The Spectre In The Cart | Page 5

she had to give, and my wife thinks the world and
all of it; won't let me have it 'cept as a favor; but this mornin' she told
me to take it--said 'twould bring me luck.' He took a big bandana out of
his pocket and held it up in the moonlight. I remembered it as one of
my father's.
"'She 'll make me give it up to-morrow night when I git home,' he
chuckled.
"We had turned into a road through the plantations, and had just come
to the fork where Halloway's road turned off toward his place.
"'I lays a heap to your mother's door--purty much all this, I reckon.' His
eye swept the moon-bathed scene before him. 'But for her I might n't 'a
got her. And ain't a' man in the world got a happier home, or as good a
wife.' He waved his hand toward the little homestead that was sleeping
in the moonlight on the slope the other side of the stream, a picture of
peace.
"His path went down a little slope, and mine kept along the side of the
hill until it entered the woods. A great sycamore tree grew right in the
fork, with its long, hoary arms extending over both roads, making a
broad mass of shadow in the white moonlight.
"The next day was the day of election. Hal-loway was at one poll and I
was at another; so I did not see him that day. But he sent me word that
evening that he had carried his poll, and I rode home knowing that we
should have peace.
"I was awakened next morning by the news that both Halloway and his
wife had been murdered the night before. I at once galloped over to his
place, and was one of the first to get there. It was a horrible sight.
Halloway had evidently been waylaid and killed by a blow of an axe

just as he was entering his yard gate, and then the door of the house had
been broken open and his wife had been killed, after which Halloway 's
body had been dragged into the house, and the house had been fired
with the intention of making it appear that the house had burned by
accident. But by one of those inscrutable fatalities, the fire, after
burning half of two walls, had gone out.
"It was a terrible sight, and the room looked like a shambles. Halloway
had plainly been caught unawares while leaning over his gate. The back
of his head had been crushed in with the eye of an axe, and he had died
instantly. The pleasant thought which was in his mind at the
instant--perhaps, of the greeting that always awaited him on the click of
his latch; perhaps, of his success that day; perhaps, of my mother's
kindness to him when he was a boy--was yet on his face, stamped there
indelibly by the blow that killed him. There he lay, face upward, as the
murderer had thrown him after bringing him in, stretched out his full
length on the floor, with his quiet face upturned! looking in that throng
of excited, awe-stricken men, just what he had said he was: a man of
peace. His wife, on the other hand, wore a terrified look on her face.
There had been a terrible struggle. She had lived to taste the bitterness
of death, before it took her."
Stokeman, with a little shiver, put his hand over his eyes as though to
shut out the vision that recurred to him. After a long breath he began
again.
"In a short time there was a great crowd there, white and black. The
general mind flew at once to Absalom Turnell. The negroes present
were as earnest in their denunciation as the whites; perhaps, more so,
for the whites were past threatening. I knew from the grim-ness that
trouble was brewing, and I felt that if Absalom were caught and any
evidence were found on him, no power on earth could save him. A
party rode off in search of him, and went to old Joel's house. Neither
Absalom nor Joel were there; they had not been home since the election,
one of the women said.
"As a law officer of the county I was to a certain extent in charge at
Halloway's and in looking around for all the clews to be found, I came

on a splinter of 'light-wood' not as large or as long as one's little finger,
stuck in a crack in the floor near the bed: a piece of a stick of 'fat-pine,'
such as negroes often carry about, and use as tapers. One end had been
burned; but the other end was clean and was jagged just as it had