The Affair at Grover Station by Willa Cather. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Affair at Grover Station by Willa Cather. I heard this story sitting on the rear platform of an accommodation freight that crawled along through the brown, sun-dried wilderness between Grover Station and Cheyenne. The narrator was Terrapin Rogers, who had been a classmate of mine at Princeton, and who was then cashier in the B Railroad office at Cheyenne. Rogers was an Albany boy, but after his father failed in business, his uncle got Terrapin a position on a western railroad, and he left college and disappeared completely from our little world. And it was not until I was sent west by the university with a party of geologists who were digging for fossils in the region about Stirling, Colorado that I saw him again. On this particular occasion, Rogers had been down at Stirling to spend Sunday with me, and I accompanied him when he returned to Cheyenne. When the train pulled out of Grover Station, we were sitting smoking on the rear platform, watching the pale yellow disc of the moon that was just rising, and that drenched the naked, gray plains in a soft, lemon-colored light. The telegraph poles scored the sky like a musical staff as they flashed by, and the stars seen between the wires looked like the notes of some erratic symphony. The stillness of the night and the loneliness and barrenness of the plains were conducive to an uncanny train of thought. We had just left Grover Station behind us, and the murder of the station agent at Grover, which had occurred the previous winter, was still the subject of much conjecturing and theorizing all along that line of railroad. Rogers had been an intimate friend of the murdered agent, and it was said that he knew more about the affair than any other living man. But with that particular reticence, which at college had won him the sober-k, Terrapin, he had kept what he knew to himself, and even the most accomplished reporter on the New York Journal, who had traveled halfway across the continent for the express purpose of pumping Rogers, had given him up as impossible. But I had known Rogers a long time, and since I had been grubbing in the chalk about Sterling, we had fallen into a habit of exchanging confidences, for it is good to see an old face in a strange land. So, as the little red station house at Grover faded into the distance, I asked him point blank what he knew about the murder of Lawrence O'Toole. Rogers took a long pull at his black briar pipe, as he answered me. Well, yes, I could tell you something about it, but the question is how much you'd believe, and whether you could restrain yourself from reporting it to the Society for Psychical Research. I never told the story but once, and then it was to the division superintendent, and when I finished, the old gentleman asked if I were a drinking man, and remarking that a fertile imagination was not a desirable quality in a railroad employee, said it would be just as well if the story went no further. You see, it's a gruesome tale, and some way we don't like to be reminded that there are more things in heaven and earth than our systems of philosophy can grapple with. However, I should rather like to tell the story to a man who would look at it objectively and leave it in the domain of a pure incident where it belongs. It would unburden my mind, and I'd like to get a scientific man's opinion on the yarn. But I suppose I'd better begin at the beginning with the dance which preceded the tragedy, just as such things follow each other in a play. I noticed that Destiny, who was a good deal of an artist in her way, frequently falls back upon that elementary principle of contrast to make things interesting for us. It was the 31st of December, the morning of the incoming governor's inaugural ball, and I got down to the office early, for I had a heavy day's work ahead of me, and I was going to the dance and wanted to close up by six. I had scarcely unlocked the door when I heard someone calling Cheyenne on the wire, and hurried over to the instrument to see what was wanted. It was Lawrence O'Toole at Grover, and he said he was coming up for the ball on the extra due in Cheyenne at nine o'clock that night. He wanted me to go up to see Miss Masterson and ask her if she could go with him. He had had some trouble in getting leave of absence, as the last regular train for Cheyenne then left Grover at five forty-five in the afternoon, and as there was an eastbound going through Grover at seven thirty, the dispatcher didn't want him array. In case there should be orders for the seven thirty train. So Larry had made no arrangement with Miss Masterson, as he was uncertain about getting up until he was notified about the extra. I telephoned Miss Masterson and delivered Larry's message. She replied that she had made an arrangement to go to the dance with Mr. Fraymark, but added laughingly that no other arrangement held when Larry could come. About noon, Fraymark dropped in at the office, and I suspected he'd got his time from Miss Masterson. While he was hanging around, Larry called me up to tell me that Helen's flowers would be up from Denver on the Union Pacific passenger at five, and he asked me to have them sent up to her promptly, and to call for her that evening in case the extra should be a little late. Fraymark, of course, listened to the message, and when the sounder stopped, he smiled in a slow, disagreeable way, and saying, Thank you, that's all I wanted to know. Left the office. Lawrence O'Toole had been my predecessor in the cashier's office at Cheyenne, and he needs a little explanation now that he is underground. Though when he was in the world of living men, he explained himself better than any man I have ever met, East or West. I've knocked about a good deal since I cut loose from Princeton, and I found that there are a great many good fellows in the world, but I've not found many better than Larry. I think I can say without stretching a point that he was the most popular man on the division. He had a faculty of making everyone like him that amounted to a sort of genius. When he first went to working on the road, he was the agent's assistant down at Sterling, a mayor kid fresh from Ireland, without a dollar in his pocket and no sort of backing in the world but his quick wit and handsome face. It was a face that served him as a sight draft, good in all banks. Fraymark was cashier at the Cheyenne office then, but he had been up to some dirty work with the company, and when it fell in the line of Larry's duty to expose him, he did so without hesitating. Eventually Fraymark was discharged, and Larry was made cashier in his place. There was, after that, naturally little love lost between them, and to make matters worse, Helen Masterson took a fancy to Larry, and Fraymark had begun to consider himself pretty solid in that direction. I doubt whether Miss Masterson ever really liked the Blackard, but he was a queer fish, and she was a queer girl, and she found him interesting. Old John J. Masterson, her father, had been United States Senator from Wyoming, and Helen had been educated at Wellesley, and had lived in Washington a good deal.  He passed as an Alsatian Jew, but he had lived a good deal in Paris, and had been pretty much all over the world, and spoke the more general European languages fluently. He was a wiry, sallow, unwholesome-looking man, slight and meagerly built, and he looked as though he had been dried through and through by the blistering heat of the tropics. His movements were as lithe and agile as those of a cat, and invested with a certain unusual stealthy grace.  His hair a very thick and coarsen straight, black with a sort of purple luster to it, and he always wore it correctly parted in the middle and brushed smoothly about his ears. He had a pair of the most impudent red lips that closed over white regular teeth. His hands, of which he took the greatest care, were the yellow wrinkled hands of an old man, and shriveled at the fingertips, though I don't think he could have been much over thirty. The long and short of it is that the fellow was uncanny. He somehow felt that there was that in his present or in his past, or in his destiny which isolated him from other men. He dressed in excellent taste, was always accommodating, with the most polished manners and in a dress extravagantly deferential. He went into cattle after he lost his job with the company and had an interest in a ranch ten miles out, though he spent most of his time in Cheyenne at the capital card rooms. He had an insatiable passion for gambling, and he was one of the few men who make it pay. About a week before the dance, Larry's cousin, Harry Burns, who was a reporter on the London Times, stopped in Cheyenne on his way to Frisco, and Larry came up to meet him. We took Burns up to the club, and I noticed that he acted rather clearly when Fraymark came in. Burns went down to Grover to spend a day with Larry, and on Saturday Larry wired me to come down and spend Sunday with him, as he had important news for me. I went, and the gist of his information was that Fraymark, then going by another name, had figured in a particularly ugly London scandal that happened to be in Burns's beat, and his record had been exposed. He was indeed from Paris, but there was not a drop of Jewish blood in his veins, and he dated from farther back than Israel. His father was a French soldier, who during his service in the East had bought a Chinese slave girl, had become attached to her, and married her, and after her death had brought her child back to Europe with him. He had entered the civil service and held several subordinate offices in the capital, where his son was educated. The boy, socially ambitious and extremely sensitive about his Asiatic blood, after having been black-balled at a club, had left and lived by an exceedingly questionable traffic in London, assuming a Jewish patronymic to account for his Oriental complexion and traits of feature. That explained everything. That explained why Fraymark's hands were those of a centenarian. In his veins crept the sluggish amphibious blood of a race that was already old when Jacob tended the flocks of Laban upon the pills of Padden Aram, a race that was in its mort cloth before Europe's swaddling clothes were made. Of course, the question at once came up as to what ought to be done with Burns's information. Cheyenne clubs are not exclusive, but a Chinaman who had been engaged in Fraymark's peculiarly unsavory traffic would be disbarred in almost any region outside of Whitechapel. One thing was for sure. Miss Masterson must be informed of the matter at once. On second thought said Larry, I guess I'd better tell her myself. It will have to be done easy like, not to hurt her self-respect too much. Like as not, I'll go off my head the first time I see him and call him rat-eater to his face. Well, to get back to the day of the dance, I was wondering whether Larry would stay over to tell Miss Masterson about it the next day, for of course he couldn't spring such a thing on a girl at a party. That evening I dressed early and went down to the station at nine to meet Larry. The extra came in, but no Larry. I saw Connolly, the conductor, and asked him if he had seen anything of O'Toole, but he said he hadn't, that the station at Grover was open when he came through, but that he had found no train orders and couldn't raise anyone, so he supposed O'Toole had come up on the 153. I went back to the office and called Grover, but he got no answer. Then I sat down at the instrument and called for 15 minutes straight. I wanted to go then and hunt up the conductor on 153, the passenger that went through Grover at 5.30 in the afternoon, and ask him what he knew about Larry, but it was then 9.45 and I knew Miss Masterson would be waiting, so I jumped into the carriage and told the driver to make up time. On my way to the Mastersons I did some tall thinking. I could find no explanation for O'Toole's non-appearance, but the business of the moment was to invent one for Miss Masterson that would neither alarm nor offend her. I couldn't exactly tell her he wasn't coming, for he might show up yet, so I decided to say the extra was late and I didn't know when it would be in. Miss Masterson had been an exceptionally beautiful girl to begin with, and life had done a great deal for her. Fond as I was of Larry, I used to wonder whether a girl who had led such a full and independent existence would ever find the courage to face life with a railroad man who was so near the bottom of a ladder that is so long and steep.  