"With all my heart," said Clifford; "I am glad we have such a mutual bond of sympathy."
Then he told how the gray-robed figure had startled the group at the camp-fire, and fled shrieking away, that memorable evening more than a year before; and although all of their family had maintained an apprehensive outlook for a second visit from his spookship, they never had been molested further; and he concluded by saying:—
"But I hope, Miss Estill, your experience will throw some light on the mystery."
"It is undoubtedly the same spectral being which has haunted our ranch for the past twenty-five years, and which has eluded pursuit on every occasion, although papa, Hugh, and several herders have endeavored, more or less bravely, to trace it; but the mysterious apparition always vanishes into the night without leaving a trace. Why, I have become so fearful that, like the daughter of the bold Glengyle,—
'Alone I dare not venture there,
Where walks, they say, the shrieking ghost,'—
and I often fly at the sight of my own shadow," said Miss Estill. "One evening, Mr. Warlow, I was riding by a peculiarly lonesome spot near home,—a lofty hill on which there is the grave of a mysterious relative, who died near a quarter of a century since, and of whose history I can learn but little. Although Hugh and I often question our parents about him, they seem to evade our inquiries. I had reached a point close to the grave,—which is all overgrown with thistles, notwithstanding the fact that I had repeatedly planted flowers and roses there that had always refused to grow,—when that same hideous, gray-robed creature emerged from the thicket about the grave, and as I halted, frozen with horror at the sight, the gaunt wretch glared a moment, then fled shrieking away in the darkling twilight. Oh, I never paused to investigate, you may believe, but gave rein to my pony, which was as badly frightened as myself, and flew home like the wind," said Miss Estill with a shiver.
"Have you ever been up to the corral, Miss Estill?" Clifford asked.
"Not for three years, Mr. Warlow. Now, while we are speaking of supernatural things, I must tell you how strangely I always felt at that place. I can never go about the old ruin without being assailed by an uncanny feeling—something like one might be expected to feel who walks over her own grave, you know!" she added with a smile; then continuing she said earnestly: "It always seems that something terrible haunts the very air there, and I feel a weight of grief and misery that horrifies me whenever I pass the spot. If I had lost my dearest friend there, I should have very much the same sensation, I believe, at sight of the ruin. I struggle with my memory to recall some event with which I seem to have been connected there; but it is all in vain, for it is as intangible as a moonbeam."
"That is very mysterious indeed, Miss Estill; for I often feel very much that way myself there, but not in so marked a degree as when I pass that great hill three miles up the valley, known as Antelope Butte. I am often overpowered by a feeling of deepest melancholy and grief while only passing that hill. The first time I saw the place I was shocked to think how familiar it all seemed; for I found the spring near its base just where my instinct seemed to tell me that the water bubbled forth from the rocky cleft. But a feeling of unutterable longing and an uncontrollable yearning to see some one, the name even of whom I can not recall, always seizes me there, and I am both perplexed and horrified at the sensation," Clifford replied.
Gradually the tone of their conversation lost its gloomy hue, and rambled away into the realms of art, history, and song, of the fair foreign lands beyond that blue, quivering horizon; and as Miss Estill fluttered her fan of carved ivory and rose-plumes, talking in her sweet vivacious way, the sunlight threw a halo about the golden hair and Grecian face of the youth reclining on the bank, suffusing with rose the handsome features that even a western sun in all its fierceness could not rob of its fresh glow.