The Death of Halpin Frayser
I
For by death is wrought greater change than hath been shown. Whereas
in general the spirit that removed cometh back upon occasion, and is
sometimes seen of those in flesh (appearing in the form of the body
it bore) yet it hath happened that the veritable body without the
spirit hath walked. And it is attested of those encountering who
have lived to speak thereon that a lich so raised up hath no natural
affection, nor remembrance thereof, but only hate. Also, it is known
that some spirits which in life were benign become by death evil
altogether.--Hali.
One dark night in midsummer a man waking from a dreamless sleep in a
forest lifted his head from the earth, and staring a few moments into
the blackness, said: "Catherine Larue." He said nothing more; no
reason was known to him why he should have said so much.
The man was Halpin Frayser. He lived in St. Helena, but where he
lives now is uncertain, for he is dead. One who practices sleeping
in the woods with nothing under him but the dry leaves and the damp
earth, and nothing over him but the branches from which the leaves
have fallen and the sky from which the earth has fallen, cannot hope
for great longevity, and Frayser had already attained the age of
thirty-two. There are persons in this world, millions of persons,
and far and away the best persons, who regard that as a very advanced
age. They are the children. To those who view the voyage of life
from the port of departure the bark that has accomplished any
considerable distance appears already in close approach to the
farther shore. However, it is not certain that Halpin Frayser came
to his death by exposure.
He had been all day in the hills west of the Napa Valley, looking for
doves and such small game as was in season. Late in the afternoon it
had come on to be cloudy, and he had lost his bearings; and although
he had only to go always downhill--everywhere the way to safety when
one is lost--the absence of trails had so impeded him that he was
overtaken by night while still in the forest. Unable in the darkness
to penetrate the thickets of manzanita and other undergrowth, utterly
bewildered and overcome with fatigue, he had lain down near the root
of a large madrono and fallen into a dreamless sleep. It was hours
later, in the very middle of the night, that one of God's mysterious
messengers, gliding ahead of the incalculable host of his companions
sweeping westward with the dawn line, pronounced the awakening word
in the ear of the sleeper, who sat upright and spoke, he knew not
why, a name, he knew not whose.
Halpin Frayser was not much of a philosopher, nor a scientist. The
circumstance that, waking from a deep sleep at night in the midst of
a forest, he had spoken aloud a name that he had not in memory and
hardly had in mind did not arouse an enlightened curiosity to
investigate the phenomenon. He thought it odd, and with a little
perfunctory shiver, as if in deference to a seasonal presumption that
the night was chill, he lay down again and went to sleep. But his
sleep was no longer dreamless.
He thought he was walking along a dusty road that showed white in the
gathering darkness of a summer night. Whence and whither it led, and
why he traveled it, he did not know, though all seemed simple and
natural, as is the way in dreams; for in the Land Beyond the Bed
surprises cease from troubling and the judgment is at rest. Soon he
came to a parting of the ways; leading from the highway was a road
less traveled, having the appearance, indeed, of having been long
abandoned, because, he thought, it led to something evil; yet he
turned into it without hesitation, impelled by some imperious
necessity.
As he pressed forward he became conscious that his way was haunted by
invisible existences whom he could not definitely figure to his mind.
From among the trees on either side he caught broken and incoherent
whispers in a strange tongue which yet he partly understood. They
seemed to him fragmentary utterances of a monstrous conspiracy
against his body and soul.
It was now long after nightfall, yet the interminable forest through
which he journeyed was lit with a wan glimmer having no point of
diffusion, for in its mysterious lumination nothing cast a shadow. A
shallow pool in the guttered depression of an old wheel rut, as from
a recent rain, met his eye with a crimson gleam. He stooped and
plunged his hand into it. It stained his fingers; it was blood!
Blood, he then observed, was about him everywhere. The weeds growing
rankly by the roadside showed it in blots and splashes on their big,
broad leaves. Patches of dry dust between the wheelways were pitted
and spattered as with a red rain. Defiling the trunks of the trees
were broad maculations of crimson, and blood dripped like dew from
their foliage.
