"In sheer determination to fight it through I got off my horse and picked up my stirrup. He was trembling like a leaf. I remounted and rode back to the spot and looked again, confident that the spectres would now have disappeared. But there they were, old Joel, sitting in his cart, bowing to me civilly with timid, sad, friendly eyes, as much alive as I was, and the dead man, with his limp head and arms, hanging in mid-air and turning in the wind.
"I rode up under the dangling body and cut at it with my switch. At the motion my horse bolted. He ran fully a mile before I could pull him in.
"The next morning I went to my stable to get my horse to ride to the polls. The man at the stable said:
"'He ain't fit to take out, sir. You must 'a gin him a mighty hard ride last night—he won't tetch a moufful; he's been in a cold sweat all night.'
"Sure enough, he looked it.
"I took another horse and rode out by Halloway's to see the place by daylight. It was quiet enough now.
"The sycamore shaded the grass-grown road, and a branch, twisted and broken by some storm, hung by a strip of bark from the big bough that stretched across the road above my head, swaying, with limp leaves, a little in the wind; a dense dogwood bush in full bloom among the young pines, filled a fence-corner down the disused road where old Joel had bowed to me from his phantom cart the night before. But it was hard to believe that these were the things which had created such impressions on my mind—as hard to believe as that the quiet cottage peering out from amid the mass of peach-bloom was one hour the home of such happiness, and the next the scene of such a tragedy.
"Yes, I have seen apparitions," he said, thoughtfully, "but I have seen what was worse."
Dressed in his Sunday clothes, with a clean white shirt on, seated on his pine coffin, was old Joel.—[Page 185].