In 1830, only a few miles away from what is now the great city of Cincinnati, lay an immense
and almost unbroken forest. The whole region was sparsely settled by people of the frontier.
Restless souls who no sooner had hewn fairly habitable homes out of the wilderness, and
attained to that degree of prosperity which today we shall call indigents, than impelled
by some mysterious impulse of their nature, they abandoned all and pushed farther westward
to encounter new perils and privitations in the effort to regain the meagre comforts which
they had voluntarily renounced. Many of them had already forsaken that region for the remoter
settlements, but among those remaining was one who had been of those first arriving.
He lived alone in a house of logs surrounded on all sides by the great forest, of whose
gloom and silence he seemed apart, for no one had ever known him to smile nor speak
a needless word. His simple wants were supplied by the sale or barter of skins of wild animals
in the river town, for not a thing did he grow upon the land which, if needful, he might
have claimed by right of undisturbed possession. There were evidences of improvement. A few
acres of ground immediately about the house had once been cleared of its trees, the decayed
stumps of which were half concealed by the new growth that had been suffered to repair
the ravage wrought by the axe. Apparently a manseal for agriculture had burned with
a failing flame, expiring in penitential ashes. The little log house with its chimney of sticks,
its roof of warping clapboards weighted with traversing poles, and its chinking of clay,
had a single door and directly opposite a window. The latter, however, was boarded up
nobody could remember a time when it was not, and none of those knew why it was so closed.
Certainly not because of the occupant's dislike of light and air, for on those rare
occasions when a hunter had passed that lonely spot the recluse had commonly been seen sunning
himself on his doorstep if heaven had provided sunshine for his need. I fancy there are a
few persons living today who ever knew the secret of that window, but I am one, as you
will see. The man's name was said to be Murlock. He was apparently seventy years old, actually
about fifty. Something besides years had had a hand in his ageing. His hair and long full
beard were white, his grey lustreless eyes sunken, his face singularly seamed with wrinkles
which appeared to belong to two intersecting systems. In figure he was tall and spare,
with a stoop of the shoulders, a burden -bearer. I never saw him. These particulars I learned
from my grandfather, from whom I also got the man's story when I was a lad. He had
known him when he was living nearby in that early day. One day Murlock was found in his
cabin dead. It was not a time and place for coroners and newspapers, and I suppose it
was agreed that he had died from natural causes, or I should have been told, and I should remember.
I know only that with what was probably a sense of fitness of things the body was buried
near the cabin, alongside the grave of his wife, who had preceded him by so many years
that local tradition had retained hardly a hint of her existence. That closes the final
chapter of this true story, accepting, indeed, the circumstance that many years afterwards,
in company with equally intrepid spirit, I penetrated to the place and ventured near
enough to the ruined cabin to throw a stone against it, and ran away to avoid the ghost
which every well -informed boy thereabout knew haunted the spot. But there is an earlier
chapter that's supplied by my grandfather. When Murlock built his cabin and began laying
sturdily about with his axe to hew out a farm, the rifle, meanwhile, his means of support,
he was young, strong and full of hope. In that eastern country, whence he came, he had
married, and as the fashion, a young woman in all ways worthy of his honest devotion,
who shared the dangers and privations of his lot with a willing spirit and light heart.
There is no known record of her name, of her charms of mind and person tradition is silent
it. Of their affection and happiness there is abundant assurance in every added day of
the man's widowed life. For what but the magnetism of a blessed memory could have changed
One day Murlock returned from gunning in a distant part of the forest to find his wife
prostrate with fear and delirious. There was no physician within miles, no neighbour, nor
was she in a condition to be left to summon help. So he set about the task of nursing
her back to health. But at the end of the third day she fell into unconsciousness and
passed away, apparently with never a gleam of returning reason.