All this he observed with a terror which seemed not incompatible with
the fulfillment of a natural expectation. It seemed to him that it
was all in expiation of some crime which, though conscious of his
guilt, he could not rightly remember. To the menaces and mysteries
of his surroundings the consciousness was an added horror. Vainly he
sought by tracing life backward in memory, to reproduce the moment of
his sin; scenes and incidents came crowding tumultuously into his
mind, one picture effacing another, or commingling with it in
confusion and obscurity, but nowhere could he catch a glimpse of what
he sought. The failure augmented his terror; he felt as one who has
murdered in the dark, not knowing whom nor why. So frightful was the
situation--the mysterious light burned with so silent and awful a
menace; the noxious plants, the trees that by common consent are
invested with a melancholy or baleful character, so openly in his
sight conspired against his peace; from overhead and all about came
so audible and startling whispers and the sighs of creatures so
obviously not of earth--that he could endure it no longer, and with a
great effort to break some malign spell that bound his faculties to
silence and inaction, he shouted with the full strength of his lungs!
His voice broken, it seemed, into an infinite multitude of unfamiliar
sounds, went babbling and stammering away into the distant reaches of
the forest, died into silence, and all was as before. But he had
made a beginning at resistance and was encouraged. He said:
"I will not submit unheard. There may be powers that are not
malignant traveling this accursed road. I shall leave them a record
and an appeal. I shall relate my wrongs, the persecutions that I
endure--I, a helpless mortal, a penitent, an unoffending poet!"
Halpin Frayser was a poet only as he was a penitent: in his dream.
Taking from his clothing a small red-leather pocketbook, one-half of
which was leaved for memoranda, he discovered that he was without a
pencil. He broke a twig from a bush, dipped it into a pool of blood
and wrote rapidly. He had hardly touched the paper with the point of
his twig when a low, wild peal of laughter broke out at a measureless
distance away, and growing ever louder, seemed approaching ever
nearer; a soulless, heartless, and unjoyous laugh, like that of the
loon, solitary by the lakeside at midnight; a laugh which culminated
in an unearthly shout close at hand, then died away by slow
gradations, as if the accursed being that uttered it had withdrawn
over the verge of the world whence it had come. But the man felt
that this was not so--that it was near by and had not moved.
A strange sensation began slowly to take possession of his body and
his mind. He could not have said which, if any, of his senses was
affected; he felt it rather as a consciousness--a mysterious mental
assurance of some overpowering presence--some supernatural
malevolence different in kind from the invisible existences that
swarmed about him, and superior to them in power. He knew that it
had uttered that hideous laugh. And now it seemed to be approaching
him; from what direction he did not know--dared not conjecture. All
his former fears were forgotten or merged in the gigantic terror that
now held him in thrall. Apart from that, he had but one thought: to
complete his written appeal to the benign powers who, traversing the
haunted wood, might some time rescue him if he should be denied the
blessing of annihilation. He wrote with terrible rapidity, the twig
in his fingers rilling blood without renewal; but in the middle of a
sentence his hands denied their service to his will, his arms fell to
his sides, the book to the earth; and powerless to move or cry out,
he found himself staring into the sharply drawn face and blank, dead
eyes of his own mother, standing white and silent in the garments of
the grave!
II
In his youth Halpin Frayser had lived with his parents in Nashville,
Tennessee. The Fraysers were well-to-do, having a good position in
such society as had survived the wreck wrought by civil war. Their
children had the social and educational opportunities of their time
and place, and had responded to good associations and instruction
with agreeable manners and cultivated minds. Halpin being the
youngest and not over robust was perhaps a trifle "spoiled." He had
the double disadvantage of a mother's assiduity and a father's
neglect. Frayser pere was what no Southern man of means is not--a
politician. His country, or rather his section and State, made
demands upon his time and attention so exacting that to those of his
family he was compelled to turn an ear partly deafened by the thunder
of the political captains and the shouting, his own included.