I noticed the roses then, though I didn't know that they were the boy's last message to the woman he loved. She paused halfway down the stairs and looked at me, and then over my head into the drawing-room, and then her eyes questioned me. I bungled at my explanation, and she thanked me for coming, but she couldn't hide her disappointment and scarcely glanced at herself in the mirror as I put her wrap around her shoulders. It was not a cheerful ride down to the capital. Miss Masterson did her duty by me bravely, but it was difficult to be even decently attentive to what she was saying. Once arrived at Representative Hall where the dance was held, the strain was relieved, for the fellows all pounced on her for dances, and there were friends of hers there from Helena and Laramie, and my responsibility was practically at an end. Don't expect me to tell you what a Wyoming inaugural ball is like. I'm not good at that sort of thing, and this dance is merely incidental to my story. Dance followed dance and still no Larry. The dances I had with Miss Masterson were torture. She began to question and cross-question me, and when I got tangled up in my lies she became indignant. Fraymark was late in arriving. It must have been after midnight when he appeared, correct and smiling, having driven up from his ranch.  He was constantly dangling about Miss Masterson, who made rather a point of being gracious to him. I couldn't much blame her under the circumstances, but it irritated me, and I'm not ashamed to say that I rather spied on them. When they were on the balcony, I heard him say, You see, I've forgiven this morning entirely. She answered him rather coolly, but you were constitutionally forgiving. However, I'll be fair and forgive too. It's more comfortable. Then he said, in a slow insinuating tone, and I could fairly see him thrust out those impudent red lips of his as he said it. If I can teach you to forgive, I wonder whether I could not also teach you to forget. I almost think I could. At any rate, I shall make you remember this night. Rappelle-toi lorsque les destinées mourront de toi pour jamais s'éparer. As they came in, I saw him slip one of Larry's red roses into his pocket. It was not until near the end of the dance that the clock of destiny sounded the first stroke of the tragedy.  The orchestra was playing a waltz, drawing the strains out long and sweet like the notes of a flute, and Fremark was dancing with Helen. I was not dancing myself then, and suddenly noticed some confusion among the waiters who stood watching by one of the doors, and Larry's black dog, Duke, all foam at the mouth, shot in the side and bleeding, dashed in through the door, and threw himself at Fremark's feet, uttering a howl piteous enough to herald any sort of calamity. Fremark, who had not seen him before, turned with an exclamation of rage and a face absolutely livid and kicked the wounded brute halfway across the slippery floor. There was something fiendishly brutal and horrible in the episode. It was the breaking out of the barbarian blood through his mask of European civilization, a jet of black mud spurted up from some nameless pest-hole of filthy, heathen cities. The music stopped, people began moving about in a confused mass, and I saw Helen's eyes seeking mine appealingly. I hurried to her, and by the time I reached her, Fremark had disappeared. Get the carriage and take care of Duke, she said, and her voice trembled like that of one shivering with cold. When we were in the carriage, she spread one of the robes of her on her knee, and I lifted the dog up to her, and she took him in her arms, comforting him. Where is Larry, and what is all this mean, she asked? You can't put me off any longer, for I danced with a man who came up on the extra. Then I made a clean rest of it and told her what I knew, which was little enough. Do you think he is ill, she asked? I replied, I don't know what to think. I'm all at sea. For since the appearance of the dog, I was genuinely alarmed. She was silent for a long time, and the rays of the electric streetlights flashed at intervals into the carriage. I could see that she was leaning back with her eyes closed and the dog's nose against her throat. At last she said with a note of entreaty in her voice, can't you think of anything? I saw that she was thoroughly frightened and told her that it would probably all end in a joke, and that I would telephone her as soon as I heard from Larry, and would more than likely have something amusing to tell her. It was snowing hard when we reached the senators, and when we got out of the carriage she gave Duke tenderly over to me, and I remember how she dragged on my arm and how played out and exhausted she seemed. You really must not worry at all, I said. You know how uncertain railroadmen are. It's sure to be better at the next inaugural ball. We'll all be dancing together then. The next inaugural ball, she said, as we went up the steps, putting out her hand to catch the snowflakes. That seems a long way off. I got down to the office late next morning, and before I had time to try Grover, the dispatcher at Holyoke called me up to ask whether Larry were still in Cheyenne. He couldn't raise Grover, he said, and he wanted to give Larry train orders for 151, the eastbound passenger. When he heard what I had to say, he told me I had better go down to Grover on 151 myself, as the storm threatened to tie up all the trains and we might look for trouble. I had the veterinary surgeon fix up Duke's side, and I put him in the express car and boarded the 151 with a mighty cold, uncomfortable sensation in the region of my diaphragm. It had snowed all night long and the storm had developed into a blizzard, and the passenger had difficulty in making any headway at all. When we got into Grover, I thought it was the most desolate spot I had ever looked on, and as the train pulled out, leaving me there, I felt like sending a message of farewell to the world. You know what Grover is, a red box of a station, section house barricaded by coal sheds, and a little group of dwellings at the end of everything, with a desert running out on every side to the skyline. The houses and the station were covered with a coating of snow that clung to them like a wet plaster, and the siding was one deep snowdrift banked against the station door. The plain was a wide, white ocean of swirling, drifting snow that beat and broke like the thrash of the waves and the merciless wind that swept with nothing to break it from the Rockies to the Missouri. When I opened the station door, the snow fell in upon the floor, and Duke sat down by the empty, fireless stove and began to howl and whine in a heartbreaking fashion. Larry's sleeping room upstairs was empty. Downstairs everything was in order, and all the station work had been done up. Apparently the last thing Larry had done was to bill out a car of wool from the Oasis sheep ranch for Dewey, Gold and Company, Boston. The car had gone out on 153, the eastbound that left Grover at 7 o'clock the night before, so he must have been there at that time. I copied the bill in the copy book and went over to the section house to make inquiries. The section boss was getting ready to go out to look after his track. He said he had seen O'Toole at 5.30 when the westbound passenger went through, and, not having seen him since, suppose he was still in Cheyenne. I went over to Larry's boarding house, and the woman said he must be in Cheyenne, as he had eaten his supper at 5 o'clock the night before so that he would have time to get his station work done and dress. The little girl, she said, had gone over at 5 to tell him that supper was ready. I questioned the child carefully. She said there was another man, a stranger, in the station with Larry when she went in, and that though she didn't hear anything they said, and Larry was sitting with his chair tilted back and his feet on the stove, she somehow had thought they were quarreling. The stranger, she said, was standing. There was a fur codon, and his eyes snapped like he was mad, and she was very afraid of him. I asked her if she could recall anything else about him, and she said, yes, he had very red lips. When I heard that, my heart grew cold as a snow lump, and when I went out, the wind seemed to go clear through me. It was evident enough that Fraymark had gone down there to make trouble, had quarreled with Larry, and had boarded either the 5.30 passenger or the extra, and got the conductor to let him off at his ranch, and accounted for his late appearance at the dance. It was five o'clock then, but the 5.30 train was two hours late, so there was nothing to do but sit down and wait for the conductor, who had gone out on the seven o'clock eastbound the night before, and who must have seen Larry when he picked up the car of wool. It was growing dark by that time. The sky was a dull lead color, and the snow had drifted about the little town until it was almost buried, and was still coming down so fast that you could scarcely see your hand before you. I was never so glad to hear anything as that whistle when old 153 came lumbering and groaning in through the snow. I ran out on the platform to meet her, and her headlight looked like the face of an old friend. I caught the conductor's arm the minute he stepped off the train, but he wouldn't talk until he got in by the fire. He said he hadn't seen a tool at all the night before, but he had found the bill for the wool car on the table with a note from Larry asking him to take the ear out on the QT, and he had concluded that Larry had gone up to Cheyenne on the 530. I wired the Cheyenne office and managed to catch the express clerk who had gone through on the extra the night before. He wired me, saying that he had not seen Larry board the extra, but that his dog had crept into his usual place in the express car, and he had supposed Larry was in the coach. He had seen Fraymark get on at Grover, and the train had slowed up a trifle at his ranch to let him off, for Fraymark stood in with some of the boys and sent his cattle shipments our way. When the night fairly closed down on me, I began to wonder how a gay, expansive fellow like O'Toole had ever stood six months at Grover. The snow had let up by that time, and the stars were beginning to glitter cold and bright through the hurrying clouds. I put on my elster and went outside. I began on my newt tour of inspection. I went through empty freight cars run down by the siding, searched the coal houses and primitive cellar, examining them carefully, and calling O'Toole's name. Duke at my heels dragged himself painfully about, but seemed as much at sea as I, and betrayed the nervous suspense and alertness of a bird dog that has lost its game. I went back to the office, and took the big station lamp upstairs to make a more careful examination of Larry's sleeping