ee of the old grey negro Clabe, about
the horrors of this haunted "bend" in the Gauley. There, when I was a
child, had lived old Bodkin in a stone house, now a ruin, by the
river,--a crooked, mean old devil with a great hump, and eyes like a
toad. He came to own the land through some suspicious will about which
there clung the atmosphere of crime, as men said. When I saw him first,
I was riding behind my brother, and he stopped us and tried to induce
Ward to buy his land. He was mounted on a red roan horse, and looked
like an old knotty spider.

I can still remember how frightened I was, and how I hid my face against
my brother's coat and hugged him until my arms ached. When Ward inquired
why he wished to sell, he laughed in a sort of cackle, and replied that
he was going to marry a wife and go to the moon.

Now, tradition told that he had married many a wife, but that they died
quickly in the poisoned chamber of this spider. Ward looked the
bridegroom over from his twisted feet to his hump, and there must have
been some merry shadow in his face, for Bodkin leaned over the horn of
his saddle and stretched out his hand, a putty-coloured hand, with long,
bony fingers. "Do you see that?" he croaked. "If I ever get that hand on
a woman, she's mine."

Then I began to cry, and Ward wished the old man a happy voyage to the
cloud island, and we rode on.

He did marry a wife, and one morning, but little afterwards, two of my
brother's drivers found her hanging to the limb of a dead apple tree
with a bridle rein knotted to her neck, and her bare feet touching the
tops of the timothy grass. When they came to look for Bodkin, he had
disappeared with his red roan horse. Ward explained that he had ridden
through the gap of the mountains into the South, but I thought, with the
negroes, that someone ought to have seen him if he had gone that way;
besides, I had heard him say that he was going to the moon. Later, old
Bart and Levi Dillworth, returning from some frolic, had seen Bodkin
riding his horse in a terrible gallop, with the dead woman across the
horn of his saddle, on his way to the moon.

It was true that both Bart and Levi were long in the bow arm, and men
who loved truth less than they loved laurels. Still the tale had
splendid conditions precedent, and old Clabe arose to its support with
many an eloquent wag of his head.

I was running through this very ghost story when El Mahdi stopped in the
road and pricked up his