Young Halpin was of a dreamy, indolent and rather romantic turn,
somewhat more addicted to literature than law, the profession to
which he was bred. Among those of his relations who professed the
modern faith of heredity it was well understood that in him the
character of the late Myron Bayne, a maternal great-grandfather, had
revisited the glimpses of the moon--by which orb Bayne had in his
lifetime been sufficiently affected to be a poet of no small Colonial
distinction. If not specially observed, it was observable that while
a Frayser who was not the proud possessor of a sumptuous copy of the
ancestral "poetical works" (printed at the family expense, and long
ago withdrawn from an inhospitable market) was a rare Frayser indeed,
there was an illogical indisposition to honor the great deceased in
the person of his spiritual successor. Halpin was pretty generally
deprecated as an intellectual black sheep who was likely at any
moment to disgrace the flock by bleating in meter. The Tennessee
Fraysers were a practical folk--not practical in the popular sense of
devotion to sordid pursuits, but having a robust contempt for any
qualities unfitting a man for the wholesome vocation of politics.
In justice to young Halpin it should be said that while in him were
pretty faithfully reproduced most of the mental and moral
characteristics ascribed by history and family tradition to the
famous Colonial bard, his succession to the gift and faculty divine
was purely inferential. Not only had he never been known to court
the muse, but in truth he could not have written correctly a line of
verse to save himself from the Killer of the Wise. Still, there was
no knowing when the dormant faculty might wake and smite the lyre.
In the meantime the young man was rather a loose fish, anyhow.
Between him and his mother was the most perfect sympathy, for
secretly the lady was herself a devout disciple of the late and great
Myron Bayne, though with the tact so generally and justly admired in
her sex (despite the hardy calumniators who insist that it is
essentially the same thing as cunning) she had always taken care to
conceal her weakness from all eyes but those of him who shared it.
Their common guilt in respect of that was an added tie between them.
If in Halpin's youth his mother had "spoiled" him, he had assuredly
done his part toward being spoiled. As he grew to such manhood as is
attainable by a Southerner who does not care which way elections go
the attachment between him and his beautiful mother--whom from early
childhood he had called Katy--became yearly stronger and more tender.
In these two romantic natures was manifest in a signal way that
neglected phenomenon, the dominance of the sexual element in all the
relations of life, strengthening, softening, and beautifying even
those of consanguinity. The two were nearly inseparable, and by
strangers observing their manner were not infrequently mistaken for
lovers.
Entering his mother's boudoir one day Halpin Frayser kissed her upon
the forehead, toyed for a moment with a lock of her dark hair which
had escaped from its confining pins, and said, with an obvious effort
at calmness:
"Would you greatly mind, Katy, if I were called away to California
for a few weeks?"
It was hardly needful for Katy to answer with her lips a question to
which her telltale cheeks had made instant reply. Evidently she
would greatly mind; and the tears, too, sprang into her large brown
eyes as corroborative testimony.
"Ah, my son," she said, looking up into his face with infinite
tenderness, "I should have known that this was coming. Did I not lie
awake a half of the night weeping because, during the other half,
Grandfather Bayne had come to me in a dream, and standing by his
portrait--young, too, and handsome as that--pointed to yours on the
same wall? And when I looked it seemed that I could not see the
features; you had been painted with a face cloth, such as we put upon
the dead. Your father has laughed at me, but you and I, dear, know
that such things are not for nothing. And I saw below the edge of
the cloth the marks of hands on your throat--forgive me, but we have
not been used to keep such things from each other. Perhaps you have
another interpretation. Perhaps it does not mean that you will go to
California. Or maybe you will take me with you?"
It must be confessed that this ingenious interpretation of the dream
in the light of newly discovered evidence did not wholly commend
itself to the son's more logical mind; he had, for the moment at
least, a conviction that it foreshadowed a more simple and immediate,
if less tragic, disaster than a visit to the Pacific Coast. It was
Halpin Frayser's impression that he was to be garroted on his native
heath.