room. The suit of clothes that he usually wore at his back was hanging on the wall. His shaving things were lying about, and I recognized the silver-backed military hairbrushes that Miss Masterson had given him at Christmastime, lying on his chiffonier. The upper drawer was open, and a pair of white kid gloves was lying on the corner. A white string tie hung across his pipe rack. It was crumpled, and had evidently proved unsatisfactory when he tied it. On the chiffonier lay several clean handkerchiefs with holes in them, where he had unfolded them, and thrown them by in a hasty search for a hole one. A black silk muffler hung on the chair-back, and a top hat was set awry on the head of a plaster cast of Parnell, Larry's hero. His dress suit was missing, so there was no doubt that he had dressed for the party. His overcoat lay on his trunk, and his dancing shoes were on the floor at the foot of the bed beside his everyday ones. I knew that his pumps were a little tight. He had joked about them when I was down the Sunday before the dance, but he had only one pair, and he couldn't have got another in Grover if he had tried himself. That set me to thinking. He was a dainty fellow about his shoes, and I knew his collection pretty well. I went to his closet and found them all there. Even granting him a prejudice against overcoats, I couldn't conceive of him going out in that stinging weather without shoes. I noticed that a surgeon's case, such as our carried-on passenger's trains, in which Larry had once appropriated in Cheyenne, was open, and that the role of medicated cotton had been pulled out and recently used. Each discovery I made served only to add to my perplexity. Granted that Fraymark had been there, and granted that he had played the boy an ugly trick, he could not have spirited him away from the knowledge of the train crew.   I decided to go to bed and make a fresh start on the ugly business in the morning. The bed looked as though someone had been lying on it, so I started to beat it up a little before I got in. I took off the pillow, and I pulled up the mattress. On the edge of the ticking at the head of the bed, I saw a dark red stain about the size of my hand. I felt the cold sweat come out on me, and my hands were dangerously unsteady, as I carried the lamp over and set it down on the chair by the bed. But Duke was too quick for me. He had seen that stain, and leaping on the bed began sniffing it and whining like a dog that is being whipped to death. I bent down and felt it with my fingers. It was dry, but the color and stiffness were unmistakably accumulated blood. I caught up my coat and vest, and ran downstairs with Duke yelping at my heels. My first impulse was to go and call someone, but from the platform not a single light was visible, and I knew the section men had been in bed for hours. I remembered then that Larry was often annoyed by hemorrhages at the nose in that high altitude, but even that did not altogether quiet my nerves, and I realized that sleeping in that bed was quite out of the question. Larry always kept a supply and soda on hand, so I made myself a stiff drink and filled the stove and locked the door, turned down the lamp, and lay down on the operator's table. I had often slept there when I was a night operator. At first it was impossible to sleep, for Duke kept starting up and limping to the door and scratching at it, yelping nervously. He kept this up until I was thoroughly unstrong, and though I'm ordinarily cold enough, there wasn't money enough in Wyoming to have bribed me to open that door. I didn't hear it, and I even drew the big rusty bolt that was never used, and it seemed to me that it groaned heavily as I drew it, or perhaps it was the wind outside that groaned. As for Duke, I threatened to put him out and boxed his ears until I heard his feelings, and he lay down in front of the door with his muzzle between his paws and his eyes shining like live coals and riveted on the crack under the door. The situation was gruesome enough, but the liquor had made me drowsy and at last I fell asleep. It had been about three o'clock in the morning that I was awakened by the crying of the dog, a whimper low, continuous, and pitiful, and indescribably human. While I was blinking my eyes in an effort to get thoroughly awake, I heard another sound, the grating sound of chalk on a wooden chalkboard, or of a soft pencil on a slate. I turned my head to the right and saw a man standing with his back to me, chalking something on the bulletin board. At a glance I recognized the broad, high shoulders and the handsome head of my friend. Yet there was that about the figure which kept me from calling his name or from moving a muscle where I lay. He finished his writing and dropped the chalk, and I distinctly heard its click as it fell. He made a gesture as though he were dusting his fingers and then turned facing me, holding his left-handed front of his mouth. I saw him clearly in the soft light of the station lamp. He wore his dress clothes and began moving towards the door with his stocking feet. There was about his movements an indescribable stiffness as though his limbs had been frozen. His face was chalky white, his hair seemed damp, and was plastered down close about his temples. His eyes were colorless jellies, dull as lead, and staring straight before him. When he reached the door, he lowered the hand he held before his mouth to open the latch. His face was turned squarely towards me and was set rigidly upon his collar.  Then I knew it was a dead man's face I looked upon. The door opened and that stiff black figure in stockings walked as noiselessly as a cat out into the night. I think I went quite mad then. I dimly remember that I rushed out upon the siding and ran up and down screaming, Larry! Larry! until the wind seemed to echo my call. The stars were out in myriads and the snow glistened in their light. But I could see nothing but the wide, white plain, not even a dark shadow anywhere. When at last I found myself back in the station I saw Duke lying before the door and dropped on my knees beside him calling him by name. But Duke was past calling back. Master and Dog had gone together and I dragged him into the corner and covered his face.  Oh, I didn't forget that. I had chalked the time of the accommodation on at the night before, from sheer force of habit, for it isn't customary to mark the time of trains in unimportant stations like Grover. My writing had been rubbed out by a moist hand, for I could see the finger marks clearly and in place of it was written in blue chalk simply C, B, and Q 2, 6, 3, 8, 7 I sat there drinking brandy and muttering to myself before that blackboard until those blue letters danced up and down like magic lantern pictures when you jiggle the slides.  At last an idea flashed over me. I snatched the waybill off the hook. The car of wool that had left Grover for Boston the night before was numbered 2, 6, 3, 8, 7. I must have got through the rest of the night somehow, for when the sun came up red and angry over the planes the section boss found me sitting by the stove, the lamp burning full blaze, the brandy bottle empty beside me and with but one idea in my head that box car 2, 6, 3, 8, 7 must be stopped and opened as soon as possible and that somehow it would explain. I figured that we could easily catch it in Omaha and wired the freight agent there to go through it carefully and report anything unusual. That night I got a wire from the agent stating that the body of a man had been found under a wool sack at one end of the car with a fan and an invitation to the inaugural ball at Cheyenne in the pocket of his dress coat. I wired him not to disturb the body until I arrived and started for Omaha. Before I left Grover the Cheyenne office wired me that the framework had left town going west over the Union Pacific. The company detectives never found him. The matter was clear enough then. Being a railroad man he had hidden the body and sealed up the car and build it out leaving the conductor. Since he was of a race without conscience or sensibilities and since his past was more infamous than his birth he had boarded the extra and had gone to the ball and danced with Miss Masterson with blood undried upon his hands. When I saw Larry O'Toole again he was lying stiff and stark in the undertaker's rooms in Omaha. He was clad in his dress clothes with black stockings on his feet as I had seen him 48 hours before. Helen Masterson's fan was in his pocket.  He had been shot in the mouth the bullet lodging between the third and fourth vertebrae. The hemorrhage had been very slight and had been checked by the cotton. The quarrel had taken place about five in the afternoon. After supper Larry had dressed all but his shoes and had lain down to snatch a wink of sleep trusting to the whistle of the extra to awaken him. He had been asleep. Afterwards placing his body in the wool-car, which, but from my telegram, would not have been open for weeks. That's the whole story. There is nothing more to tell except one detail that I did not mention to the superintendent. When I said goodbye to the boy before the undertaker and coroner took charge of the body, I lifted his right hand to take off a ring that Miss Masterson had given him and the ends of the fingers in the grover station. The evening was already falling as the vehicle in which I was contained entered upon the long and gloomy avenue that leads to Bugham Grange. A resounding shriek echoed through the wood as I entered the avenue. I paid no attention to it at the moment, judging it to be merely one of those resounding shrieks which one might expect to hear in such a place at such a time. As my drive continued, however, I found myself wondering in spite of myself why such a shriek should have been uttered at the very moment of my approach. I am not by temperament in any degree a nervous man, and yet there was much in my surroundings to justify a certain reason. The Grange is situated in the loneliest part of England, the marsh country of the Fens to which civilization is still hardly penetrated. The inhabitants of whom there are only one and a half to the square mile live here and there among the Fens and eke out a miserable existence by frog fishing and catching flies. They speak a dialect so broken as to be practically unintelligible while the perpetual rain which falls upon them renders speech itself almost superfluous. Here and there where the ground rises slightly above the level of the Fens there are dense woods tangled with parasitic creepers and filled with owls. Bats fly from wood to wood. The air on the lower ground is charged with the poisonous gases which exude from the marsh, while in the woods it is heavy with the dank odors of deadly nightshade and poison ivy. It had been raining in the afternoon, and as I drove up the avenue the mournful dripping of the rain from the dark trees accentuated the fearlessness of the gloom. The vehicle in which I rode was a fly on three wheels, the fourth having apparently been broken and taken off causing the fly to sag on one side and drag on its axle over the muddy ground. The fly thus moving only at a foot space in a way calculated to enhance the dreariness of the occasion. The driver on the box in front of me was so thickly muffled up as to be indistinguishable, while the horse which drew us was so thickly coated with mist as to be practically invisible. I may say, have I had a drive of so mournful character. The avenue presently opened out upon a lawn with overgrown shrubberies and in the half-darkness I could see the outline of the Grange itself, a rambling, dilapidated building, a dim light struggled through the casement of a window in a tower room, save for the melancholy