"Only, there was no wind."
"Perhaps a snag tossing in the motion of the water,—at all events, you can't say there was no water." Dr. Rigdon glanced at Gordon with a genial smile.
"Mighty little water for the Mississippi," Gordon sought to respond in the same key.
"You know the record of these apparitions." Leaning forward, one arm on his knee, the document in question in his hand, Rigdon looked up into Geraldine's pale face. "In the old days there used to be a sort of water-gypsy, with a queer little trading-boat that plied the region of the bends-a queer little old man, too—Polish, I think, foreign certainly—and the butt of all the wags alongshore, at the stores and the wood-yards, the cotton-sheds and the wharf-boats. By some accident, it was thought, the boat got away when he was befuddled with drink in a wood-chopper's cabin—a stout, trig little craft it was! When he found it was gone, he was wild, for although he saw it afloat at a considerable distance down the Mississippi, it suddenly disappeared near Bogue Holauba, cargo and all. No trace of its fate was ever discovered. He haunted these banks then—whatever he may have done since—screaming out his woes for his losses, and his rage and curses on the miscreants who had set the craft adrift—for he fully believed it was done in malice—beating his breast and tearing his hair. The Civil War came on presently, and the man was lost sight of in the national commotions. No one thought of him again till suddenly something—an apparition, an illusion, the semblance of a man—began to patrol the banks of Bogue Holauba, and beat its breast and tear its hair and bewail its woes in pantomime, and set the whole country-side aghast, for always disasters follow its return."
"And how do you account for that phase?" asked Gordon, obviously steadying his voice by an effort of the will.
"The apparition always shows up at low water,—the disasters are usually typhoid," replied the physician.
"Mr. Keene died from malaria," Geraldine murmured musingly.
The two men glanced significantly at each other. Then Rigdon resumed: "I mustered the hardihood on one occasion to row up to the bank of Bogue Holauba for a closer survey. The thing vanished on my approach. There was a snag hard by, fast anchored in the bottom of the Bogue. It played slackly to and fro with the current, but I could not see any way by which it or its shadow could have produced the illusion."
"Is this what you had to tell me?" demanded Geraldine pertinently. "I knew all that already."
"No, no," replied the Doctor reluctantly. "Will you tell it, Mr. Gordon, or shall I?"