"Are there not medicinal springs in California?" Mrs. Frayser resumed
before he had time to give her the true reading of the dream--"places
where one recovers from rheumatism and neuralgia? Look--my fingers
feel so stiff; and I am almost sure they have been giving me great
pain while I slept."
She held out her hands for his inspection. What diagnosis of her
case the young man may have thought it best to conceal with a smile
the historian is unable to state, but for himself he feels bound to
say that fingers looking less stiff, and showing fewer evidences of
even insensible pain, have seldom been submitted for medical
inspection by even the fairest patient desiring a prescription of
unfamiliar scenes.
The outcome of it was that of these two odd persons having equally
odd notions of duty, the one went to California, as the interest of
his client required, and the other remained at home in compliance
with a wish that her husband was scarcely conscious of entertaining.
While in San Francisco Halpin Frayser was walking one dark night
along the water front of the city, when, with a suddenness that
surprised and disconcerted him, he became a sailor. He was in fact
"shanghaied" aboard a gallant, gallant ship, and sailed for a far
countree. Nor did his misfortunes end with the voyage; for the ship
was cast ashore on an island of the South Pacific, and it was six
years afterward when the survivors were taken off by a venturesome
trading schooner and brought back to San Francisco.
Though poor in purse, Frayser was no less proud in spirit than he had
been in the years that seemed ages and ages ago. He would accept no
assistance from strangers, and it was while living with a fellow
survivor near the town of St. Helena, awaiting news and remittances
from home, that he had gone gunning and dreaming.
III
The apparition confronting the dreamer in the haunted wood--the thing
so like, yet so unlike his mother--was horrible! It stirred no love
nor longing in his heart; it came unattended with pleasant memories
of a golden past--inspired no sentiment of any kind; all the finer
emotions were swallowed up in fear. He tried to turn and run from
before it, but his legs were as lead; he was unable to lift his feet
from the ground. His arms hung helpless at his sides; of his eyes
only he retained control, and these he dared not remove from the
lusterless orbs of the apparition, which he knew was not a soul
without a body, but that most dreadful of all existences infesting
that haunted wood--a body without a soul! In its blank stare was
neither love, nor pity, nor intelligence--nothing to which to address
an appeal for mercy. "An appeal will not lie," he thought, with an
absurd reversion to professional slang, making the situation more
horrible, as the fire of a cigar might light up a tomb.
For a time, which seemed so long that the world grew gray with age
and sin, and the haunted forest, having fulfilled its purpose in this
monstrous culmination of its terrors, vanished out of his
consciousness with all its sights and sounds, the apparition stood
within a pace, regarding him with the mindless malevolence of a wild
brute; then thrust its hands forward and sprang upon him with
appalling ferocity! The act released his physical energies without
unfettering his will; his mind was still spellbound, but his powerful
body and agile limbs, endowed with a blind, insensate life of their
own, resisted stoutly and well. For an instant he seemed to see this
unnatural contest between a dead intelligence and a breathing
mechanism only as a spectator--such fancies are in dreams; then he
regained his identity almost as if by a leap forward into his body,
and the straining automaton had a directing will as alert and fierce
as that of its hideous antagonist.
But what mortal can cope with a creature of his dream? The
imagination creating the enemy is already vanquished; the combat's
result is the combat's cause. Despite his struggles--despite his
strength and activity, which seemed wasted in a void, he felt the
cold fingers close upon his throat. Borne backward to the earth, he
saw above him the dead and drawn face within a hand's breadth of his
own, and then all was black. A sound as of the beating of distant
drums--a murmur of swarming voices, a sharp, far cry signing all to
silence, and Halpin Frayser dreamed that he was dead.
IV
A warm, clear night had been followed by a morning of drenching fog.
At about the middle of the afternoon of the preceding day a little
whiff of light vapor--a mere thickening of the atmosphere, the ghost
of a cloud--had been observed clinging to the western side of Mount
St. Helena, away up along the barren altitudes near the summit. It
was so thin, so diaphanous, so like a fancy made visible, that one
would have said: "Look quickly! in a moment it will be gone."