cry of a row of owls sitting on the roof and croaking of the frogs in the moat which ran around the grounds, the place was soundless. He halted his horse at the hither side of the moat. I tried in vain to urge him by signs to go further. I could see by the fellow's face that he was in a paroxysm of fear, and indeed nothing but the extra sixpence which I had added to his fare would have made him undertake the drive up the avenue. I had no sooner alighted than he wheeled his cab about and made off. Laughing heartily at the fellow's trepidation I have a way of laughing heartily in the dark. I made my way to the door and pulled the bell handle. I could hear the muffled reverberations of the bell far within the building. Then all was silent. I bent my ear to listen but could hear nothing except perhaps the sound of a low moaning as of a person in pain or in great mental distress. Convinced, however, from what my friend Sir Jeremy Bugham had told me that the Grange was not empty, I raised the ponderous knocker and beat with it loudly against the door. But perhaps at this point I may do well to explain to my readers before they're too frightened to listen to me how I came to be beating on the door of Bugham Grange at nightfall on a gloomy November evening. A year before I had been sitting with Sir Jeremy Bugham the present baronet on the veranda of his ranch in California. So you don't believe in the supernatural, he was saying. Not in the slightest, I answered, lighting a cigar as I spoke. When I want to speak very positively I generally light a cigar as I speak. Well at any rate, Digby, said Sir Jeremy, Bugham Grange is haunted. If you want to be assured of it, go down there any time and spend the night and you'll see for yourself. My dear fellow, I replied, nothing will give me greater pleasure. I shall be back in England in six weeks and I shall be delighted to put your ideas to the test. Now tell me, I added somewhat cynically, is there any particular season or day when your Grange is supposed to be especially terrible? Sir Jeremy looked at me strangely. Why do you ask that? he said. Have you heard the story of the Grange? Never heard of the place in my life, I answered cheerily. Till you mentioned it tonight, my dear fellow, I hadn't the remotest idea that you still owned property in England. The Granges shut up, said Sir Jeremy, and has been for twenty years. But I keep a man there, horrid. He was Butler in my father's time and before. If you care to go, I'll write him that you're coming. And since you're taking your own fate in your hands, the fifteenth of November is the day. And Lady Bugham and Clara and the other girls came trooping out on the veranda, and the whole thing passed clean out of my mind. Nor did I think of it again until I was back in London. Then, by one of those strange coincidences or premonitions, call it what you will, it suddenly occurred to me one morning that it was the fifteenth of November. Whether Sir Jeremy had written to Horrid or not I did not know. But nonetheless Nightfall found me, as I have described, knocking at the door of Bugham Grange. The sound of the knocker had scarcely ceased to echo when I heard the shuffling of feet within and the sound of chains and bolts being withdrawn. The door opened.  His faded black clothes, once apparently a Butler's dress, his white hair and advanced age left me in no doubt that he was horrid of whom Sir Jeremy had spoken. Without a word he motioned me to come in, and still without speech he helped me to remove my wet outer garments, and then beckoned me into a great room, evidently the dining room of the Grange. I am not in any degree a nervous man by temperament, as I think I remarked before, and yet there was something in the vastness of the wanes-cutted room, lighted only by a single candle and in the silence of the empty house and still more in the appearance of my speechless attendant, which gave me a feeling of distinct uneasiness. As Horrid moved to and fro I took occasion to scrutinize his face more narrowly. I have seldom seen features more calculated to inspire a nervous dread. The pallor of his face and the whiteness of his hair, the man was at least 70, and still more the peculiar furtiveness of his eyes, seemed to mark him as one who lived under a great terror. He moved with a noiseless step, and at times he turned his head to glance in the dark corners of the room. Sir Jeremy told me, I said, speaking as loudly and as heartily as I could, that he would apprise you of my coming. I was looking into his face as I spoke.  I am not nervous, I think I said that, but the realization that my sole companion in the empty house was a deaf mute struck a cold chill to my heart. Horrid lay in front of me a cold meat pie, a cold goose, a cheese and a tall flag and a cider, but my appetite was gone. I ate the goose, but found that after I had finished the pie I had but little zest for the cheese, which I finished without enjoyment. The cider had a sour taste, and after having permitted Horrid to refill the flag in twice, I found that it induced a sense of melancholy and decided to drink no more. My meal finished, the butler picked up the candle and beckoned me to follow him. We passed through the empty corridors of the house, a long line of pictured bugams looking upon us as we passed. Portraits in the flickering light of the taper assuming a strange and lifelike appearance as if leaning forward from their frames to gaze upon the intruder. Horrid led me upstairs and I realized that he was taking me to the tower in the east wing in which I had observed a light. The rooms to which the butler conducted me consisted of a sitting room within a joining bedroom, both of them fitted with antique wainscotting against which a faded tapestry fluttered. There was a candle burning on the table in the sitting room, but its insufficient light only rendered the surroundings the more dismal.  The butler left me, and in the stillness of the house I could hear his shuffling step echo down the corridor. It may have been fancy, but it seemed to me that his departure was the signal for a low moan that came from somewhere behind the wainscot. There was a narrow cupboard door at one side of the room, and for the moment I wondered whether the moaning came from within. I am not as a rule lacking in courage. I am sure my reader will be decent enough to believe this, yet I found myself entirely unwilling to open the cupboard door and look within.  I must have been seated there for some time when I happened to lift my eyes to the mantle above and saw, standing upon it, a letter addressed to myself. I knew the handwriting at once to be that of Sir Jeremy Bugham. I opened it and spreading it out within reach of the feeble candle-light I read as follows. My dear Digby, in our talk that you will remember, I had no time to finish telling you about the mystery of Bugham Grange. I take for granted, however, that you will go there and that horrid will put you in the tower rooms, which are the only ones that make any pretence of being habitable. I have therefore sent him this letter to deliver at the Grange itself. This story is this. On the night of the fifteenth of November, fifty years ago, my grandfather was murdered in the room in which you are sitting by his cousin, Sir Dougum Bugham. He was stabbed from behind while seated at the little table at which you are probably reading this letter. The two had been playing cards at the table and my grandfather's body was found lying in a litter of cards and gold sovereigns on the floor. Sir Dougum Bugham, insensible from drink, lay beside him with a knife at his hand. His fingers smeared with blood. My grandfather, though of the younger branch, possessed a part of the estates which were to revert to Sir Dougum on his death. Sir Dougum Bugham was tried at the ascises and was hanged. On the day of his execution he was permitted by the authorities out of respect for his rank to wear a mask to the scaffold. The clothes in which he was executed are hanging at full length in the little cupboard to your right in the middle of November at midnight the cupboard door opens and Sir Dougum Bugham walks out into the room. It has been found impossible to get servants to remain at the Grange in the place except for the presence of Horrid has been unoccupied for a generation. At the time of the murder Horrid was a young man of twenty-two newly entered into the service of the family. It was he who entered the room and discovered the crime. On the day of the execution he was stricken with paralysis and never consented to leave the Grange where he lives in isolation. Wishing you a pleasant night after your tiring journey I remain very faithfully Jeremy Bugham. I leave my reader to imagine my state of mind when I completed the perusal of the letter. I have as little belief in the supernatural as anyone yet I must confess that there was something in the surroundings in which I now found myself which rendered me at least uncomfortable. My reader may smile if he will but I assure him that it was with a very distinct feeling of uneasiness that I had length managed to rise to my feet and grasping my candle in my hand to move backward into the bedroom. As I backed into it something so like a moan seemed to proceed from the closed cupboard that I accelerated my backward movement to a considerable degree. I hastily blew out the candle threw myself upon the bed and drew the bed-clothes over my head keeping however one eye and one ear still out and available. How long I lay thus listening to every sound I cannot tell. The stillness had become absolute. From time to time I could dimly hear the distant cry of an owl and once far away in the building below a sound as if someone dragging a chain along a floor. More than once I was certain that I heard the sound of moaning behind the wanes cut. Meantime I realized that the hour must now be drawing close upon the fatal moment of midnight. My watch I could not see in the darkness by reckoning the time that must have elapsed I knew that midnight could not be far away. Then presently my ear, alert to every sound, could just distinguish far away across the fence the striking of a church bell in the clock tower of Bugham Village Church no doubt tolling the hour of twelve. On the last stroke of twelve the cupboard door in the next room opened. There is no need to ask me how I knew it. I couldn't of course see it but I could hear or sense in some way the sound of it. I could feel my hair, all of it rising upon my head. I was aware that there was a presence in the adjoining room I will not say a person, a living soul but a presence. Anyone who has been in the next room to a presence will know just how I felt. I could hear a sound as if someone groping on the floor on the faint rattle of coins. My hair was now perpendicular. My reader can blame it or not but it was. Then at this very moment from somewhere below in the building there came the sound of a prolonged and piercing cry a cry as of a soul passing in agony. My reader may censure me or not but right at this moment I decided to beat it. Whether I should have remained to see what was happening is a question that I will not discuss.  