“You did; and if you failed in your vow, you were to meet the vengeance of the spirits. Your children were to perish by the vulture, the wolf—”
“Out, out, demon!”
“And their bones blanch in the wilderness. Ha!-ha!”
My father, frantic with rage, seized his axe, and raised it over Wilfred’s head to strike.
“All this I swear,” continued the huntsman, mockingly.
The axe descended; but it passed through the form of the hunter, and my father lost his balance, and fell heavily on the floor.
“Mortal!” said the hunter, striding over my father’s body, “we have power over those only who have committed murder. You have been guilty of a double murder—you shall pay the penalty attached to your marriage vow. Two of your children are gone; the third is yet to follow—and follow them he will, for your oath is registered. Go—it were kindness to kill thee—your punishment is—that you live!”
THE GHOST AT POINT OF ROCKS, by Frank H. Spearman
As for the country—there is really no end of country around Point of Rocks. When Hughie Morrison asked about the station after he had been assigned to it, he was told that on the north his territory would extend to the pole. He was assured that he would find very little of the country in any direction competitive, and, in matter of fact, he never did find any, though Martin Duffy at one time advised him to circularize the Eskimos with a view of securing any portion of their cold-storage business that might be getting away from Jim Hill.
On the south, while there was no competition in sight, there was even less of business. The southern country for three thousand miles stood on end—at least so Hughie concluded after he had climbed the peak of Point of Rocks to look the field over and make a preliminary traffic survey. After he had climbed down he wrote to his mother that if arrangements could be made to ship all the scenery out of his territory and ship all the unassigned rainbows in, it would make a great farming country. Answering her affectionate inquiries from the East, he wrote that he was making money fast; that he feared, at the moment, to ship it in large sums out of the country, but that she need feel no anxiety; he really had the rocks and would show them to her when she came out.
Point of Rocks has been called everything that is bad because of its reputation for loneliness. The point, a mere speck on a spreading map, set far and singly out on the high seas of the railroad desert, was the dread of all operators on the mountain division, and Hughie Morrison was the first night man sent there after the panic. When there were but two passenger trains a day on the division, and the Government receivers were objecting to these, Hughie, with the rattlesnakes and a worn-out key, was holding down Point of Rocks. Before he and the day man were sent, the Point had long been abandoned. One building, the section house, stood half a mile east of the station, and in this the section men hived. Other than these no human beings lived within miles of Hughie. To the north stretched the forgotten land, on the west rose the point monstrous, and to the south, generally speaking, hell prevailed.
To this spot President Bucks had sent his nephew, Hugh Morrison, to learn the railroad business. Hughie was a Princeton man when he asked his uncle to come through with some sort of job; and his uncle, at that time reorganizing the system, and having troubles of his own, was not disposed to take on any family difficulties. He merely passed the word to Martin Duffy, chief dispatcher at Medicine Bend, to put Hughie through. Accordingly the Princeton man, who had turned twenty, could count to a hundred, and knew that the Rocky Mountains were surrounded by land, was brought to the Mountain Division. Martin soon saw that he could not get rid of Hughie merely by putting him through. Hughie learned the key with facility, ate what was set before him, and looked pleasant when the railroad men set up jobs. Worst of all, Martin Duffy found that he was beginning to like the green one. But orders were orders. Bucks had said Hughie was to be put through, and there was nothing more merciful to Martin’s mind for the boy than a quick railroad death. Martin considered that in such a case strong medicine is best, and well knew that to assign a man to a night job at Point of Rocks was equivalent to the knock-out drops.
Hughie never blanched when the orders came. Why should he? He did not know Point of Rocks from Colorado Springs, and made his preparations and departed promptly for the new post. When he asked Duffy where he should board, Martin, a taciturn man, said he might board in Texas if he liked, provided he could make the hours for the job.
