In 1830, only a few miles away from what is now the great city of
Cincinnati, lay an immense and almost unbroken forest. The whole region
was sparsely settled by people of the frontier--restless souls who no
sooner had hewn fairly habitable homes out of the wilderness and
attained to that degree of prosperity which to-day we should call
indigence than impelled by some mysterious impulse of their nature they
abandoned all and pushed farther westward, to encounter new perils and
privations in the effort to regain the meagre comforts which they had
voluntarily renounced. Many of them had already forsaken that region for
the remoter settlements, but among those remaining was one who had been
of those first arriving. He lived alone in a house of logs surrounded on
all sides by the great forest, of whose gloom and silence he seemed a
part, for no one had ever known him to smile nor speak a needless word.
His simple wants were supplied by the sale or barter of skins of wild
animals in the river town, for not a thing did he grow upon the land
which, if needful, he might have claimed by right of undisturbed
possession. There were evidences of "improvement"--a few acres of ground
immediately about the house had once been cleared of its trees, the
decayed stumps of which were half concealed by the new growth that had
been suffered to repair the ravage wrought by the ax. Apparently the
man's zeal for agriculture had burned with a failing flame, expiring in
penitential ashes.
The little log house, with its chimney of sticks, its roof of warping
clapboards weighted with traversing poles and its "chinking" of clay,
had a single door and, directly opposite, a window. The latter, however,
was boarded up--nobody could remember a time when it was not. And none
knew why it was so closed; certainly not because of the occupant's
dislike of light and air, for on those rare occasions when a hunter had
passed that lonely spot the recluse had commonly been seen sunning
himself on his doorstep if heaven had provided sunshine for his need. I
fancy there are few persons living to-day who ever knew the secret of
that window, but I am one, as you shall see.
The man's name was said to be Murlock. He was apparently seventy years
old, actually about fifty. Something besides years had had a hand in his
aging. His hair and long, full beard were white, his gray, lustreless
eyes sunken, his face singularly seamed with wrinkles which appeared to
belong to two intersecting systems. In figure he was tall and spare,
with a stoop of the shoulders--a burden bearer. I never saw him; these
particulars I learned from my grandfather, from whom also I got the
man's story when I was a lad. He had known him when living near by in
that early day.
One day Murlock was found in his cabin, dead. It was not a time and
place for coroners and newspapers, and I suppose it was agreed that he
had died from natural causes or I should have been told, and should
remember. I know only that with what was probably a sense of the fitness
of things the body was buried near the cabin, alongside the grave of his
wife, who had preceded him by so many years that local tradition had
retained hardly a hint of her existence. That closes the final chapter
of this true story--excepting, indeed, the circumstance that many years
afterward, in company with an equally intrepid spirit, I penetrated to
the place and ventured near enough to the ruined cabin to throw a stone
against it, and ran away to avoid the ghost which every well-informed
boy thereabout knew haunted the spot. But there is an earlier chapter--
that supplied by my grandfather.
When Murlock built his cabin and began laying sturdily about with his ax
to hew out a farm--the rifle, meanwhile, his means of support--he was
young, strong and full of hope. In that eastern country whence he came
he had married, as was the fashion, a young woman in all ways worthy of
his honest devotion, who shared the dangers and privations of his lot
with a willing spirit and light heart. There is no known record of her
name; of her charms of mind and person tradition is silent and the
doubter is at liberty to entertain his doubt; but God forbid that I
should share it! Of their affection and happiness there is abundant
assurance in every added day of the man's widowed life; for what but the
magnetism of a blessed memory could have chained that venturesome spirit
to a lot like that?
One day Murlock returned from gunning in a distant part of the forest to
find his wife prostrate with fever, and delirious. There was no
physician within miles, no neighbor; nor was she in a condition to be
left, to summon help. So he set about the task of nursing her back to
health, but at the end of the third day she fell into unconsciousness
and so passed away, apparently, with never a gleam of returning reason.
