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let's be moving. It's gettin' hotter every minute, and you oughtn't to be out in all this heat. For the Lord's sake, you ain't going to light another one of them things, are you?"
"Sure. It's the only vice I'm capable of enjoying at present. Being gassed and shell-shocked, and then having the flu and pneumonia and rheumatism,--and God knows what else,--sort of purifies a chap, you see."
"Well, all I got to say is--I guess I'd better not say it, after all."
"You can't hurt my feelings."
"I'm not so sure about that," said the old man gruffly.
"How do you get up to that cave?"
"You ain't thinking of trying it, are you?" apprehensively.
"When I'm a bit huskier, yes."
The old man removed his cigar in order to obtain the full effect of a triumphant grin.
"Well, in the first place, you can't get up to it. You've got to come down to it. The only way to get to the mouth of that cave is to lower yourself from the top of the rock. And in the second place, you can't get DOWN to it because it ain't allowed. The owner of all the land along that side of the river has got 'no trespass' signs up, and NOBODY'S allowed to climb to the top of that rock. She's all-fired particular about it, too. The top of that rock is sacred to her. Nobody ever thinks of violatin' it. All around the bottom of the slope back of the hill she's got a white picket fence, and the gate to it is padlocked. You see it's her family buryin'-ground."
"Her what?"
"Buryin'-ground. Her father and mother are buried right smack on top of that rock."
The young man lifted his eyebrows. "Does that mean there are a couple of married ghosts fighting on top of the rock every night, besides the gang down in the--"
"It ain't a joking matter," broke in the other sharply.
"Go on, tell me more. The monstrosity gets more and more interesting every minute."
The old man chewed his cigar energetically for a few seconds before responding.
"I'll tell you the story tonight after supper,--not now. The only thing I want to make clear to you is this. Everybody in this section respects her wishes about keeping off of that rock, and I want to ask you to respect 'em, too. It would be a dirty trick for you to go up there, knowin' it's dead against her wishes."
"A dirty trick, eh?" said the young man, fixing his gaze on the blue-black summit of the forbidden rock.
CHAPTER II
THE STORY THE OLD MAN TOLD

David Windom's daughter Alix ran away with and married Edward Crown in the spring of 1894.
Windom was one of the most prosperous farmers in the county. His lands were wide, his cattle were many, his fields were vast stretches of green and gold; his granaries, his cribs and his mows, filled and emptied each year, brought riches and dignity and power to this man of the soil.
Back when the state was young, his forefathers had fared westward from the tide-water reaches of Virginia, coming at length to the rich, unbroken region along the river with the harsh Indian name, and there they built their cabins and huts on lands that had cost them little more than a song and yet were of vast dimensions. They were of English stock. (Another branch of the family, closely related, remains English to this day, its men sitting sometime in Parliament and always in the councils of the nation, far removed in every way from the Windoms in the fertile valley once traversed by the war-like redskins.) But these Windoms of the valley were no longer English. There had been six generations of them, and those of the first two fought under General Washington against the red-coats and the Hessians in the War of '76.
David Windom, of the fourth generation, went to England for a wife, however,--a girl he had met on the locally celebrated trip to Europe in the early seventies. For years he was known from one end of the county to the other as "the man who has been across the Atlantic Ocean." The dauntless English bride had come unafraid to a land she had been taught to regard as wild, peopled by savages and overrun by ravenous beasts, and she had found it populated instead by the gentlest sort of men and equally gentle beasts.
She did a great deal for David Windom. He was a proud man and ambitious. He saw the wisdom of her teachings and he followed them, not reluctantly but with a fierce desire to refine what God had given him in the shape of raw material: a good brain, a sturdy sense of honour, and above all an imagination that lifted him safely,--if not always sanely,--above the narrow world in which