The window of the tower room was some twenty five feet above the ground. I sprang out through the casement and landed on the grass below. I jumped over the shrubbery in one bound and cleared the moat in one jump. I went down the avenue in about six strides and ran five miles along the road through the fence in three minutes. This, at least, is an accurate transcription of my sensations. It may have taken longer. I never stopped till I found myself on the threshold of the Bugham arms in Little Bugham beating on the door for the landlord. I returned to Bugham Grange on the next day in the bright sunlight of a frosty November morning in a seven cylinder motor car with six local constables and a physician. It makes all the difference. We carried revolvers, spades, pickaxes, shotguns, and a Ouija board. What we found cleared up for ever the mystery of the Grange. We discovered Horrid the butler lying on the dining room floor quite dead. The physician said that he had died from heart failure. There was evidence from the marks of his shoes in the dust that he had come in the night in the tower room. On the table he had placed a paper which contained a full confession of his having murdered Jeremy Bugham fifty years before. The circumstances of the murder had rendered it easy for him to fasten the crime upon Sir Dougham, already insensible from drink. A few minutes with the Ouija board enabled us to get a full corroboration from Sir Dougham, he promised moreover now that his name was cleared to go away from the premises forever. The place is rebuilt, the moat is drained, the whole house is lit with electricity. There are beautiful motor-drives in all directions in the woods. He has had the bats shot and the owls stuffed. His daughter Clara Bugham became my wife. She is looking over my shoulder as I write, What more do you want? End of Bugham Grange Recording by Sean Michael Hogan St. John's Newfoundland, Canada A Ghost of the Sierras by Brett Hart This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Reading by Greg Marguerite A Ghost of the Sierras by Brett Hart It was a vast silence of pines, redolent with balsamic breath and muffled with the dry dust of dead bark and matted mosses. Lying on our backs, we looked upward through a hundred feet of clear, unbroken interval to the first lateral branches that formed the flat canopy above us. Here and there, the fierce sun from whose active persecution we had just escaped, searched for us through the woods, but its keen blade was dulled and turned aside by intercostal boughs and its brightness dissipated in nebulous mists throughout the roofing of the dim mountains around us. We were in another atmosphere, under another sky, indeed in another world than the dazzling one we had just quitted. The grave silence seemed so much a part of the grateful coolness that we hesitated to speak and for some moments lay quietly outstretched on the pine tassels where we had first thrown ourselves. Finally a voice broke the silence. Ask the old Major, he knows all about it. The person here alluded to under that military title was myself. I hardly need explain to any Californian that it by no means followed that I was a major or that I was old or that I knew anything about it or indeed what it referred to. The whole remark was merely one of the usual conventional feelers to conversation, the kind of social preamble quite common to our slangy camp intercourse. Nevertheless, as I was always known as the major, perhaps for no better reason than that the speaker, an old journalist, was always called doctor. I recognized the fact so far as to kick aside an intervening saddle so that I could see the speaker's face on a level with my own and said nothing. About ghosts, said the doctor after a pause which nobody broke or was expected to break. Ghosts, sir, that's what we want to know. What are we doing here in this blanked old mausoleum in this county if it isn't to find out something about them, eh? Nobody replied. Thar's that haunted house at Cave City can't be more than a mile or two anyhow. Used to be just off the trail. A dead silence. The doctor, addressing space generally.  Still, the same reposeful indifference. We all knew the doctor's skill as a raconteur. We all knew that a story was coming and we all knew that any interruption would be fatal. Time and time again in our prospecting experience had a word of polite encouragement, a rash expression of interest, even a too eager attitude of silent expectancy brought the doctor to a sudden change of subject. Time and time again have we seen the unwary stranger stand amazed and bewildered between our own indifference and the sudden termination of a promising anecdote through his own unlucky inference. So we said nothing. The judge, another instance of arbitrary nomenclature, pretended to sleep. Jack began to twist a cigarito. Thornton bit off the ends of pine needles reflectively. Yes, sir, continued the doctor, coolly resting the back of his head on the palms of his hands. It was rather curious. All except the murder. That's what gets me. For the murder had no new points, no fancy touches, no sentiment, no mystery. Was just one of the old style subhead paragraphs. Old fashioned miner scrubs along on hard-tackin' beans and saves up a little money to go home and see relations. Old fashion assassin sharpens up knife, old style, loads old flintlock, brass-mounted pistol, walks in on old fashioned miner one dark night, sends him home to his relations, away back to several generations, and walks off with the swag. No mystery there. Nothing to clear up. Subsequent revelations, only impertinence. Nothing for any ghost to do. Who meant business. More than that, over forty murders, same old kind, committed every year in Calaveras, and no spiritual post-o-bits coming due every anniversary. No assessments made on the peace and quiet of the surviving community. I tell you what, boys, I've always been inclined to throw off on the Cave City ghost for that alone. It's a bad precedent, sir. If that kind of thing is going to obtain in the foothills, we'll have the trails formally knocked over by Mexicans and road agents. Every little camp and grocery will have stock enough on hand to go into business. And where's there any security for surviving life and property, eh? What's your opinion, Judge? As a fair-minded legislator. Of course, there was no response. Yet it was part of the doctor's system of aggravation to become discursive at these moments, in the hope of interruption, and he continued for some moments to dwell on the terrible affairs in which a gentleman could no longer settle a dispute with an enemy without being subjected to succeeding spiritual embarrassment. But all this digression fell upon, apparently, in attentive ears. Well, sir, after the murder that Cabin stood for a long time deserted and tenantless, popular opinion was against it. One day a ragged prospector, savage with hard labor and harder luck, came to camp looking for a place to live in a chance to prospect. After the defense had taken his measure, they concluded that he'd already tackled so much in the way of difficulties that a ghost, more or less, wouldn't be of much account. So they sent him to the haunted Cabin. He had a big yellow dog with him, about as ugly and as savage as himself, and the boys sort of congratulated themselves, from a practical viewpoint, that while they were giving the old ruffian a shelter, they were helping in the cause of Christianity against ghosts and goblins. They had little faith in the old man, but went their whole pile on that dog. That's where they were mistaken. The house stood almost 300 feet from the nearest cave, and on dark nights, being in a hollow, was as lonely as if it had been on the top of Shasta. If you ever saw the spot when there was just moon enough to bring out the little surrounding clumps of Chaparral, until they looked like crouching figures and make the bits of broken quartz glisten like skulls, you'd begin to understand how big a contract that man and that yellow dog look. They went into possession that afternoon, and old hard times set out to cook his supper. When it was over, he sat down by the embers and lit his pipe, the yellow dog lying at his feet. Suddenly, RAP! RAP! comes from the door. Come in, says the man gruffly. RAP! again. Come in and be damned to you, says the man who has no idea of getting up to open the door. But no one responded, and the next moment smash goes the only sound pain only window. Seeing this, old hard times gets up with the devil in his eye and a revolver in his hand followed by the yellow dog with every tooth showing and swings open the door. No one there. But as the man opened the door, that yellow dog that had been so chipper before suddenly begins to crouch and step backward step by step, trembling and shivering, and at last crouches down in the chimney without even so much as looking at his master. The man slams the door shut again, but there comes another smash. This time it seems to come from inside the cabin, and it isn't until the man looks around and sees everything quiet that he gets up without speaking and makes a dash for the door and tears round outside the cabin like mad, but finds nothing but silence and darkness. Then he comes back, swearing, and calls the dog. But that great yellow dog that the boys would have staked all their money on is crouching under the bunk, and has to be dragged out like a coon from a hollow tree staring from their sockets, every limb and muscle quivering with fear and his very hair drawn up in bristling ridges. The man calls him to the door. He drags himself a few steps, stops, sniffs, and refuses to go further.  Then what does that yellow dog do? He crawls edgewise towards the door, crouching himself against the bunk till he's flatter than a knife blade. Then halfway he stops. The damned yellow dog begins to walk gingerly, lifting each foot up in the air, one after the other, still trembling in every limb. Then he stops again. Then he crouches. Then he gives one little shuttering leap, not straightforward, but up, clearing the floor about six inches as if over something. Interrupted the judge, hastily lifting himself on his elbow. The doctor stopped instantly. One, he said coolly to one of the Mexican packers, quit fooling with that riada. You'll have that steak out and that mule loose in another minute. Come over this way. The Mexican turned a scared white face to the doctor muttering something and let go the deerskin hide. We all upraised our voices with one accord, the judge most pentantly and apologetically, and implored the doctor to go on. I'll shoot the first man who interrupts you again, added Thornton persuasively. But the doctor with his hands languidly under his head and lost his interest. Well, that dog ran off to the hills and neither the threats nor cajolaries of his master could ever make him enter the cabin again. The next day the man left camp. What time is it? Getting onto sundown, ain't it?  Lie down! But we knew that the doctor had not completely finished his story and we waited patiently for the conclusion. Meanwhile, the old grey silence of the woods again asserted itself, but shadows were now beginning to gather in the heavy beams of the roof above and the dim aisles seemed to be narrowing and closing in around us. Presently the doctor recommenced lazily as if no interruption had occurred. As I said before, I never put much faith in that story and shouldn't have told it, but for a rather curious experience of my own. It was in the spring of sixty-two and I was one of a party of four coming up from O'Neill's when we had been snowed up. It was awful weather. The snow had changed to sleet and rain after we crossed the divide and the water was out everywhere. Every ditch was a creek, every creek a river. We had lost two horses on the north fork.  