The Fourth Ghost Story MEGAPACK ®. Sarah Orne Jewett

up, “if you expect to get back before dark, I will not detain you longer.”

      He was right—time had gone faster than I had noticed. I turned toward the pass through which I had come. Then we both jumped with fright.

      A deep growl came rolling up among the rocks!

      Mr. Adams was the first to recover himself. “Grizzly!” he said, smiling. “Funny how strong habit is. Of course, he can’t do a thing to me, yet for a moment I was as frightened as if I was alive.”

      “How about me?” I asked, still trembling.

      Mr. Adams became serious at once.

      “I think I can manage it,” he said. “The bear smells you, but he can see me, and if you will step behind that rock, I may be able to decoy him off. He will think it is me he smells. So I will say good-bye, for I may have to leave hastily.”

      I dropped obediently behind the rock, but peered over the top to watch developments. If Mr. Adams failed I preferred jumping off the cliff to being eaten gradually by a hungry bear.

      The shaggy head and shoulders of a huge grizzly appeared round the corner. I knew he was a grizzly from a rug which we once owned. Mr. Adams approached him fearlessly, and the bear opened his mouth to receive him. I shuddered with horror.

      But when within only a few feet of the bear, Mr. Adams jumped lightly over his head and landed somewhere behind him. The effect on the grizzly was astonished disappointment. He turned quickly round and dashed after Mr. Adams, who was disappearing round the corner.

      After a few minutes had elapsed, I rose from my hiding-place and followed them.

      There was no sign of them in the narrow defile, and I did not see them again until I reached the main ravine. There I caught sight of them far up the mountain: Mr. Adams sailing serenely over the rough ground, the bear panting in hot pursuit a few feet behind.

      Mr. Adams turned and waved me a polite farewell, which I returned. Then I walked quietly to Organ, chartered a mule-team, and three days later arrived back in Boston.

      * * * *

      The first thing I then did was to visit a famous brain and nerve specialist. If science had any explanation for my experience, I wanted to hear it before I began boasting about my acquaintance with real ghosts.

      “My dear sir,” said the specialist after I had told him everything, “your case, though interesting, is not at all unusual. It has nothing to do with mental telepathy or telegy which are the only so-called supernatural effects recognized by science. You are no doubt familiar with the phenomenon of walking in the sleep, the walker being awake to all appearances and with eyes wide open. You, sir, have the opposite malady of dreaming while you are actually awake. I prescribe complete rest and a change of climate.”

      “But, doctor,” I expostulated, “if it was all a dream, why did the bear follow Mr. Adams out of the canyon?”

      “Do not think,” answered the wise doctor, “that because the bear ran out of the canyon that he was necessarily following anyone. Unless cornered or wounded, they are timid animals, and your sudden appearance in a prospector’s outfit would ordinarily be enough to protect you. And then it is possible that this was also part of your dream and there wasn’t any bear.”

      This was all I could get out of him.

      Of course he is right, and there are no ghosts. But he’ll never get me to believe it, just the same!

MY OWN TRUE GHOST STORY, by Rudyard Kipling

      As I came through the Desert thus it was—

      As I came through the Desert.

      The City of Dreadful Night.

      Somewhere in the Other World, where there are books and pictures and plays and shop windows to look at, and thousands of men who spend their lives in building up all four, lives a gentleman who writes real stories about the real insides of people; and his name is Mr. Walter Besant. But he will insist upon treating his ghosts—he has published half a workshopful of them—with levity. He makes his ghost-seers talk familiarly, and, in some cases, flirt outrageously, with the phantoms. You may treat anything, from a Viceroy to a Vernacular Paper, with levity; but you must behave reverently toward a ghost, and particularly an Indian one.

      There are, in this land, ghosts who take the form of fat, cold, pobby corpses, and hide in trees near the roadside till a traveler passes. Then they drop upon his neck and remain. There are also terrible ghosts of women who have died in child-bed. These wander along the pathways at dusk, or hide in the crops near a village, and call seductively. But to answer their call is death in this world and the next. Their feet are turned backward that all sober men may recognize them. There are ghosts of little children who have been thrown into wells. These haunt well curbs and the fringes of jungles, and wail under the stars, or catch women by the wrist and beg to be taken up and carried. These and the corpse ghosts, however, are only vernacular articles and do not attack Sahibs. No native ghost has yet been authentically reported to have frightened an Englishman; but many English ghosts have scared the life out of both white and black.

      Nearly every other Station owns a ghost. There are said to be two at Simla, not counting the woman who blows the bellows at Syree dâk-bungalow on the Old Road; Mussoorie has a house haunted of a very lively Thing; a White Lady is supposed to do night-watchman round a house in Lahore; Dalhousie says that one of her houses “repeats” on autumn evenings all the incidents of a horrible horse-and-precipice accident; Murree has a merry ghost, and, now that she has been swept by cholera, will have room for a sorrowful one; there are Officers’ Quarters in Mian Mir whose doors open without reason, and whose furniture is guaranteed to creak, not with the heat of June but with the weight of Invisibles who come to lounge in the chairs; Peshawur possesses houses that none will willingly rent; and there is something—not fever—wrong with a big bungalow in Allahabad. The older Provinces simply bristle with haunted houses, and march phantom armies along their main thoroughfares.