Humorous Ghost Stories Part 18

"Ah, yes," said landlord; "it's to-night he goes true enough, and mind you, though he treated me handsome over the rent, I'm not sure it's a loss to the village. I don't hold with gentrice, who fetch their drink from London instead of helping local traders to get their living."

"But you haven't got any rum like his," I said, to draw him out.

His neck grew red above his collar, and I was afraid I'd gone too far; but after a while he got his breath with a grunt.

"John Simmons," he said, "if you've come down here this windy night to talk a lot of fool's talk, you've wasted a journey."

Well, of course then I had to smooth him down with praising his rum, and Heaven forgive me for swearing it was better than captain's. For the like of that rum no living lips have tasted save mine and parson's. But somehow or other I brought landlord round, and presently we must have a gla.s.s of his best to prove its quality.

"Beat that if you can," he cried, and we both raised our gla.s.ses to our mouths, only to stop halfway and look at each other in amaze. For the wind that had been howling outside like an outrageous dog had all of a sudden turned as melodious as the carol-boys of a Christmas eve.

"Surely that's not my Martha," whispered landlord, Martha being his great-aunt who lived in the loft overhead.

We went to the door, and the wind burst it open so that the handle was driven clean into the plaster of the wall, but we didn't think about that at the time; for over our heads, sailing very comfortably through the windy stars, was the s.h.i.+p that had pa.s.sed the summer in landlord's field. Her port-holes and her bay-window were blazing with lights, and there was a noise of singing and fiddling on her decks. "He's gone!"

shouted landlord above the storm, "and he's taken half the village with him." I could only nod in answer, not having lungs like bellows of leather.

In the morning we were able to measure the strength of the storm, and over and above my pigsty, there was damage enough wrought in the village to keep us busy. True it is that the children had to break down no branches for the firing that autumn, since the wind had strewn the woods with more than they could carry away. Many of our ghosts were scattered abroad, but this time very few came back, all the young men having sailed with captain; and not only ghosts, for a poor half-witted lad was missing, and we reckoned that he had stowed himself away or perhaps s.h.i.+pped as cabin-boy, not knowing any better.

What with the lamentations of the ghost girls and the grumblings of families who had lost ancestors, the village was upset for a while, and the funny thing was that it was the folk who had complained most of the carryings-on of the youngsters who made most noise now that they were gone. I hadn't any sympathy with shoemaker or butcher, who ran about saying how much they missed their lads, but it made me grieve to hear the poor bereaved girls calling their lovers by name on the village green at nightfall. It didn't seem fair to me that they should have lost their men a second time, after giving up life in order to join them, as like as not. Still, not even a spirit can be sorry forever, and after a few months we made up our mind that the folk who had sailed in the s.h.i.+p were never coming back; and we didn't talk about it any more.

And then one day, I dare say it would be a couple of years after, when the whole business was quite forgotten, who should come trapesing along the road from Portsmouth but the daft lad who had gone away with the s.h.i.+p without waiting till he was dead to become a ghost. You never saw such a boy as that in all your life. He had a great rusty cutla.s.s hanging to a string at his waist, and he was tattooed all over in fine colors, so that even his face looked like a girl's sampler. He had a handkerchief in his hand full of foreign sh.e.l.ls and old-fas.h.i.+oned pieces of small money, very curious, and he walked up to the well outside his mother's house and drew himself a drink as if he had been nowhere in particular.

The worst of it was that he had come back as soft-headed as he went, and try as we might, we couldn't get anything reasonable out of him. He talked a lot of gibberish about keelhauling and walking the plank and crimson murders--things which a decent sailor should know nothing about, so that it seemed to me that for all his manners captain had been more of a pirate than a gentleman mariner. But to draw sense out of that boy was as hard as picking cherries off a crab-tree. One silly tale he had that he kept on drifting back to, and to hear him you would have thought that it was the only thing that happened to him in his life.

"We was at anchor," he would say, "off an island called the Basket of Flowers, and the sailors had caught a lot of parrots and we were teaching them to swear. Up and down the decks, up and down the decks, and the language they used was dreadful. Then we looked up and saw the masts of the Spanish s.h.i.+p outside the harbor. Outside the harbor they were, so we threw the parrots into the sea, and sailed out to fight. And all the parrots were drowneded in the sea, and the language they used was dreadful."

That's the sort of boy he was--nothing but silly talk of parrots when we asked him about the fighting. And we never had a chance of teaching him better, for two days after he ran away again, and hasn't been seen since.

That's my story, and I a.s.sure you that things like that are happening at Fairfield all the time. The s.h.i.+p has never come back, but somehow, as people grow older, they seem to think that one of these windy nights she'll come sailing in over the hedges with all the lost ghosts on board. Well, when she comes, she'll be welcome. There's one ghost la.s.s that has never grown tired of waiting for her lad to return. Every night you'll see her out on the green, straining her poor eyes with looking for the mast-lights among the stars. A faithful la.s.s you'd call her, and I'm thinking you'd be right.

Landlord's field wasn't a penny the worse for the visit; but they do say that since then the turnips that have been grown in it have tasted of rum.

THE TRANSPLANTED GHOST

A CHRISTMAS STORY

BY WALLACE IRWIN

From _Everybody's Magazine_. By permission of _Everybody's_ and Wallace Irwin.

The Transplanted Ghost

A CHRISTMAS STORY

BY WALLACE IRWIN

When Aunt Elizabeth asked me to spend Christmas with her at Seven Oaks she appended a peculiar request to her letter. "Like a good fellow," she wrote, "won't you drop off at Perkinsville, Ohio, on your way, and take a look at Gauntmoor Castle? They say it's a wonderful old pile; and its history is in many ways connected with that of our own family. As long as you're the last of the Geoffray Pierreponts, such things ought to interest you." Like her auburn namesake who bossed the Thames of yore, sweet, red-haired, romantic autocrat, Aunt Elizabeth! Her wishes were commands.