From what we know of nature like this, we may venture to sketch in some of the details
of the outline picture drawn by my grandfather. When convinced that she was dead, Murlock
had sense enough to remember that the dead must be prepared for burial. In performance
of this sacred duty, he blundered now and again, did certain things incorrectly and
others which he did correctly were done over and over. His occasional failures to accomplish
some simple and ordinary fact filled him with astonishment, like that of a drunken
man who wanders at the suspension of familiar natural laws. He was surprised too that he
Tomorrow, he said, I shall have to make the coffin and dig the grave. And then I shall
miss her, when she is no longer in sight. But now she is dead of course. But it's alright.
He stood over the body in the fading light, adjusting the hair and putting the finishing
touches to the simple toilet, doing all mechanically with soulless care. And still through his
consciousness ran an undersense of conviction that all was right, that he should have her
again as before. And everything explained. He had no experience of grief, his capacity
had not been enlarged by use, his heart could not contain it all, nor his imagination rightly
conceive it. He did not know he was so hard struck, the knowledge would come later and
never go. Grief is an artist of powers of various as the instruments upon which he plays
is dirges for the dead, evoking from some of the sharpest, shrillest notes, from others
the low grave chords that throb recurrent like the slow beating of a distant drum. Some
natures it startles, some it stupefies. To one it comes like the stroke of an arrow,
stinging all the sensibilities to keener life, to another as the blow of a bludgeon, which
in crushing benumbs. We may conceive Murlock to have been that way affected, for, and here
we are upon surer ground than that of conjection, no sooner had he finished his pious work than
sinking into a chair by the side of the table upon which lay the body and noting how white
the profile showed in the deepening gloom, he laid his arms open upon the table's edge
and dropped his face into them, tearless and yet unutterably weary. At that moment came
in through the open window a long wailing sound like the cry of a lost child in the
far deeps of the darkening woods. But the man did not move. Again and nearer than before
sounded that unearthly cry upon his failing sense. Perhaps it was a wild beast, perhaps
it was a dream, for Murlock was asleep. Some hours later, as it afterward appeared, this
unfaithful watcher awoke and, lifting his head from his arms, intently listened. He
knew not why. There in the black darkness by the side of the dead, recalling all without
a shock, he strained his eyes to see. He knew not what. His senses were all alert, his breath
was suspended, his blood had stilled its tides as if to assist the silence. Who, what had
waked him and where was it? Suddenly the table shook beneath his arms, and at that
same moment he heard, or fancied that he heard, a light soft step, another, sounds as if bare
feet upon the floor. He was terrified beyond the power to cry out or move. Preforce he
waited, waited there in the darkness, through seeming centuries of such dread as one may
know, yet live to tell. He tried vainly to speak the dead woman's name, vainly to stretch
forth his hand across the table to learn if she were there. His throat was powerless,
his arms and hands were like lead. Then occurred something most frightful. Some heavy body
seemed hurled against the table, with an impetus that pushed it against his breast so sharply
as nearly to overthrow him, and at the same instant he heard and felt the fall of something
upon the floor with so violent a thump that the whole house was shaken by the impact.
A scuffling ensued, and a confusion of sounds impossible to describe. Murlock had risen
to his feet, fear had by excess forfeited control of his faculties. He flung his hands
and madness incites to action. With no definite intent, from no motive but the wayward impulse
of a madman, Murlock sprang to the wall, with a little groping seized his loaded rifle and
without aim discharged it. By the flash which lit up the room with a vivid illumination
he saw an enormous panther dragging the dead woman towards the window, its teeth fixed
in her throat. Then there was darkness blacker than before and silence, and when he returned
to consciousness the sun was high and the wood vocal with songs of birds. The body lay
near the window where the beast had left it when frightened away by the flash and the
report of the rifle. The clothing was deranged, the long hair in disorder, the limbs lay anyhow.
From the throat, dreadfully lacerated, had issued a pool of blood not yet entirely coagulated.
The ribbon with which he had bound the wrists was broken, the hands were tightly clenched,