Hughie took hold, and the fun began. The trainmen bullied him, called him Hughie and “Nephew,” stole his cigars, and made him glad to be left alone with the night, the desert, the coyotes, and the stars. Hughie got used to looking for the constellations of his youth, and to know for a certainty that Orion, calm and immensely dignified, would never fail him and that between freight trains about three o’clock in the morning the red heart of the Scorpion in the south-west could always be counted on, was a mild sort of consolation. Poling at Princeton, they had made, at three in the morning, no impression on him; at Point of Rocks there were absolutely no other associations to suggest God’s country.
Besides these there was, in matter of fact, nothing and nobody within measurable distance of the night man. Hughie was a good bit of a philosopher; but even among those of the railroad men who had never been east of the Missouri River a shift from Princeton to Point of Rocks was commonly conceded to be a fright.
When Hugh was told that at one time a colony had existed at Point of Rocks he was unbelieving. Yet an Englishman, fascinated in an earlier day by the mountains, had chosen the wildest spot between Medicine Bend and Bear Dance for a cattle-ranch, and his shipping yards were put in at Point of Rocks. He built for himself in the hills east of the station a great brick house. Deserted and in the slow decay of loneliness, it had stood long after the downfall of his hopes, to serve while a vagrant army of prospectors moved across the country as a quarry for the hammer and chisel of their camp-fires. After they had left it naked in its ruin to the elements it had been struck by lightning and burned. Yet after all of this the house stood. Built in stanch English fashion, its walls remained, and scarred and roofless its height and strength still defied the sun and the sand and the wind.
At one time the Englishman had a hundred men working on his ranches. He founded a colony, planned an abattoir, rode like a fiend, and drank like an engine. The beginning had been ten years before Hughie’s day, the end perhaps five. A sheep-herder knew the story. Sitting on the ground one night beside the passing track, a full-moon night with the white streaming through the sightless windows of the ruin on the hill, he had told Hughie about the Swintons—Richard and the bachelor brother John—Hughie, silent, in his belted trousers and bare arms, standing while the wind blew softly, with his back and one foot against the station building, listening.
Once in a month, out of the dreadful south, the sheep-herder, a lost man with sand-burned eyes and sun-split lips, came to hear a human voice. He was the sole caller on the college man at Point of Rocks.
The sheep-herder was pointing in the moonlight to the east. “Dick Swinton built yards from the switch away over to the creek, and from there down to the curve.”
“Yards?” echoed Hughie incredulously.
“Cattle yards. He had a barn five hundred feet long the other side of the draw for his Holsteins; another big barn over there to the right for a string of thoroughbreds. He run his horses in Denver and Colorado Springs. The whole family used to go down there summers—had a house down at the Springs nigh as big as this one. Mrs. Swinton, she was the thoroughbred, and the governess and the boy and the little girl—she had her own maid—used to go down regular with the China-boy cook and all hands, private car. I seen twenty-two trunks to one time piled up right there where you stand—oh, they were blooded, all right. Champagne right along from New York, twelve cases at a lick, piled up here for the wagons, when their cousins come out from the old coun
try. All gone to hell. Was you ever in England?”
Hughie used to think about the story. He never tired of hearing about the Swintons. They were people, and had done things on a scale, and being the only interest, living or dead, about Point of Rocks, they were naturally matter for reflection. What if they had sunk their money? They had sunk it royally. The east-bound passenger train was not due to pass Point of Rocks until midnight, and from then until four thirty o’clock in the morning, when the west-bound train was due, the operator had abundance of time to think. Even from sunset until midnight all alone under the lamp in the station, reading, perhaps, or writing, was a good bit of a stretch. But after Hughie got acquainted with the weather-warped sheep-herder he found something to look forward to in the night at Point of Rocks—he was waiting for a storm.
“Wait till you get a good thunder-storm some night,” the sheep-herder had muttered. “Then watch them windows over on the hill—you’ll see dancing over there yet; I seen it since the house was burned, right along.” When he spoke, he was telling of the big dances he remembered in the brick house at times that the New Yorkers and the English cousins came out in the car. The sheep-herder believed that when it stormed in the mountains they still danced through the floorless halls. Hughie wanted to ask a lot more questions when he heard of this: it was a story different from the others. But the passenger train in the west was whistling, and when it had come and gone the sheep-herder had disappeared. He blew in from the south like the wind, and died as silently away.
