His Unquiet Ghost | Page 9

I war. I wish I war."
He realized, after a moment's consideration, that he had been
unconsciously actuated by the chance of meeting the wagon, returning
by this route from the cross-roads' store. He was tired, disheartened; his
spirit was spent; he would be glad of the lift. He reflected, however,
that he must needs wait some time, for this was the date of a
revival-meeting at the little church, and the distillers' wagon would lag,

that its belated night journey might not be subjected to the scrutiny and
comment of the church-goers. Indeed, even now Walter Wyatt saw in
the distance the glimmer of a lantern, intimating homeward-bound
worshipers not yet out of sight.
"The saints kep' it up late ter-night," he commented.
He resolved to wait till the roll of wheels should tell of the return of the
moonshiners' empty wagon.
He crossed the river on the little footbridge and took his way languidly
along the road toward the deserted church. He was close to the hedge
that grew thick and rank about the little inclosure when he suddenly
heard the sound of lamentation from within. He drew back precipitately,
with a sense of sacrilege, but the branches of the unpruned growth had
caught in his sleeve, and he sought to disengage the cloth without such
rustling stir as might disturb or alarm the mourner, who had evidently
lingered here, after the dispersal of the congregation, for a moment's
indulgence of grief and despair. He had a glimpse through the shaking
boughs and the flickering mist of a woman's figure kneeling on the
crude red clods of a new-made grave. A vague, anxious wonder as to
the deceased visited him, for in the sparsely settled districts a strong
community sense prevails. Suddenly in a choking gust of sobs and
burst of tears he recognized his own name in a voice of which every
inflection was familiar. For a moment his heart seemed to stand still.
His brain whirled with a realization of this unforeseen result of the
fantastic story of his death in Eskaqua Cove, which the moonshiners,
on the verge of detection and arrest, had circulated in Tanglefoot as a
measure of safety. They had fancied that when the truth was developed
it would be easy enough to declare the men drunk or mistaken. The
"revenuers" by that time would be far away, and the pervasive security,
always the sequence of a raid, successful or otherwise, would once
more promote the manufacture of the brush whisky. The managers of
the moon-shining interest had taken measures to guard Wyatt's aged
father from this fantasy of woe, but they had not dreamed that the
mountain coquette might care. He himself stood appalled that this
ghastly fable should delude his heart's beloved, amazed that it should

cost her one sigh, one sob. Her racking paroxysms of grief over this
gruesome figment of a grave he was humiliated to hear, he was woeful
to see. He felt that he was not worth one tear of the floods with which
she bewept his name, uttered in every cadence of tender regret that her
melancholy voice could compass. It must cease, she must know the
truth at whatever cost. He broke through the hedge and stood in the
flicker of the moonlight before her, pale, agitated, all unlike his wonted
self.
She did not hear, amid the tumult of her weeping, the rustling of the
boughs, but some subtle sense took cognizance of his presence. She
half rose, and with one hand holding back her dense yellow hair, which
had fallen forward on her forehead, she looked up at him fearfully,
tremulously, with all the revolt of the corporeal creature for the essence
of the mysterious incorporeal. For a moment he could not speak. So
much he must needs explain. The next instant he was whelmed in the
avalanche of her words.
"Te hev kem!" she exclaimed in a sort of shrill ecstasy. "Te hev kem so
far ter hear the word that I would give my life ter hev said before. Te
knowed it in heaven! an' how like ye ter kem ter gin me the chanst ter
say it at last! How like the good heart of ye, worth all the hearts on
yearth--an' buried hyar!"
With her open palm she smote the insensate clods with a gesture of
despair. Then she went on in a rising tide of tumultuous emotion. "I
love ye! Oh, I always loved ye! I never keered fur nobody else! an' I
war tongue-tied, an' full of fool pride, an' faultin' ye fur yer ways; an' I
wouldn't gin ye the word I knowed ye war wantin' ter hear. But now I
kin tell the pore ghost of ye--I kin tell the pore, pore ghost!"
She buried her