“They say I possess a seventh sense, namely, second sight, and I know I shall never forget that night’s experience.
“But listen—the story is not ended yet. Next morning a telegram arrived from my brother in Kent, ‘Are you all right?’ I wondered much, and wired back that I was very well.
“The following day a letter came from my brother giving me a curious explanation.
“The following afternoon of the day I saw the coach, my brother was looking out of the old manor house windows in Kent, when he and several others noticed a large bird, having most peculiar plumage, seated on the garden wall. No one had ever seen a bird of the kind before. He was rushing off for a gun to shoot it, when our father, who looked very white and scared, stopped him. ‘Do not shoot,’ he said, ‘it would be of no use. That is the bird of ill omen to all our race, it only appears before a death. I have only once seen it before—that week your dear mother died.’
“My brother was so alarmed at this that he sent the wire I have mentioned to me at St Andrews. By the next mail from Australia we learned that our eldest brother had died there the very day I saw the coach at St Andrews and my brother saw the bird at our old home in Kent. Very odd, is it not; but what do you know about that coach?”
“Only tales,” I said. “Many people swear they have heard it, or seen it, on stormy nights. I know a girl who swears to it, and also a doctor who passed it on the road, and it nearly frightened his horse to death and him too.
“The tale of the two tramps is funny. They were trudging into St Andrews one wild stormy night when this uncanny coach overtook them. It stopped; the door opened, and a white hand beckoned towards them. One tramp rushed up and got in, then suddenly the door noiselessly shut and the coach moved off, leaving the other tramp alone in the pitiless wind and rain. ‘I never saw my old mate again,’ said the tramp, when he told the tale, ‘and I never shall—that there old coach was nothing of this here world of ours, it took my old mate off to Davy Jones’s locker mighty smart, poor fellow.’
“They say his body was found in the sea some months afterwards, and the tale goes that the phantom coach finishes its nocturnal journey in the waves of St Andrews Bay.”
“Whose coach is it?” asked all that were in the room.
“I cannot say; some say Bethune, others Sharpe, and others Hackston; I do not know who is supposed to be the figure inside, unless it is his Satanic Majesty himself. At all events, it seems a certain fact that a phantom coach has been seen from time to time on the roads round St Andrews. I have never seen any of these things myself.”