se for which they had been first intended--the
storing of loot.

"He waited there for his brother, determined to have it decided once and
for all. They quarreled bitterly. Both were young, both had bad tempers,
and each saw his side as the right of the matter--"

"Regular Ralestones, weren't they?" commented Val slyly.

"Undoubtedly," agreed Rupert. "Well, at last Richard started for the
house, his brother in pursuit.

"Then they fought, here in this very hall. And not with words this time,
but with the rapiers Richard had brought back from France. A slave named
Falesse, who had been the twins' childhood nurse, was the only witness
to the end of that duel. Richard lay face down across the hearth-stone
as she came screaming down the stairs."

Ricky was studying the gray stone.

"By rights," Val agreed with her unspoken thought, "there ought to be a
stain there. Unfortunately for romance, there isn't."

"Rick was standing by the door," Rupert continued. "When Falesse reached
his brother, he laughed unsteadily and half raised his sword in a
duelist's salute. Then he was gone. But there were two swords on the
floor. And that niche was empty.

"When he fled into the night storm with his brother's blood staining his
hands, Rick Ralestone took the Luck of his house with him.

"After almost a year of invalidism, Richard recovered. He never married
his American beauty. But in 1819 he took a wife, a young Creole lady
widowed by the Battle of New Orleans. Of Rick nothing was heard again,
although his brother searched diligently for more than thirty years."

"How," Val grinned at his brother, "did Richard explain the little
matter of the ghost which is supposed to walk at night?"

"I don't know. But when the Civil War broke out, Richard's son Miles was
the master of Pirate's Haven. The once-great fortune of the family had
shrunk. Business losses in the city, floods, a disaster at sea, had
emptied the family purse--"

"The Luck getting in its dirty work by remote control," supplied the
irrepressible Val.

"Perhaps. Young Miles had married in his teens, and the call to the
Confederate colors brought both his twin sons under arms as well as
their father.

"Miles, the father, fell in the First Battle of Bull Run. But Miles, the
son and elder of the twins, a lieutenant of cavalry, came out of the war
the only surviving male of his family.

"His brother Richard had been wounded and was home on sick leave when
the North