In a moment it was visibly larger and denser. While with one edge it
clung to the mountain, with the other it reached farther and farther
out into the air above the lower slopes. At the same time it
extended itself to north and south, joining small patches of mist
that appeared to come out of the mountainside on exactly the same
level, with an intelligent design to be absorbed. And so it grew and
grew until the summit was shut out of view from the valley, and over
the valley itself was an ever-extending canopy, opaque and gray. At
Calistoga, which lies near the head of the valley and the foot of the
mountain, there were a starless night and a sunless morning. The
fog, sinking into the valley, had reached southward, swallowing up
ranch after ranch, until it had blotted out the town of St. Helena,
nine miles away. The dust in the road was laid; trees were adrip
with moisture; birds sat silent in their coverts; the morning light
was wan and ghastly, with neither color nor fire.
Two men left the town of St. Helena at the first glimmer of dawn, and
walked along the road northward up the valley toward Calistoga. They
carried guns on their shoulders, yet no one having knowledge of such
matters could have mistaken them for hunters of bird or beast. They
were a deputy sheriff from Napa and a detective from San Francisco--
Holker and Jaralson, respectively. Their business was man-hunting.
"How far is it?" inquired Holker, as they strode along, their feet
stirring white the dust beneath the damp surface of the road.
"The White Church? Only a half mile farther," the other answered.
"By the way," he added, "it is neither white nor a church; it is an
abandoned schoolhouse, gray with age and neglect. Religious services
were once held in it--when it was white, and there is a graveyard
that would delight a poet. Can you guess why I sent for you, and
told you to come heeled?"
"Oh, I never have bothered you about things of that kind. I've
always found you communicative when the time came. But if I may
hazard a guess, you want me to help you arrest one of the corpses in
the graveyard."
"You remember Branscom?" said Jaralson, treating his companion's wit
with the inattention that it deserved.
"The chap who cut his wife's throat? I ought; I wasted a week's work
on him and had my expenses for my trouble. There is a reward of five
hundred dollars, but none of us ever got a sight of him. You don't
mean to say--"
"Yes, I do. He has been under the noses of you fellows all the time.
He comes by night to the old graveyard at the White Church."
"The devil! That's where they buried his wife."
"Well, you fellows might have had sense enough to suspect that he
would return to her grave some time."
"The very last place that anyone would have expected him to return
to."
"But you had exhausted all the other places. Learning your failure
at them, I 'laid for him' there."
"And you found him?"
"Damn it! he found ME. The rascal got the drop on me--regularly held
me up and made me travel. It's God's mercy that he didn't go through
me. Oh, he's a good one, and I fancy the half of that reward is
enough for me if you're needy."
Holker laughed good humoredly, and explained that his creditors were
never more importunate.
"I wanted merely to show you the ground, and arrange a plan with
you," the detective explained. "I thought it as well for us to be
heeled, even in daylight."
"The man must be insane," said the deputy sheriff. "The reward is
for his capture and conviction. If he's mad he won't be convicted."
Mr. Holker was so profoundly affected by that possible failure of
justice that he involuntarily stopped in the middle of the road, then
resumed his walk with abated zeal.
"Well, he looks it," assented Jaralson. "I'm bound to admit that a
more unshaven, unshorn, unkempt, and uneverything wretch I never saw
outside the ancient and honorable order of tramps. But I've gone in
for him, and can't make up my mind to let go. There's glory in it
for us, anyhow. Not another soul knows that he is this side of the
Mountains of the Moon."
"All right," Holker said; "we will go and view the ground," and he
added, in the words of a once favorite inscription for tombstones:
"'where you must shortly lie'--I mean, if old Branscom ever gets
tired of you and your impertinent intrusion. By the way, I heard the
other day that 'Branscom' was not his real name."
"What is?"
