That night in Chinatown for once a misunderstanding ended happily.
XXV
A Haunted House
When Billy Cloyd prospered in the lumber and milling business, he determined to erect a mansion overlooking the arrowy waters of the Sinnemahoning that would reflect not only his success, but the social status of his family as well. Accordingly Williamsport architects who made a specialty of erecting houses for the wealthy lumbermen of that community were commissioned to prepare plans for what was to be the grandest private dwelling on the outposts of civilization, a structure which would outdo the already famous club house built for the use of the stockholders of the Philadelphia Land Company at Snow Shoe, or the offices of the agents of the Queen of Spain at Reveltown and Scootac.
The result was a large, square house, along Colonial lines, with a spacious doorway, above which was a transom of antique colored glass brought all the way from the home of one of his ancestors at Old Carlisle. Windows were numerous, commanding views up and down the beautiful, billowy stream, then teeming with fish and aquatic bird life.
The surrounding mountains were covered with virgin pine forests, while the great hemlocks, oaks and birches hung over the water’s edge. There was a clearing in which the mansion stood, the chief feature of which was an old-fashioned garden of carefully laid design, with plenty of columbine, called by the mountain folks “church bells,” and eglantine, with boxwoods from the “Quaker City,” purchased from the heirs of “Eaglesfield.”
The dark forest came to the back of the garden, and stood black in the gorge of Mill Creek near the projected flouring and fulling mills, to the east of the mansion; the ever-busy saw-mill, the chief symbol of the prosperity of Castlecloyd, as the domain was called, was situated near the mouth of the creek. There was barely a distance of two hundred yards from the sloping banks of the Sinnemahoning to where the forest and the steep mountains began, consequently the mansion, mills, workshops, stables and mill hands’ and woodsmen’s houses were all close together.
Along the water’s edge carpenters were steadily at work building arks and flats which carried the products of the mills to the terminus of the railroad at Lock Haven, or to Sunbury or Harrisburg.
Now all is changed. The view from the portico and the lawn of Castlecloyd is upon a stream flowing with a liquid the color and texture of ink, frowning with fine yellow bubbles; not, a living fish has been seen, according to the present occupant of the premises, the venerable Seth Nelson, Jr., since 1899, when the paper mill at Austin sent down its first installment of vile pollution. Then the fish leaped on the shore in frightful agony, dying out of water, but away from the insidious poisoning of the acids.
The water birds are gone; they cannot drink the polluted water, and give the region a wide berth. Instead of cooling zephyrs, when the wind blows off the creek towards the house, there comes a stench worse than a week-old battlefield in Flanders.
No forests of virgin timber are to be seen, if you strain your eyes looking up or down stream, nothing but charred, brown wastes, the aftermath of killing forest fires which followed the lumbering operations. Here and there on some inaccessible cliff a lone original white pine or hemlock has its eyrie, but even there the fires are finding them, and they are all scorched and shaky at the butts, and go down easily in sharp gales. Altar Rock, famed in song and story, still has one pine standing on its top, but it is dead, and will soon share the fate of its mate, which was blown down over twenty years ago.