Things were looking pretty bleak and scary when riding a little ahead of the party I saw a light twinkling in a hollow beyond. My horse was still fresh and I called out to the boys to follow me and bear for the light. I struck out for it. In another moment I was before a little cabin that half barrowed in the black chaparral. I dismounted and rapped at the door. There was no response. I then tried to force the door, but it was fastened securely from within. I was all the more surprised when one of the boys who had overtaken me told me that he had just seen through a window a man reading by the fire. Indignant at this hospitality we both made a resolute onset against the door at the same time raising our angry voices to a yell. Suddenly there was a quick response. The hurried withdrawing of a bolt and the door opened. The occupant was a short thick-set man with a pale care-worn face whose prevailing expression was one of gentle good humor and patient suffering. When we entered he asked us hastily why we had not sung out before. But we knocked I said impatiently and almost drove your door in. That's nothing, he said patiently. I'm used to that. I looked again at the man's patient fateful face and then around the cabin. In an instant the whole situation flashed before me. Are we not near Cave City, I asked? Yes, he replied. It's just below. You must have passed it in the storm. I see. I again looked around the cabin. Isn't this what they call the Haunted House? He looked at me curiously. It is, he said simply. You can imagine my delight. Here was an opportunity to test a whole story, to work down to the bedrock and see how it would pan out. We were too many and too well armed to fear tricks or dangers from outsiders. If, as one theory had been held, the disturbance was kept up by a band of concealed marauders or road agents whose purpose was to preserve their haunts from intrusion, we were quite able to pay them back in kind for any assault. I need not say that the boys were treated with this prospect when the fact was revealed to them. The only one doubtful or apathetic spirit there was our host who quietly resumed his seat and his book with his old expression of patient martyrdom. It would have been easy for me to drawn him out, but I felt that I did not want to corroborate anyone else's experience only to record my own, and I thought it better to keep the boys from any predisposing terrors. An hour slipped away but no disturbance. Another hour passed as monotonously. Our host read his book, only the dash of hail against the roof broke the silence. But the doctor stopped. Since the last interruption I noticed he had changed the easy slangy style of his story to a more perfect, artistic, and even studied manner. He dropped now suddenly into his old colloquial speech and quietly said, For those riyad is one, I'll hobble you. Come here. There. Lie down, will you?"  And the doctor, happily, of his own accord, went on. But I had forgotten that it was no easy matter to keep these high-spirited boys bent on a row in decent subjection, and after a supernatural exhibition I observed from certain winks and whispers that they were determined to get up indications of their own. In a few moments violent wrappings were heard from all parts of the cabin. Large stones adroitly thrown up the chimney fell with a heavy thud on the roof. Strange groans and ominous yells seemed to come from the outside, where the interstices between the logs were wide enough. Yet through all this uproar our host sat still and indignation or reproach upon his good humored but haggard features. Before long it became evident that this exhibition was exclusively for his benefit. Under the thin disguise of asking him to assist them in discovering the disturbance outside the cabin, those inside took advantage of his absence to turn the cabin topsy-turvy. You see what the spirits have done, old man? said the arch-leader of this mischief.  The patient man lifted his head and looked at the flower-strewn walls. Then he glanced down at the floor but drew back with a slight tremor. It ain't water, he said quietly. What is it, then? It's blood. Look. The nearest man gave a sudden start and sank back white as a sheet. For there, gentlemen, on the floor, just before the door where the old man had seen the dog hit and lift his feet, there, there, gentlemen, upon my honor, slowly widened and broadened a dark red pool of human blood. Stop him. Quick. Stop him, I say. There was a blinding flash that lit up the dark woods and a sharp report. When we reached the doctor's side he was holding the smoking pistol, just discharged in one hand while with the other he was pointing to the rapidly disappearing figure of Juan our Mexican vaquero. My God!" said the doctor. But did you hear him? Did you see his livid face as he rose up at the name of blood? Did you see his guilty conscience in his face? A. Why don't you speak? What are you staring at? Was it the murdered man's ghost, doctor? We all panted in one quick breath. Ghost be damned! No! But in that Mexican vaquero that cursed Juan Ramirez I saw and shot at his murderer. The Sierra's. By Brett Hart. How It Happened by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Missy Knapp. How It Happened by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle She was a writing medium. This is what she wrote. I can remember some things upon that evening most distinctly and others are like broken dreams. That is what makes it so difficult to tell a connected story. I have no idea now what it was that had taken me to London and brought me back so late. It just merges into all my other visits to London. But from the time that I got out at the little country station everything is extraordinarily clear. I can live it again every instant of it. I remember so well walking down the platform and looking at the illuminated clock at the end which told me that it was half past 11. I remember also my wondering whether I could get home before midnight. Then I remembered the big motor with its glaring headlights and glitter of polish brass waiting for me outside. It was my new 30 horsepower rover which had only been delivered that day. I remember also asking Perkins my chauffeur how she had gone and his saying that he thought she was excellent. I'll try here myself said I and I climbed into the driver's seat. The gears are not the same said he said I had better drive. No I should like to try her said I and so we started on the 5 mile drive for home. My old car had the gears as they used always to be in notches on a bar. In this car you passed the gear lever through a gate to get on the higher ones. It was not difficult to master and soon I thought that I understood it. It was foolish no doubt to begin to learn a new system in the dark but one often does foolish things and one has not always to pay the price for them. I got along very well until I came to Claystall Hill. It is one of the worst hills in England in my own half long and one in six in places with three fairly sharp curves. My park gate stands at the very foot of it upon the main London road. We were just over the brow of this hill where the grade is steepest when the trouble began. I had been on the top speed and wanted to get her on the free but she stuck between gears on the top again. By this time she was going at a great rate so I clapped on both brakes and one after the other they gave way. I didn't mind so much when I felt my foot brake snap but when I put all my weight on the side brake and the lever clang to its full limit without a catch it brought a cold sweat out of me.  The lights were brilliant and I brought her around the first curve alright. Then we did the second one though it was a close shave for the ditch. I curved beneath it and after that the gate of the park. If I could shoot into that arbor all would be well for the slope up to the house would bring her to a stand. Perkins behaved splendidly. I should like that to be known. He was perfectly cool and alert. I had thought at the very beginning of taking the bank and he read my intention. I wouldn't do it sir said he. At this pace it must go over and we should have it on top of us. Of course he was right. We had it off. So we were in the free. But we were still running at a fearful pace. He laid his hands on the wheel. I'll steadier said he. If you could have jumped and chanced it we could never get around that curve better jump sir. No said I. I'll stick it out. You can jump if you like. I'll stick with you sir said he. If I had been the old car I should have jammed the gear lever into the reverse and seen what would happen. I expect she would have stripped her gears or smashed up somehow. But it would have been a chance. As it was I was helpless. Perkins tried to climb across but you couldn't do it going at that pace. The wheels were roaring like a high wind and the big body creaking and groaning with the strain. But the lights were brilliant and one could steer to an inch. I remember thinking what an awful and yet majestic sight we should appear to anyone who met us. It was a narrow road and we were just a great roaring golden death to anyone who came in our path. We were high upon the bank. I thought we were surely over but after staggering for a moment she righted and darted onwards. That was the third corner and the last one. There was only the park gate now. It was facing us but as luck would have it not facing us directly. It was about 20 yards to the left of the main road into which we ran. Perhaps I could have done it but I expect that the steering gear had been jarred when we ran on the bank. The wheel did not turn easily. I saw the open gate on the left. I whirled round my wheel with all the strength of my wrists. Perkins and I threw our bodies across and then the next instant going at 50 miles an hour my right wheel stuck full on the right hand pillar of my own gate. I heard the crash. I was conscious of flying through the air and then and then when I became aware of my own existence once more I was among some brushwood in the shadow of the oaks upon the lodge side of the drive. I was standing beside me. I imagined at first that it was Perkins but when I looked again I saw that it was Stanley a man whom I had known at college some years before and for whom I had a really genuine affection. There was always something peculiarly sympathetic to me in Stanley's personality and I was proud to think that I had some similar influence upon him. At the present moment I was surprised to see him but I was like a man in a dream giddy and shaken and quite prepared to take things as I found them without questioning them. What a smash I said. Good lord what an awful smash. He nodded his head and even in the gloom I could see that he was smiling the gentle wishful smile which I connected with him. I was quite unable to move. Indeed I had not any desire to try to move but my senses were exceedingly alert. I saw the wreck of the motor lit up by the moving lanterns. I saw the little group of people turn his wife in one or two more. They were taking no notice of me but were very busy around the car then suddenly I heard a cry of pain. The weight is on him left it easy cried a voice. It's only my leg said another which I recognized as Perkins. Where's master he cried? Here I am I answered but they did not seem to hear me. They were all bending over something which lay in the front of the car. Stanley laid his hand upon my shoulder expressibly soothing. I felt light and happy in spite of it all. No pain of course said he. None said I. There never is said he. And then suddenly a wave of amazement passed over me. Stanley? Stanley? Why Stanley had surely died of enteric at Bloomfontaine in the Boer War. Stanley I cried and the words seemed to choke my throat. Stanley you were dead. He looked at me with the same old smile so were you he answered. End of How It Happened Recording by Missy Knapp myspace.com backslash Missy Knapp The Leather Funnel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Graham Dunlop The Leather Funnel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle My friend Lionel Dachra lived in the Avenue du Argram Paris. His house was