"I can't recall it. I had lost all interest in the wretch, and it
did not fix itself in my memory--something like Pardee. The woman
whose throat he had the bad taste to cut was a widow when he met her.
She had come to California to look up some relatives--there are
persons who will do that sometimes. But you know all that."
"Naturally."
"But not knowing the right name, by what happy inspiration did you
find the right grave? The man who told me what the name was said it
had been cut on the headboard."
"I don't know the right grave." Jaralson was apparently a trifle
reluctant to admit his ignorance of so important a point of his plan.
"I have been watching about the place generally. A part of our work
this morning will be to identify that grave. Here is the White
Church."
For a long distance the road had been bordered by fields on both
sides, but now on the left there was a forest of oaks, madronos, and
gigantic spruces whose lower parts only could be seen, dim and
ghostly in the fog. The undergrowth was, in places, thick, but
nowhere impenetrable. For some moments Holker saw nothing of the
building, but as they turned into the woods it revealed itself in
faint gray outline through the fog, looking huge and far away. A few
steps more, and it was within an arm's length, distinct, dark with
moisture, and insignificant in size. It had the usual country-
schoolhouse form--belonged to the packing-box order of architecture;
had an underpinning of stones, a moss-grown roof, and blank window
spaces, whence both glass and sash had long departed. It was ruined,
but not a ruin--a typical Californian substitute for what are known
to guide-bookers abroad as "monuments of the past." With scarcely a
glance at this uninteresting structure Jaralson moved on into the
dripping undergrowth beyond.
"I will show you where he held me up," he said. "This is the
graveyard."
Here and there among the bushes were small inclosures containing
graves, sometimes no more than one. They were recognized as graves
by the discolored stones or rotting boards at head and foot, leaning
at all angles, some prostrate; by the ruined picket fences
surrounding them; or, infrequently, by the mound itself showing its
gravel through the fallen leaves. In many instances nothing marked
the spot where lay the vestiges of some poor mortal--who, leaving "a
large circle of sorrowing friends," had been left by them in turn--
except a depression in the earth, more lasting than that in the
spirits of the mourners. The paths, if any paths had been, were long
obliterated; trees of a considerable size had been permitted to grow
up from the graves and thrust aside with root or branch the inclosing
fences. Over all was that air of abandonment and decay which seems
nowhere so fit and significant as in a village of the forgotten dead.
As the two men, Jaralson leading, pushed their way through the growth
of young trees, that enterprising man suddenly stopped and brought up
his shotgun to the height of his breast, uttered a low note of
warning, and stood motionless, his eyes fixed upon something ahead.
As well as he could, obstructed by brush, his companion, though
seeing nothing, imitated the posture and so stood, prepared for what
might ensue. A moment later Jaralson moved cautiously forward, the
other following.
Under the branches of an enormous spruce lay the dead body of a man.
Standing silent above it they noted such particulars as first strike
the attention--the face, the attitude, the clothing; whatever most
promptly and plainly answers the unspoken question of a sympathetic
curiosity.
The body lay upon its back, the legs wide apart. One arm was thrust
upward, the other outward; but the latter was bent acutely, and the
hand was near the throat. Both hands were tightly clenched. The
whole attitude was that of desperate but ineffectual resistance to--
what?
Near by lay a shotgun and a game bag through the meshes of which was
seen the plumage of shot birds. All about were evidences of a
furious struggle; small sprouts of poison-oak were bent and denuded
of leaf and bark; dead and rotting leaves had been pushed into heaps
and ridges on both sides of the legs by the action of other feet than
theirs; alongside the hips were unmistakable impressions of human
knees.
The nature of the struggle was made clear by a glance at the dead
man's throat and face. While breast and hands were white, those were
purple--almost black. The shoulders lay upon a low mound, and the
head was turned back at an angle otherwise impossible, the expanded
eyes staring blankly backward in a direction opposite to that of the
feet. From the froth filling the open mouth the tongue protruded,
black and swollen. The throat showed horrible contusions; not mere
finger-marks, but bruises and lacerations wrought by two strong hands
that must have buried themselves in the yielding flesh, maintaining
their terrible grasp until long after death. Breast, throat, face,
were wet; the clothing was saturated; drops of water, condensed from
the fog, studded the hair and mustache.
