that she too
had been hearing rumors.

The ha'nt stories had been repeated and exaggerated until they contained
no semblance of truth. By this time, not only the laurel walk was
haunted, but the spring-hole as well; and it soon became a region of
even greater fear than the deserted cabins. The "spring-hole" was a
natural cavity in the side of a hill a half mile or so back from the
house. It was out of this cavity that the underground stream flowed
which fed the pools, and furnished such valuable irrigation to the
place. All that part of Virginia is undermined with limestone caverns,
and my uncle's was by no means the only plantation that could boast the
distinction of a private cave. The entrance was half hidden among rugged
piled-up boulders dripping with moisture; and was not inviting. I
remembered chasing a rabbit into this cavern when I was a boy, and
though it would have been an easy matter to follow him, I preferred to
stay outside in the sunshine. The spring-hole, then, was haunted. This
did not strike me as strange. I rather wondered that it had not been