"What the deuce is Aunt Elizabeth up to now?" I asked Tim Cole, my law partner, whom I found in my rooms smoking my tobacco. "Why should I be inspecting Gauntmoor Castle--and what is a castle named Gauntmoor doing in Perkinsville, Ohio, anyway? Perkinsville sounds like the Middle West, and Gauntmoor sounds like the Middle Ages."

"Right in both a.n.a.lyses," said the pipe-poaching Tim. "Castle Gauntmoor _is_ from the Middle Ages, and we all know about where in Ohio Perkinsville is. But is it possible that you, twenty-seven years old and a college graduate, haven't heard of Thaddeus Hobson, the Marvelous Millionaire?" I shook my head. "The papers have been full of Hobson in the past two or three years," said Tim. "It was in 1898, I think, that Fate jumped Thaddeus Hobson to the golden Olympus. He was first head salesman in the village hardware store, then he formulated so successful a scheme to clean up the Tin Plate Combine that he put away a fabulous number of millions in a year, and subsequently went to England. Finally he set his heart on Norman architecture. After a search he found the ancient Castle Gauntmoor still habitable and for sale. He thrilled the British comic papers by his offer to buy the castle and move it to America. Hobson saw the property, telegraphed to London, and closed the deal in two hours. And an army of laborers at once began taking the Gauntmoor to pieces, stone by stone.

"Transporting that relic to America involved a cost in labor and ingenuity comparable with nothing that has yet happened. Moving the Great Pyramid would be a lighter job, perhaps. Thousands of tons of scarred and medieval granite were carried to the railroads, freighted to the sea, and dragged across the Atlantic in whopping big lighters chartered for the job. And the next the newspapers knew, the monster was set up in Perkinsville, Ohio."

"But why did he do it?" I asked.

"Who knows?" said Tim. "Ingrowing sentiment--unlimited capital--wanted to do something for the Home Town, probably; wanted to beautify the village that gave him his start--and didn't know how to go at it. Well, so long!" he called out, as I seized my hat and streaked for the train.

It was dinner time when the train pulled in at Perkinsville. The town was as undistinguished as I expected. I was too hungry to care about castles at the moment, so I took the 'bus for the Commercial Hotel, an establishment that seemed to live up to its name, both in sentiment and in accommodation. The landlord, Mr. Spike, referred bitterly to the castle, which, he explained, was, by its dominating presence, "spoilin'

the prosperous appearance of Perkinsville." Dinner over, he led me to a side porch.

"How does Perkinsville look with that--with that curio squattin' on top of it?" asked Mr. Spike sternly, as he pointed over the local livery stable, over Smith Brothers' Plow Works, over Odd Fellows' Hall, and up, up to the bleak hills beyond, where, poised like a stony coronet on a giant's brow, rose the great Norman towers and frowning b.u.t.tresses of Gauntmoor Castle. I rubbed my eyes. No, it _couldn't_ be real--it must be a wizard's work!

"What's old Hobson got out of it?" said Mr. Spike in my ear. "Nothin'

but an old stone barn, where he can set all day nursin' a grouch and keepin' his daughter Anita--they do say he does--under lock and key for fear somebody's goin' to marry her for her money."

Mr. Spike looked up at the ramparts defiantly, even as the Saxon churl must have gazed in an earlier, far sadder land.

"It's romantic," I suggested.

"Yes, _darn_ rheumatic," agreed Mr. Spike.

"Is it open for visitors?" I asked innocently.

"Hobson?" cackled Spike. "He'd no more welcome a stranger to that place than he'd welcome--a ghost. He's a hol-ee terror, Hobson!"

Mr. Spike turned away to referee a pool game down in the barroom.

The fires of a December sunset flared behind Gauntmoor and cast the grim shadows of Medievalism over Mediocrity, which lay below. Presently the light faded, and I grew tired of gazing. Since Hobson would permit no tourists to inspect his castle, why was I here on this foolish trip?

Already I was planning to wire Aunt Elizabeth a sarcastic reference to being marooned at Christmas with a castle on my hands, when a voice at my shoulder said suddenly:

"Mr. Hobson sends his compliments, sir, and wants to know would Mr.

Pierrepont come up to Gauntmoor for the night?"

A groom in a plum-colored livery stood at my elbow. A light station wagon was waiting just outside. How the deuce did Hobson know my name?

What did he want of me at Gauntmoor this time of night? Yet prospects of bed and breakfast away from the Commercial lured me strangely.

"Sure, Mr. Pierrepont will be delighted," I announced, leaping into the vehicle, and soon we were mounting upward, battling with the winds around the time-scarred walls. The wagon stopped at the great gate. A horn sounded from within, the gate swung open, a drawbridge fell with a hideous creaking of machinery, and we pa.s.sed in, twenty or thirty feet above the snow-drifted moat. Beyond the portcullis a dim door swung open. Some sort of seneschal met us with a light and led us below the twilight arches, where beyond, I could catch glimpses of the baileys and courts and the donjon tower against the heavy ramparts.

The wind hooted through the high galleries as we pa.s.sed; but the west wing, from its many windows and loopholes, blazed with cheerful yellow light. It looked nearly cozy. Into a tall, gaunt tower we plunged, down a winding staircase, and suddenly we came into a vast hall, stately with tapestries and innumerable monkish carvings--and all brightly lighted with electricity!