“But the grave cannot give up its dead!”
“The grave has never claimed me!” returned Doctor Ludington, and, seeing the governor too astonished to reply, he continued:
“As you seem to have heard of my tragic death, perhaps you know also of the strange tragedy of my funeral journey?”
“Yes, yes! It created a great sensation, and all the newspapers printed it. The hearse went over the precipice in the blinding snowstorm, and your casket was shattered into fragments. It was supposed that the corpse fell into the river,” exclaimed the governor.
Doctor Ludington smiled, and replied:
“The corpse did not go into the river, but instead bounded down the hill, into the back yard of an old ferryman, who, with his deaf-and-dumb sister, lived in a hut below the hill, close to the river. And it was no corpse, for I was alive, and had been in a strange trancelike state ever since my seeming death, in which I was conscious of everything transpiring, but unable to move or speak.
“I spare you the recital of the horrors I endured. Your time is too valuable to waste on the story, and the tale too harrowing for your ears. Suffice it that the mere fact of the casket lid being but loosely screwed down saved me from suffocation, and the accident to the hearse must have been God-sent, as it kept me from being buried alive. The shock of my fall restored my faculties, and the old ferryman presently found me in the snow and carried me into his wretched hut, little thinking I had fallen out of a hearse on my way to the grave. I took care that he should not find it out, either, for I decided it was best to remain dead to the world.”
“But, my dear Doctor Ludington, why should you do so?”
“Do you not remember that my antagonist, Terry Groves, died by my hand in an accidental discharge of the revolver I was trying to wrest from him? Well, if I had lived I should have been tried for his murder, and, being in the house of my enemy, to which I had been falsely lured, I should have had no witness in my favor, and the Groves clan, that hated me, would have hounded me to my death. Public sentiment would have been so dead against me I might have been mobbed and lynched.”
“Quite true. But then the young lady? Would she not have testified in your favor?”