The mechanician got his breath, and his heart began to pump in steadier rhythm. A horse and buggy betokened the presence of humankind, and Rucker was not a coward of men. Moreover, the ball-peen machinist’s hammer, lying within easy reach, was no mean weapon of defense in the grasp of a man who knew how to swing it.
Obsessed by the idea that he might shortly have to resort to the hammer, the mechanician was wholly unprepared for what followed. Slowly, and as if they were materializing out of the shadows of the wood, two figures glided into the watcher’s field of vision: a man, tall, stately, wearing the long coat and the wide-brimmed soft hat which even an unobservant Rucker knew to be the garmentings of the old-fashioned Southern gentleman. And, hanging on the man’s arm, a woman, small and trimly clad.
They came only to the edge of the open glade. The woman’s hat left her face in shadow, so that even if the light had been better, Rucker could not have seen what she looked like. The man’s back was turned to him, and here, again, he was at fault. Nevertheless, he was presently able to postulate the man’s gestures as those of anger, and to understand that the woman was pleading with him. It was etched out wholly in pantomime; Rucker could hear nothing. Twice or thrice the man made an inclusive motion with his free hand as if indicating the glade as the subject of whatever he was saying; and finally he balled his hand into a fist and shook it wrathfully at the unoffending drill derrick.
This went on for some moments, the woman, Rucker fancied, trying to end it and draw the man away. Whether as the result of her efforts, or for some other reason, the scene ended as abruptly as it had begun. The two figures turned and faded into the wood shadows as mysteriously as they had come out of them; and while Rucker was still straining his eyes to keep them in sight, the horse and buggy vanished to a soft thudding of hoofs on the sandy road.
After this apparition had disappeared, the machinist filled his black cutty pipe, opened the door of the tool-house, and sat upon the step to smoke and ruminate and strive for a better collecting of things into their normal groupings. Later, he strolled out to the by-road to see if the hoof and wheel marks were really there; to satisfy himself beyond question that he had not been dreaming. The ocular demonstration convinced him that he was sane, sober, and awake. The hoof-prints were there, though they were by no means so gigantic as he had expected to find them; and so were the wheel ruts.
“I guess I needn’t be botherin’ my head about who they was,” he muttered to himself as he went back to his seat on the tool-house door-step. “Th’ bosses’ll know that, all right, all right. But if there’s goin’ to be a whole lot of this ghost business up here, it’s me for the downstairs, even if I do have to duck every time I see old man Layne comin’ up th’ road. These moonlight picture-shows get next to my gizzard-nerve. I ain’t no ghost-killer—not me.”
His pipe was smoked out and, knocking the ash from the bowl, he got up, having fresh designs upon the tool-house bed-room and the blanketed cot. But he was scarcely afoot before the sounds of wheels and hoofs came again, this time from the opposite direction.
“My gosh!” he complained, “are they comin’ back? Or is it a torchlight procession of ’em? No, by jing! it’s somebody else: that horse is a black one!”
More to be out of harm’s way than for any spying purpose, he slipped into the tool-house and softly closed and fastened the door. When he tiptoed to the window two other figures had entered the glade; two men, and both of them with burdens.
Their movements were even more mysterious than those of the earlier visitors. The shorter of the two carried a square box, handling it by a buckled strap which encircled it, and the other had a shoulder load which Rucker could liken only to a small bundle of poles. Both burdens were quickly put down; and at Rucker’s final glimpse, obtained just as the moon was passing behind a cloud, the shorter man had gone down on his knees beside the box, and was apparently opening it.