What he wanted was very plain, for sometimes the night wind wafted the mournful words down Marshall’s bedroom chimney (for he always kept his windows nailed shut): “Where shall I put it; oh, where shall I put it?”
The ghost began his hauntings in the spring, kept it up all summer, fall, winter, then another spring and summer. He had affixed himself to the family, Marshall thought, as he racked his brain to lay the troublesome night prowler.
It was during the fall of the second year that a big party of moonlight ’coon hunters went up the lane which led between the Marshall and Mintges farms, headed for the rocky heights of Jack’s Mountain. In the party was Otto Gleim, the half-witted drunkard of Selin’s Grove, little, dumpy, long-armed High German, high-shouldered Otto Gleim, who was left at the foot of the mountain to hold one of the lanterns.
Gleim was half full on this occasion, as it was in the cider season, and he staggered about under the aged chestnut trees, while his wits revolved in his head with the speed of an electric fan. He felt lonesome, sick and uncomfortable. It was a relief to see a great, tall figure, with a long, black beard, approaching him, holding aloft a huge stone. It looked like “Uncle Jake” Marshall at first; no, it wasn’t–it was no one else but the late “Uncle Jake” Mintges, his neighbor.
As the gaunt figure drew nearer, it began groaning and wailing: “Where shall I put it; oh, where shall I put it?” in tones as melancholy[melancholy] as those of the Great Horned Owl on a New Year’s Eve.
“Put it where it belongs,” spluttered Otto Gleim, the drunkard, with a gleam of super-human prescience, and lo and behold, the ghost set the stone where it had been for twenty years after the surveyors had placed it there. Then the apparition vanished, and Gleim, in a matter-of-fact way, sat down on the cornerstone, where he waited until the ’coon hunters returned.
Jake Mintges’ ghost ceased to wander and lament, but instead allied itself closely with Jake Marshall’s family as private stock banshee, warning, token or familiar. Whenever a disaster was due to any member he would show his grinning tusks, as much as to say: “Now, make the best of what is coming; life is short anyway.”
No doubt his visits of forewarning strengthened the nerves of the family to face trouble with a greater degree of equanimity; in all events the poor old fellow meant it that way. Old and young, rich and poor, in cities or in the wilds, wherever the blood of Jacob Marshall flowed, the ghost of Mintges was in evidence at the climacteric moments of their lives. They were all used to him, and never resented his visits or tried in any way to lay him.
The scene shifts to one of the last to encounter this strange old ghost. It is in a great city, in a high-ceilinged, yet gloomy room, furnished in the plush and mahogany of the middle eighties of the last century. A very dark girl, with full pouting lips and black eyes, half closed and sullen, yet beautiful in the first flush of youth withal, is seated on one of the upholstered easy chairs. Standing in the bay window facing her is a very tall man, equally dark, his drooping black mustache and long Prince Albert coat making him appear at least ten years older than the twenty-eight which was his correct age.
