The Best Ghost Stories Ever Told

by Stephen Brennan

  ‘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. She found Cheyenne dull and had got into the Washington way of tolerating anything but stupidity, and Freymark certainly was not stupid. 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 meagrely 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 eyes were small and black as bright jet beads; his hair very thick and coarse and straight, black with a sort of purple lustre 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 shrivelled at the finger tips, though I don’t think he could have been much over thirty. The long and short of it is that the fellow was uncanny. You 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 an address 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 Capitol 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 Bums, 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 Bums up to the club, and I noticed that he acted rather queerly when Freymark came in. Bums 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 Freymark, then going by another name, had figured in a particularly ugly London scandal that happened to be in Bums’ 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 blackballed 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 Freymark’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 hills of Padan-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 Bums’ information. Cheyenne clubs are not exclusive, but a Chinaman who had been engaged in Freymark’s peculiarly unsavoury traffic would be disbarred in almost any region outside of Whitechapel. One thing was 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 Connelly, 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 found no train orders and couldn’t raise anyone, so he supposed O’Toole had come up on 153. I went back to the office and called Grover, but got no answer. Then I sat down at the instrument and called for fifteen 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.

  ‘She came down the stairs in one of her Paris gowns that are as meat and drink to Cheyenne society reporters, with her arms full of American Beauty roses and her eyes and cheeks glowing. 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 half-way down the stain and looked at me, and then over my head into the drawing-room, and then her eyes questioned mine. 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 about her shoulders.

  ‘It was not a cheerful ride down to the Capitol. Miss Masterson did her duty by me bravely, but I found it 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. Freymark was late in arriving. It must have been after midnight when he appeared, correct and smiling, having driven up from his ranch. He was effusively gay and insisted upon shaking hands with me, though I never willingly touched those clammy hands of his. 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:

  ‘“Ah, but you are 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.

  Rappelles-toi lorsque les destinées

  M’auront de toi pour jamas séparé.”

  ‘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. I remember how gay the scene was, so gay that I had almo
st forgotten my anxiety in the music, flowers and laughter. The orchestra was playing a waltz, drawing the strains out long and sweet like the notes of a flute, and Freymark 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 eluding the caterer’s men, ran half the length of the hall and threw himself at Freymark’s feet, uttering a howl piteous enough to herald any sort of calamity. Freymark, who had not seen him before, turned with an exclamation of rage and a face absolutely livid and kicked the wounded brute half-way 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 civilisation, a jet of black mud that 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 Freymark 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 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 does 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 breast 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, but when the rays of the electric street lights 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 Senator’s, 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 railroad men 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 snow-flakes.–“ 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 east-bound 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 the desert running out on every side to the sky line. 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 snow drift, 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 in 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 heart-breaking 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, Gould & Co., Boston. The car had gone out on 153, the eastbound that left Grover at seven o’clock the night before, so he must have been there at that time. I copied the bill in the copybook, 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 west-bound passenger went through, and, not having seen him-since, supposed 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 five 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 five 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 quarrelling. The stranger, she said, was standing; he had a fur coat on and his eyes snapped like he was mad, and she was 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 Freymark had gone down there to make trouble, had quarrelled 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 east-bound 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 colour, 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 O’Toole 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 car out on the Q.T., and he had concluded that Larry had gone up to Cheyenne on the 5:30. 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 Freymark get on at Grover, and the train had slowed up a trifle at his ranch to let him off, for Freymark 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 ulster and went outside. I began a minute tour of inspection, I went through empty freight cars run down by the siding, searched the coal houses and primitive cellar, examining them car
efully, and calling O’Toole 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 his 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 work was hanging on the wall. His shaving things were lying about, and I recognised the silver-backed military hair brushes that Miss Masterson had given him at Christmas time, 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 whole 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 his going out in that stinging weather without shoes. I noticed that a surgeon’s case, such as are carried on passenger trains, and which Larry had once appropriated in Cheyenne, was open, and that the roll of medicated cotton had been pulled out and recently used. Each discovery I made served only to add to my perplexity. Granted that Freymark had been there, and granted that he had played the boy an ugly trick, he could not have spirited him away without the knowledge of the train crew.