Night after night Hughie waited for him to come back; night after night, at sunset, he scanned the vanishing point of the track, looking in vain for the stunted figure and the sidewise, twisted shamble. The silence of the place with the long hours of twilight and dark outside his window began to grow on Hughie, and one evening he walked across the creek for a change and up the hill to the ruin.
He had not realized before how large the house had been. Standing under the brick entrance arch where double doors had enclosed a deep vestibule, he saw how heavily every part of the house was built. The timbers that had crashed through the floors when the roof fell were like bridge stringers. The floors themselves had been framed like decks, and their charred debris lay in a forbidding tangle just as the storm drowning the conflagration had left it. The blackened walls gaped; the parting light streamed through vacant casements, and above the arches of the tower—which had suffered least from the fire—stars twinkled. The desolation was complete.
He climbed into the tower. A stairway still remained, and, climbing higher, he found intact a half-story, once a child’s playroom. Prints pasted on the walls hung in tatters. A little scrap-heap of rusty tin cars lay under the window opening. The sheep-herder had said the little girl was wild about engines and often used to ride with the enginemen on the passenger trains when the family were travelling. In a corner Hughie saw a Japanese doll, weather-beaten, but still lying where it had been left to its last sleep, with a battered locomotive for pillow. The frock was faded, and the pink cheeks and almond brows of the doll were blanched. He stooped to lift it from its long nap and something fell from its bosom. Hughie picked the something up. It was a broken ivory miniature, but the colors cunningly laid in still preserved the features of a little girl. Nearly half of the oval had been broken away, but the child’s face remained. Under his lamp that night, Hughie examined it. Brown hair fell over the temples and the high cheeks were touched with pink. The eyes deep-set and the nose straight and determined, looked boyish, but below it the face narrowed to a mere dimple of a girl’s mouth; the chin was gone.
That night the east-bound train was an hour late. The operator, idle in his solitude, studied the miniature. He wanted to know more about the children that had played in the tower and ridden the desert on their ponies—he had heard something about it—and wished continually for the sheep-herder to come back. The old fellow had been gone this time for weeks. While Hughie was reflecting, the train whistled, and he was still in a study when the engineman, Oliver Sollers, walked into the office for orders.
“I struck a man tonight, Hughie,” said Oliver, sitting down as he drew off his heavy gloves.
“Where?”
“Somewhere the other side of Castle Creek. He’s back in the baggage-car. I didn’t see him. It’s bad luck, too, to strike a man that you don’t see; leastwise, it never happened to me before. He must have been walking ahead of us, I guess, and the pilot picked him up. When we stopped at Castle Creek for water I got down to oil around and found him on the front end. He was an old man, too,” added the engineman moodily. “We will have to leave him here with you, Hughie, for Number One to take back to Sleepy Cat. Well, it can’t be helped. Got any orders, boy?”
The trainmen brought in the body. They laid it on the waiting-room floor and Hughie, busy with his orders, did not look at the man. After the train pulled out and the dull red of the tail-lights had disappeared in the east he sat down under his lamp at the window table, the telegraph key in front of him clicking vagrant messages, to wait a few minutes before stepping out of the office to close the waiting-room door. The door was left open at night, but tonight it must not be, because the coyotes had long noses for blood. When Hughie went at length to bolt the outside door he took the lamp in his hand and, coming back, stooped to lift the newspaper from the dead man’s face. It was the sheep-herder.
The operator let the newspaper drop. He went slowly back into the office. He remembered now that he had never asked the man his name. If he knew it he could perhaps notify relatives somewhere—at the very least supply a name to go on the coffin.