that small one with the iron railings and grass plot in front of it on the left hand side as you passed down from the Arc de Triomphe. I fancy that it had been there long before the avenue was constructed. For the grey tiles were stained with lichens and the walls were mildewed and discoloured with age. It looked a small house from the street, five windows in front if I remember right but it deepened into a single long chamber at the back. It was here that Dachra had that singular library of occult literature and the fantastic curiosities which served as a hobby for himself and an amusement for his friends. A wealthy man of refined and eccentric tastes he'd spent much of his life and fortune in gathering together what was said to be a unique private collection of talmudic, cabalistic and magical works many of them of great rarity and value. His tastes leaned toward the marvellous and the monstrous and I have heard that his experiments in the direction of the unknown have passed all the bounds of civilisation and of decorum. To his English friends he never alluded to such matters and took the tone of the student and virtuoso. But a Frenchman whose tastes were of the same nature has assured me that the worst excesses of the black mass have been perpetrated in that large and lofty hall which is lined with the shelves of his books and the cases of his museum. Dakle's appearance was enough to show that his deep interest in these psychic matters was intellectual rather than spiritual. There was no trace of asceticism upon his heavy face but there was much mental force in his huge dome-like skull which curved upward from amongst his thinning locks like a snow peak above its fringe of fir trees. His knowledge was greater than his wisdom than his powers were far superior to his character.   It's not with his complex character that I have to deal but with the very strange and inexplicable incident which had its rise in my visit to him in the early spring of the year 82. I had known Dakle in England for my researches in the Assyrian room of the British Museum had been conducted at the same time when he was endeavouring to establish a mystic etheric meaning in the Babylonian tablets. This community of interests had brought us together. Chance remarks had led to daily conversation and that to something verging upon friendship. I had promised him but on my next visit to Paris I would call upon him. At the time when I was able to fulfil my contract I was living in a cottage at Fontainebleu when train were inconvenient he asked me to spend the night in his house. I have only that one spare couch said he pointing to a broad sofa in his large salon. They hoped that you would manage to be comfortable there. It was a singular bedroom with its high walls of brown volumes but there could be no more agreeable furniture to a bookworm like myself. And there is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as the faint subtle reek which comes from an ancient book. I assured him that I could desire no more charming chamber and no more congenial surroundings. If the fittings are neither convenient nor conventional they are at least costly said he looking round at his shelves. I have expended nearly a quarter of a million of money upon these objects which surround you. Books, weapons, gems, carvings, tapestries, images. There is hardly a thing here which has not its history and it is generally unworth telling. He was seated as he spoke at one side of the open fireplace and eye at the other. His reading table was on his right and the strong lamp above it ringed it with a very vivid circle of golden light. A half-rolled palimpsest lay in the centre and surrounded by many quaint articles of bric-a-brac. One of these was a large funnel such as is used for filling wine casks. It appeared to be made of black wood and to be rimmed with discoloured brass. That is a curious thing Arimat, what is the history of that? Ah, said he, it is the very question which I have had occasion to ask myself. I would give a good deal to know. Take it in your hands and examine it. I did so and found that what I had imagined to be wood was in reality leather though age had dried it to an extreme hardness. It was a large funnel and might hold a quart when full. The brass rim encircled the wide end, but the narrow was also tipped with metal. What do you make of it? asked Dachl. I should imagine that it belonged to some vintner or mulster in the Middle Ages, said I. I have seen in England leavened drinking flagons of the 17th century, blackjacks as they were called, which were of the same colour and hardness as this filler. I dare say the date would be about the same, said Dachl. And no doubt also it was used for filling a vessel with liquid. If my suspicions are correct however it was a queer vintner who used it and a very singular cask which was filled. Do you observe nothing strange at the spout end of the funnel? As I held it to the light I observed that it spot some 5 inches above the brass tip. The narrow neck of the leather funnel was all haggled and scored as if someone had notched it round with one knife. Only at that point was there any roughening of the dead black surface. Someone's tried to cut off the neck. Would you call it a cut? It is torn and lacerated. It must have taken some strength to leave these marks on such tough material whatever the instrument may have been. But what do you think of it? I can tell that you know more than you say.  Have you included the psychology of dreams among your learned studies? He asked. I did not even know that there was such a psychology. My dear sir, that shelf above the gem case is filled with volumes from Albertus Magnus Onward which deal with no other subject. It is a science in itself. Science of charlatans. This charlatan is always the pioneer. From the astrology came the astronomer. From the alchemist the chemist. From the mesmerist the experimental psychologist. The quack of yesterday is the professor of tomorrow. Even such subtle and elusive things as dreams will in time be reduced to system and order. When that time comes, the researchers of our friends on the bookshelf will no longer be the amusement of the mystic, but the foundations of a science. Supposing that so, what has the science of dreams to do with a large black brass-rimmed funnel? I will tell you. You know that I have an agent who is always on the lookout for rarities and curiosities for my collection. Some days ago, he heard of a dealer upon one of the qui who had acquired some old rubbish found in a cupboard in an ancient house at the back of the Rue Maturil in the Quartier-Later. The dining room of this old house is decorated with a coat of arms, chevrons and bars rouge upon a field argent which proved upon inquiry to be the shield of Nicolas de Leranie, a high official of King Louis XIV. There can be no doubt that the other articles in the cupboard date back to the early days of that king. The inference is, therefore, that they were all the property of this Nicolas de Leranie who was, as I understand, the gentleman especially concerned with the maintenance and execution of the draconic laws of that epoch. What then? I would ask you now to take the funnel into your hands once more and to examine the upper brass rim. Can you make out any lettering upon it? There were certainly some scratches upon it almost obliterated by time. The general effect was of several letters, the last of which bore some resemblance to a B. You make it a B? Yes, I do. So do I. In fact, I have no doubt whatever that it is a B. But the nobleman you mentioned would have it R for his initial. Exactly! That's the beauty of it. He owned this curious object and yet he had someone else's initials upon it. Why did he do this? I can't imagine. Can you? Well, I might perhaps guess. Do you observe something drawn a little farther along the rim? I should say it was a crown. It is undoubtedly a crown. But if you examine it in a good light you will convince yourself that it is not an ordinary crown. It is a heraldic crown. A badge of rank. And it consists of an alternation of four pearls and strawberry leaves. The proper badge of a marquee. We may infer, therefore, that the person whose initials end in B was entitled to wear that coronet. Then this common leather filler belonged to a marquee? Dark gave a peculiar smile. Or just a member of the family of a marquee, said he. So much we have clearly gathered from this engraved rim. But what's all this to do with dreams? I do not know whether it was from a look upon Dark's face or from some subtle suggestion in his manner. But a feeling of repulsion, of unreasoning horror came upon me as I looked at the gnarled old lump of leather. I have more than once received important information through my dreams, said my companion in his didactic manner which he loved to affect. They make it a rule now when I am in doubt upon any material point to place the article in question beside me as I sleep and to hope for some enlightenment. The process does not appear to me to be very obscure, though it has not yet received the blessing of Orthodox events. According to my theory any object which has been intimately associated with any supreme paroxysm of human emotion, whether it be joy or pain will retain a certain atmosphere or association which it is capable of communicating to a sensitive mind. By a sensitive mind I do not mean an abnormal one but such a trained and educated mind as you or I possess. You mean for example if I slept beside that old sword upon the wall I might dream of some bloody incident in which that very sword took part? An excellent example for as a matter of fact that sword was used in that fashion by me and I saw in my sleep the death of its owner who perished in a brisk skirmish which I have been unable to identify which occurred at the time of the wars of the Frondists. If you think of it some of our popular observances show that the fact has already been recognised by our ancestors although we in our wisdom have clasped it among superstitions. For example well the placing of the bride's cake beneath the pillow in order that the sleeper may have pleasant dreams. That is one of several instances which he will find set forth in a small brochure which I am myself writing upon the subject. But to come back to the point I stepped one night with this funnel beside me and I had a dream which certainly throws a curious light upon its use and origin. What did you dream? I dreamed he paused and an intent look of interest by Jove that's well thought of said he. This really will be an exceedingly interesting experiment. You are yourself a psychic subject with nerves which respond readily to any impression. I've never chested myself in that direction. Then we shall test you tonight. Might I ask you as a very great favour when you occupy that couch tonight to sleep with this old funnel placed by the side of your pillow? The request seemed to me a grotesque one but I have myself in my complex nature a hunger for all which is bizarre and fantastic. I had not the faintest belief in Dakra's theory nor any hopes for success in such an experiment. Yet it amused me that the experiment should be made. Dakra with great gravity drew a small stand to the head of my setty and placed the funnel upon it. Then after a short conversation he wished me good night and left me. I sat for some little time smoking by the smoldering fire and turning over in my mind the curious incident which had occurred and the strange experience which might lie before me. Skeptical as I was there was something impressive in the assurance of Dakra's manner and my extraordinary surroundings the huge room with the strange and often sinister objects which were hung around it struck solemnity into my soul. Finally I undressed and turning out the lamp I laid down. After long tossing I fell asleep. Let me try to describe as accurately as I can the scene which came to me in my dreams. It stands out now in my memory more clearly than anything which I have seen with my waking eyes. There was a room which bore the appearance of a vault. Four spandrels from the corners ran up to join a sharp cup shaped roof. The architecture was rough but very strong. It was evidently part of a great building. Three men in black with curious top heavy black velvet hats sat in a line upon a red carpeted dais. Their faces were very solemn and sad. On the left stood two long gowned men with portfolios in their hands which seemed to be stuffed with papers. Upon the right looking toward me was a small woman with blonde hair and singular light blue eyes the eyes of a child. She was past her first youth but could not yet be called middle aged. Her figure was inclined to stoutness and her bearing was proud and confident. Her face was pale but serene. It was a curious face comely and yet feline with a subtle suggestion of cruelty about the straight strong little mouth and chubby jaw. She was draped in some sort of loose white gown. Beside her stood a thin eager priest who whispered in her ear and continually raised a crucifix before her eyes.  