“I was somewhat surprised at hearing no return to my salute; and as I drew nearer I noticed that his face was deadly pale. I ran up the steps. I caught hold of him. He had fainted. I laid him in the doorway. My first thought was that he had been shot by some one and was in a death faint. I tore his shirt open, discovering a small red mark under the nipple. Five minutes after he was a corpse. But where was he who fired the fatal shot? I had seen no one, and in vain I looked around the mill.
“Meanwhile the storm burst with appalling fury. One of the first flashes of lightning struck a monarch ash, whose decaying stump stands just over there, not thirty feet from the mill’s front. In some manner it struck the tree and ran down its bark, then cut through its base, or struck the bole at once; for the whole body of the ash fell with a resounding crash. I was knocked down and blinded for an instant by the electricity. It was the hardest rain that has drenched these mountains since 1840. All night long it continued, and I remained in the mill with my dead brother.
“It must have been past midnight when, in the pitchy darkness, I heard hoarse cries, hollow shouts, and groans, that seemed to proceed from without the mill, but which swept through the open rooms with chilling and horrible earnestness. The building shook in the wind and storm; the doors rattled on their hinges; the cataract’s roar increased with the swelling flood; but yet above all these deafening sounds, at intervals, rang this muffled voice. I must confess that I laid it to the supernatural.
“Morning and calm came together, and with the first streaks of light two of my farm-hands appeared. The storm had made a havoc before the mill. Lengthways, and down the center of the road the ash had fallen, the body of the tree lying close against the base of that great hollow oak you see still standing. We carried the body home. Who had killed him was the unanswered question on every one’s lips. Well, we buried the mysteriously murdered man in the old churchyard down the river, and the day after I went on business to Murphy. As fortune would have it I was just in time to be drafted into the Confederate army. I had only a day to spare to go to my house and return.
“The occurrences of that stormy night had unavoidably kept me away from the mill, and on my flying visit home before taking a long departure, I had no time to go to it. My wife told a strange story of ghostly cries, strange flames and apparitions which had been heard and seen at the mill for two nights by one of the farm-hands and a neighbor. Nothing could hire any of the men in the neighborhood to go near the place, even in the daytime. The description of the sounds coincided singularly with what I had heard. Having no time to investigate, and thinking these fears would wear away, I left orders for one of the hired men to run the mill during my absence.
“Four years passed, and I had returned from the war. What changes had taken place is not my intention to relate only to speak of the mill. The fears of the mountaineers had caused it to be abandoned. The one whom I had designed to work it had wholly disregarded my orders. By a train of petty circumstances connected with this man’s refusal to run the mill, together with the superstitious ideas of the people, all the mountaineers began to take their grain to the lower “corn-cracker.” This course was not adopted by all until several of the more venturesome ones had actual, unexplainable encounters with ghosts at my mill.
“A few days after my return I went up to look at the forsaken place. I found the underbrush rather heavy, fair-sized trees springing up, the old ash lying undisturbed where it had been struck down, and consequently the old road was lost. Everything within the mill, though, was in excellent condition. What struck me as curious was that the mill appeared never to have stopped running; for the stones were not mossed in the least, but on the contrary were still white with flour. The floor was also white, and a close observer would at once have declared that a supply of wheat had been ground there that week.
“ ‘Jist so,’ said an old neighbor who was with me. ‘In course these hyar stones never quit runnin’ at night, ez I tole yer; but hit ain’t no humin bein’s ez runs ’em. Many a night I’ve cum up the new road over yander, an’ stopped an’ shivered as I heered the ole wheel splashin’ round, seed lights an’ seed yer brother standin’ right hyar at this winder, I’ll swar! Why didn’t I sarch into the matter? Didn’t I though! But the hants all fled when I cum near, and nuthin’ but an owl hooted overhead; an’ one night I war knocked flat by some devil unseen, an’ next thing I knowed I woke up a mile from hyar. Ye don’t catch me foolin’ round sich things.’
“He went on to tell how the meal, which he had ground in the daytime, had made persons sick, and also helped to stop business. That night I determined to watch the ghostly millers in their midnight toils. A man named Bun volunteered to stay with me. Just after dark we came up here and ensconced ourselves in a close thicket near the fall, and about fifty feet from the mill. The hours passed by monotonously. It was late in the night, when suddenly, above the dull roar of the fall, I heard an owl’s hoot up the river road. This would not have attracted my attention, had not another hoot sounded at once from down the road, and then another came from just before the mill. Nothing further was heard to these calls, which I deemed were signals; but, a few moments after, a light flared up in the mill, and through the unboarded side we saw two figures in white garments.
“ ‘Let’s steal out of this,’ whispered Bun, in a trembling voice. ‘Didn’t I say it war ha’nted?’