But, whether or not his eyes had, after all, played him a trick, he was now ready to go to bed.
He drew down the shade of the window to his left and had grasped the cord of the one directly before him, when his arm fell to his side as if paralyzed. With a loud whirr the suddenly released shade rushed upward, and there, not thirty yards in front of and below him, he beheld the shocking spectre gliding up-hill.
He stood in rigid horror, held by the grim monstrosity.
Inclining slightly forward as it soared past, with bony arm upstretched to heaven, its bleached death's head bare and shining, the snowy drapery enshrouding its skeleton form in a silent flutter, it presented to Joyce's view the most horribly revolting and yet fascinating spectacle he had ever beheld, and one that he never forgot. In the face of this further proof all his doubts vanished, and he felt absolutely certain that he had seen what is here described.
But, even before the frightful object had finally passed from his view, he experienced one of those sudden revulsions of feeling by which fear becomes courage, and anxiety is followed by mental calm, and thus reconciled to a new belief, he went to bed.
When he awoke on the following morning, he decided to say nothing to any one of his strange experience until he had taken counsel with an intimate bachelor friend, a lawyer. He felt relieved, therefore, to find the breakfast chat confined to topics entirely foreign to the spirit world. Evidently none of the family had been disturbed by ghostly visions. As he looked across the table into the eyes of a bewitching girl, he almost shuddered at the fleeting thought that the gruesome nocturnal sight he had seen might have been a warning—an omen of some dread calamity that might dash forever the hope he entertained with regard to her. It was to see her again—to be at her side and, if possible, to woo her for his own—that he was in San Francisco.
Two years previous they had first met, on the opposite coast of the continent. While ranging in the Maine woods, Joyce had climbed Mount Royce and Speckle Mountain and visited the tourmaline mines, and on one of his woodland tramps had come across a college student with one foot inextricably caught in a bear trap. Fortunately, a legging buckle and a stout branch of undergrowth, caught at the same time, had prevented the terrible teeth of the trap from crushing the bone, and the young fellow, a brother of Joyce's future idol, was promptly released, nearly exhausted from the shock of his adventure and the fatigue of his fruitless struggles to escape.
The gratitude of the rescued youth and his parents resulted in an invitation to Joyce to visit the family, which he accepted with much alacrity, after having seen the pretty daughter of the house.
Ten o'clock found Malcolm Joyce at the office of his friend, the lawyer. He had expected Lucien Nelson to be sceptical and full of good-natured pleasantry and was therefore prepared for the reception accorded his unusual tale. He paid no attention to his friend's intimation that he had seen the ghost while under spiritual influence, rejected a proposition for a writ of ejectment to be served upon it, and finally aroused Nelson's interest and secured the promise of his co-operation in an armed attempt, to be made that night, to investigate the ghastly mystery.
Accordingly, twelve hours later, the two young men, each with a revolver, were snugly ensconced in a dark corner of the bay window of Joyce's chamber on Nob Hill. For two hours Malcolm was obliged to endure all the thinly veiled ridicule, biting sarcasm and ironical humor that a friend alone dare utter, so that when he at length turned up the light for a moment to make sure of the time, he was glad to find that a few moments more would bring the hour of midnight—the traditional time for ghostly visitations.