As I gazed the three men stood up and said something but I could distinguish no words though I was aware that it was the central one who was speaking. They then swept out of the room at the same instant several rough looking fellows in stout jerkens came bustling in and removed first the red carpet and then the boards which formed the dais so as to entirely clear the room. When the screen was removed I saw some singular articles of furniture behind it. One looked like a bed with wooden rollers at each end and a winch handle to regulate its length. Another was a wooden horse. There were several other curious objects and a number of swinging cords which played over pulleys. It was not unlike a modern gymnasium. When the room had been cleared there appeared a new figure upon the scene. This was a tall thin person clad in black with a gaunt and austere face. The aspect of the man made me shudder. His clothes were all shining grease and mottled with stains. He bore himself with a slow and impressive dignity as if he took command of all things from the instant of his entrance. In spite of his rude appearance and sort of dress it was now his business his room, his to command. He carried a coil of light ropes over his left forearm. The lady looked him up and down with a searching glance but her expression was unchanged and was confident even defiant but it was very different with the priest. His face was ghastly white and I saw the moisture glisten and run on his high sloping forehead. He threw up his hands in prayer and he stooped continually to mutter frantic words in the lady's ear. The man in black now advanced and taking one of the cords from his left arm he bound the woman's hands together. She held them meekly toward him as he did so. Then he took her arm with a rough grip and led her toward the wooden horse which was little higher than her waist. On to this she was lifted and laid with her back upon it and her face to the ceiling while the priest quivering with horror had rushed out of the room. The woman's lips were moving rapidly and though I could hear nothing I knew she was praying. Her feet hung down on either side of the horse and I saw that the rough violets in attendance had fastened cords to her ankles and secured the other ends to iron rings in the stone floor. My heart sank within me as I saw these ominous preparations and yet I was held by the fascination of horror and I could not take my eyes from the strange spectacle. A man had entered the room with a bucket of water in either hand. Another followed with a third bucket. They were laid beside the wooden horse.  This he gave to the man in black. At the same moment one of the violets approached with a dark object in his hand which even in my dream filled me with a vague feeling of familiarity. It was a leather and filler. With horrible energy he thrust it, but I could stand no more. My hair stood on end with horror. I arrived I struggled, I broke through the bonds of sleep and I burst with a shriek into my own life and found myself lying shivering with terror in the huge library with the moonlight flooding through the window and throwing strange silver and black traceries upon the opposite wall. What a blessed relief to feel that I was back in the 19th century and back out of that medieval vault into a world where men had human hearts within their bosoms. I sat up upon my couch trembling in every limb my mind divided between thankfulness and horror to think that such things were ever done that they could be done without God striking the villains dead. Was it all a fantasy or did it really stand for something which happened in the black cruel days of the world's history? I sank my throbbing head upon my shaking hands and then suddenly my heart seemed to stand still in my bosom and I could not even scream so great was my terror something was advancing toward me through the darkness of the room. It's a horror coming upon a horror which breaks a man's spirit. I could not reason I could not pray and then he sit like a frozen image and glare at the dark figure which was coming down the great room and then it moved out into the white lane of moonlight and I breathed once more it was Dakhra and his face showed me that he was as frightened as myself was that you for God's sake what's the matter? he asked in a husky voice ah Dakhra I'm glad to see you I've been down into hell it was dreadful my dear sir it was it rang through the house servants are all terrified you struck a match and lit the lamp I think we may get the fire to burn up again he added throwing some logs upon the embers good God my dear chap how white you are you look as if you had seen a ghost so I have several ghosts the leather funnel has acted then I wouldn't sleep near the infernal thing again for all the money you could offer me Dakhra I expected you would have a lively night of it said he you took it out of me in return for that scream of yours wasn't a very pleasant sound at two in the morning I suppose from what you say that you've seen the whole dreadful business what dreadful business the torture of the water the extraordinary question as it was called in the genial days of Le Roi Soleil did you stand it out to the end no thank God I awoke before it really began ah it's just as well for you I held out till the third bucket well it's an old story and they're all in their graves now anyhow so what does it matter how they got there I suppose that you have no idea what it was that you have seen the torture of some criminal she must have been a terrible malefactor in diggid if her crimes are in proportion to her penalty well we have that small consolation said Dakhra wrapping a stressing gown around him crouching closer to the fire they were in proportion to her penalty that is to say if I'm correct in the lady's identity how could you possibly know her identity for answer Dakhra took down an old vellum covered volume on the shelf just listen to this city it is in the french of the 17th century but I will give a rough translation as I go you will judge for yourself whether I have solved the riddle or not the prisoner was brought before the grand chambers and tournel of parliament sitting as a court of justice charged with the murder of master Dhrurabray her father and of her two brothers Monsieur Dobray one being civil servant and the other a counsellor of parliament in person it seemed hard to believe that she had really done such wicked deeds for she was of a mild appearance and of short stature with a fair skin and blue eyes yet the court having found her guilty condemned her to the ordinary extraordinary question in order that she might be forced to name her accomplices after which she should be carrying a cart to the plaster grave there to have her head cut off her body being afterwards burned and her ashes scattered to the winds the date of this entry is July 16 1676 it is interesting so lie but not convincing how do you prove the two women to be the same I am coming to that the narrative goes on to tell of the woman's behaviour when questioned when the executioner approached her she recognised him by the cords which he held in his hands and she at once held her own hands out to him looking at him from head to foot without uttering a word how's that yes it was so she gazed without wincing upon the wooden horse and rings which had twisted so many limbs and caused so many shrieks of agony when her eyes fell upon the three pales of water which were all ready for her she said with a smile all the water must have been rolled here for the purpose of drowning me monsieur you have no idea I trust of making a person of my small stature swallow it all shall I read the details of the torture no for heaven's sake don't here is a sentence which must surely show you that what is here recorded is a very scene which you have gazed upon tonight the good Abbe Pioro unable to contemplate the agonies which were suffered by his penitent and hurried from the room does that convince you it does entirely there can be no question that it's indeed the same event but who then is this lady whose appearance was so attractive and whose ends were so horrible for answer Dhaka came across to me and placed the small lamp upon the table which stood by my bed lifting up the ill omen filler he turned the brass rim so that the light fell full upon it seen in this way the engraving seemed clearer than on the night before we have already agreed that this is the badge of a Maki of a Maki said he he also settled that the last letter is B it is undoubtedly so I now suggest to you that the other letters from left to right are M a small D A a small D and then the final B yes I'm sure you're right I can make out the small Ds quite plainly what I have read to you tonight said Dhaka is the official record of the trail of Marie Madeleine Dobré Marquis de Brinvilliers one of the most famous prisoners and murderers of all time I sat in silence overwhelmed at the extraordinary nature of the incident and at the completeness of the proof with which Dhaka exposed its real meaning in a vague way I remembered some details of the woman's career her unbridled debauchery the cold blooded and protracted torture of her sick father the murder of her brothers for motives of petty gain I recollect also that the bravery of her end had done something to atone for the horror of her life and that all Paris had sympathised with her last moments with her mother within a few days of the time when they had cursed her as a murderess one objection and one only occurred to my mind how came her initials and her badge of rank upon the filler surely they did not carry their medieval homage to the nobility to the point of decorating instruments of torture with their titles I was puzzled with the same point said Dhaka the case of a simple explanation the case excited extraordinary interest at the time and nothing could be more natural than that the head of the police should retain this filler as a grim souvenir it was not often that a Marchionesse of France underwent the extraordinary question that he should engrave her initials upon it for the information of others was surely a very ordinary proceeding upon his part and this I asked pointing to the marks upon the leather neck she was a cruel Tigress said Dhaka as he turned away I think it is evident that like other Tigresses her teeth were both strong and sharp end of the leather funnel