All this the two men observed without speaking--almost at a glance.
Then Holker said:
"Poor devil! he had a rough deal."
Jaralson was making a vigilant circumspection of the forest, his
shotgun held in both hands and at full cock, his finger upon the
trigger.
"The work of a maniac," he said, without withdrawing his eyes from
the inclosing wood. "It was done by Branscom--Pardee."
Something half hidden by the disturbed leaves on the earth caught
Holker's attention. It was a red-leather pocketbook. He picked it
up and opened it. It contained leaves of white paper for memoranda,
and upon the first leaf was the name "Halpin Frayser." Written in
red on several succeeding leaves--scrawled as if in haste and barely
legible--were the following lines, which Holker read aloud, while his
companion continued scanning the dim gray confines of their narrow
world and hearing matter of apprehension in the drip of water from
every burdened branch:
"Enthralled by some mysterious spell, I stood
In the lit gloom of an enchanted wood.
The cypress there and myrtle twined their boughs,
Significant, in baleful brotherhood.
"The brooding willow whispered to the yew;
Beneath, the deadly nightshade and the rue,
With immortelles self-woven into strange
Funereal shapes, and horrid nettles grew.
"No song of bird nor any drone of bees,
Nor light leaf lifted by the wholesome breeze:
The air was stagnant all, and Silence was
A living thing that breathed among the trees.
"Conspiring spirits whispered in the gloom,
Half-heard, the stilly secrets of the tomb.
With blood the trees were all adrip; the leaves
Shone in the witch-light with a ruddy bloom.
"I cried aloud!--the spell, unbroken still,
Rested upon my spirit and my will.
Unsouled, unhearted, hopeless and forlorn,
I strove with monstrous presages of ill!
"At last the viewless--"
Holker ceased reading; there was no more to read. The manuscript
broke off in the middle of a line.
"That sounds like Bayne," said Jaralson, who was something of a
scholar in his way. He had abated his vigilance and stood looking
down at the body.
"Who's Bayne?" Holker asked rather incuriously.
"Myron Bayne, a chap who flourished in the early years of the nation-
-more than a century ago. Wrote mighty dismal stuff; I have his
collected works. That poem is not among them, but it must have been
omitted by mistake."
"It is cold," said Holker; "let us leave here; we must have up the
coroner from Napa."
Jaralson said nothing, but made a movement in compliance. Passing
the end of the slight elevation of earth upon which the dead man's
head and shoulders lay, his foot struck some hard substance under the
rotting forest leaves, and he took the trouble to kick it into view.
It was a fallen headboard, and painted on it were the hardly
decipherable words, "Catharine Larue."
"Larue, Larue!" exclaimed Holker, with sudden animation. "Why, that
is the real name of Branscom--not Pardee. And--bless my soul! how it
all comes to me--the murdered woman's name had been Frayser!"
"There is some rascally mystery here," said Detective Jaralson. "I
hate anything of that kind."
There came to them out of the fog--seemingly from a great distance--
the sound of a laugh, a low, deliberate, soulless laugh, which had no
more of joy than that of a hyena night-prowling in the desert; a
laugh that rose by slow gradation, louder and louder, clearer, more
distinct and terrible, until it seemed barely outside the narrow
circle of their vision; a laugh so unnatural, so unhuman, so
devilish, that it filled those hardy man-hunters with a sense of
dread unspeakable! They did not move their weapons nor think of
them; the menace of that horrible sound was not of the kind to be met
with arms. As it had grown out of silence, so now it died away; from
a culminating shout which had seemed almost in their ears, it drew
itself away into the distance, until its failing notes, joyless and
mechanical to the last, sank to silence at a measureless remove.
-THE END-
Ambrose Bierce's short story: The Death of Halpin Frayser
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