Dismiss the shock as he would, he realized that he was unnerved. He sat down with his head in his hands, thinking over it, when he heard thunder in the mountains; the sky had been overcast when the train pulled in. Soon rain began to fall in great drops on the roof above his head, and within a few moments in the land of no rain it was raining a flood. For a long time the storm hung above the peaks in the Mission range. Presently the wind shifted and shook the little station building with a yelp. Then, with the shock of an earthquake, the lightning claps of a cloudburst, and the pent-up fury of a long, dry summer, down came the storm from the high mountains.
The wind whipped the water in sheets against the window-panes, and little gusts, exploding in the downpour, rattled the sash viciously. If the wind abated the rain plunged on the roof, and when it blew, water poured in at every joint and crevice of the dried-out building. Hughie turned down the lamp, cut in the lightning arrester, and sat down with his hands in his pockets.
He knew now what the sheep-herder had meant when he talked of a storm. The lightning ceased to crash very soon and the thunder that shook the earth for a few moments abated, but great electric waves played almost silently and in a terrifying way through the deluge of falling rain. The desert rippled and swam in the dance of waters, the far mountains were strangely lighted, and above them distant thunder moaned unceasingly.
Hughie unaffectedly wished himself away from Point of Rocks. He swore mentally but savagely at everything about the place except his dead companion, and when he could sit still no longer he began to walk around with his hands in his pockets. As he passed the waiting-room door he saw that the rain was driving in at the open window above the head of the sheep-herder. He resisted an inclination to turn away, for the window ought to be closed. Above the roar of the rain he heard now through the open sash the roar of the water foaming down Dry Bitter Creek. Hughie walked out into the dark waiting-room to close the window. As he stepped toward it he saw the play of the storm in the ruin on the hill.
From the heavens to the horizon the naked basin of the desert trembled in the shock of the storm. Through the deluge great curtains of light, shot from horizon to horizon, threw the landscape up in fanciful, quivering pictures. Water leaped on arid slopes, hills floated in falling rivers, rain fell in never-ending sheets, and above all played t
he incessant blaze of the maddened sky and the long roll of the far and sullen thunder.
He looked at the old house. Like a lamp set within a skull, lightning burned and played about it. Through the casements he saw the staring walls lighted again. The words of the dead sheep-herder came back and he waited for graceful figures to weave past the burning windows to the trembling rhythm of the storm. He stood only for a moment. Then he lowered the sash, stepped away from the dead man and going back into the office, sat down at his table with his head between his hands.
Chapter II
The chief dispatcher, Martin Duffy—this is the same man who is digging the Panama Canal—called Hughie up on the wire and began talking with him as soon as he received his letter of resignation. “You don’t know your own mind,” declared Martin Duffy, sending his annoyance fast, because the furtive liking he had for the boy made him the more solicitous. “Take off your head and pound it, Hughie. Your uncle won’t like this. You are in line for a better thing. Just as soon as we can get a man to take Point of Rocks you are to come in and take an East-end trick under me. I’ve been keeping it as a surprise. Just hold your horses thirty days, and see what will happen.”
“It may well be,” returned Hughie over the wire in dry reply, “but that is just the point: I don’t want anything to happen—leastwise, not anything at Point of Rocks.”
“Hold your horses thirty days, will you?” retorted Martin Duffy, who when incensed always said “horses” with a hiss.
“I can hold my horses for thirty days,” returned Hughie, always impudent and already clever at a key, “but who will hold them for thirty nights? Forty-second Street and slavery for life for mine, Mr. Duffy, if I can’t get away from this job.”
However, Hughie held on as he had been told to and nothing whatever happened either at Point of Rocks or elsewhere. But he realized uncomfortably that Point of Rocks was getting on his nerves, and when the desert really does get on a man’s nerves, it is time to get out. He was already conscious that he was overstaying his leave, and but for Duffy he never could have been persuaded to hang on. The nights grew lonelier and lonelier. But just as they had become unbearable he got the long-awaited reprieve—orders to report at Medicine Bend on the 1st of September for the dispatcher’s trick. It was then the 30th of August.
The Fourth Ghost Story MEGAPACK: 25 Classic Haunts! Page 58
