I was a stenographer and bookkeeper in a large city firm, and was overworked in body and brain. Sleep and appetite had both forsaken me, and I was sinking into a state of semi-invalidism, with little strength and less ambition. Rest I must have and a change of air, and when I saw an advertisement saying that Mrs. Eli Parks, who lived near the sea-coast and two miles from town, wanted summer boarders, and that her rooms were large and cool and quiet, and her house a hundred years old, I said: “That is the place for me; the fashionable world has not invaded Mrs. Parks. I can rest there. I will write her at once.”
I did write her, with the result that on a day in early July I was standing by my trunk and asking the station master if there was no means of conveyance for strangers who visited Oakfield?
“Why, yes,” he said; “of course there is. We ain’t so far behind as that. There’s a ’bus from town, here mostly for the trains. I don’t know why ’tain’t here now, only there don’t many come at this hour, or if they are comin’ they telegraph. Want to go to Miss Parks’? Well, you are in luck. That young chap there lives next to her. He’ll take you in his rig and I’ll send your traps bimeby. Hallo, you Sam! Come here!”
At the agent’s call a young man, or boy, reined up suddenly, and I was soon driving with him along the pleasant country road toward Mrs. Parks’. The agent had introduced him as Sam Walker, and I found him inclined to be very sociable and ready to give me many items of interest concerning the neighborhood and its people.
“See that big stone house on the hill?” he asked, pointing to a large, gray-looking building in the distance with tall pillars in front and a square tower on the corner. “Well, that’s the McPherson place—the richest man in town—or his half-brother was, and Mr. Colin has it in trust for a young man—Reginald Travers—who is visiting there now; some relation to old Sandy, I believe, and a big swell. He has money of his own, they say; and he’ll get a pile more bimeby. That’s the luck of some folks.”
He was not very lucid in his remarks, but by questioning him I managed to learn that the house, of which he seemed very proud, had been the property of Sandy McPherson, a Scotchman and eccentric old man, who had lived to be ninety and had died a few months before, leaving quite a fortune to his half-brother, Colin, thirty years his junior. Colin was also to have the use of the house as long as he lived, and at his death it was to belong to the “swell young man,” provided he married somebody, Sam did not know whom. Some girl, he s’posed. Men mostly did marry girls and anybody would be a fool to give up the McPherson house and the money which went with it. “It was an awful funny will old Sandy made, and had something to do with a love affair when he was young. Seemed queer that he could ever have been in love, he looked so old and his hair was so white, and his head kept shaking, and hands, too. Awful nice man, though, and had the biggest funeral you ever seen,” Sam said.
I was not particularly interested in Sandy McPherson’s funeral, and was silent until Sam asked suddenly, “Do you believe in tricks?” as he came in sight of a pine-grove in the distance.
I said I didn’t know what he meant by “tricks,” as I had never heard of one, and in a way he explained what he meant.
“Lots of young people are always trying ’em at the well in the middle of the woods. There’s a queer love-story, and a true one—old Sandy’s love-story—connected with it. Want to hear it?”
I was forty, and presumably past the age of romance, but I did want to hear the story, which I afterward heard two or three times, and which I give in my own words rather than in those of Sam, who rambled a good deal and threw in various opinions of his own concerning the parties interested.