From what we know of a nature like his we may venture to sketch in some
of the details of the outline picture drawn by my grandfather. When
convinced that she was dead, Murlock had sense enough to remember that
the dead must be prepared for burial. In performance of this sacred duty
he blundered now and again, did certain things incorrectly, and others
which he did correctly were done over and over. His occasional failures
to accomplish some simple and ordinary act filled him with astonishment,
like that of a drunken man who wonders at the suspension of familiar
natural laws. He was surprised, too, that he did not weep--surprised and
a little ashamed; surely it is unkind not to weep for the dead.
"To-morrow," he said aloud, "I shall have to make the coffin and dig the
grave; and then I shall miss her, when she is no longer in sight; but
now--she is dead, of course, but it is all right--it _must_ be all
right, somehow. Things cannot be so bad as they seem."
He stood over the body in the fading light, adjusting the hair and
putting the finishing touches to the simple toilet, doing all
mechanically, with soulless care. And still through his consciousness
ran an undersense of conviction that all was right--that he should have
her again as before, and everything explained. He had had no experience
in grief; his capacity had not been enlarged by use. His heart could not
contain it all, nor his imagination rightly conceive it. He did not know
he was so hard struck; _that_ knowledge would come later, and never go.
Grief is an artist of powers as various as the instruments upon which he
plays his dirges for the dead, evoking from some the sharpest, shrillest
notes, from others the low, grave chords that throb recurrent like the
slow beating of a distant drum. Some natures it startles; some it
stupefies. To one it comes like the stroke of an arrow, stinging all the
sensibilities to a keener life; to another as the blow of a bludgeon,
which in crushing benumbs. We may conceive Murlock to have been that way
affected, for (and here we are upon surer ground than that of
conjecture) no sooner had he finished his pious work than, sinking into
a chair by the side of the table upon which the body lay, and noting how
white the profile showed in the deepening gloom, he laid his arms upon
the table's edge, and dropped his face into them, tearless yet and
unutterably weary. At that moment came in through the open window a
long, wailing sound like the cry of a lost child in the far deeps of the
darkening wood! But the man did not move. Again, and nearer than before,
sounded that unearthly cry upon his failing sense. Perhaps it was a wild
beast; perhaps it was a dream. For Murlock was asleep.
Some hours later, as it afterward appeared, this unfaithful watcher
awoke and lifting his head from his arms intently listened--he knew not
why. There in the black darkness by the side of the dead, recalling all
without a shock, he strained his eyes to see--he knew not what. His
senses were all alert, his breath was suspended, his blood had stilled
its tides as if to assist the silence. Who--what had waked him, and
where was it?
Suddenly the table shook beneath his arms, and at the same moment he
heard, or fancied that he heard, a light, soft step--another--sounds as
of bare feet upon the floor!
He was terrified beyond the power to cry out or move. Perforce he
waited--waited there in the darkness through seeming centuries of such
dread as one may know, yet live to tell. He tried vainly to speak the
dead woman's name, vainly to stretch forth his hand across the table to
learn if she were there. His throat was powerless, his arms and hands
were like lead. Then occurred something most frightful. Some heavy body
seemed hurled against the table with an impetus that pushed it against
his breast so sharply as nearly to overthrow him, and at the same
instant he heard and felt the fall of something upon the floor with so
violent a thump that the whole house was shaken by the impact. A
scuffling ensued, and a confusion of sounds impossible to describe.
Murlock had risen to his feet. Fear had by excess forfeited control of
his faculties. He flung his hands upon the table. Nothing was there!
There is a point at which terror may turn to madness; and madness
incites to action. With no definite intent, from no motive but the
wayward impulse of a madman, Murlock sprang to the wall, with a little
groping seized his loaded rifle, and without aim discharged it. By the
flash which lit up the room with a vivid illumination, he saw an
enormous panther dragging the dead woman toward the window, its teeth
fixed in her throat! Then there were darkness blacker than before, and
silence; and when he returned to consciousness the sun was high and the
wood vocal with songs of birds.
The body lay near the window, where the beast had left it when
frightened away by the flash and report of the rifle. The clothing was
deranged, the long hair in disorder, the limbs lay anyhow. From the
throat, dreadfully lacerated, had issued a pool of blood not yet
entirely coagulated. The ribbon with which he had bound the wrists was
broken; the hands were tightly clenched. Between the teeth was a
fragment of the animal's ear.