Yet, to avoid meeting
him again, she took a longer route home, across the dried ditch and over
the bluff, scarred by hydraulics, and so fell, presently, upon the old
garden at the point where it adjoined the abandoned diggings. She was
quite sure she had escaped a meeting with Starbuck, and was gliding
along under the shadow of the pear-trees, when she suddenly stopped. An
indescribable terror overcame her as she stared at a spot in the garden,
perfectly illuminated by the moonlight not fifty yards from where she
stood. For she saw on its surface a human head--a man's head!--seemingly
on the level of the ground, staring in her direction. A hysterical laugh
sprang from her lips, and she caught at the branches above her or
she would have fallen! Yet in that moment the head had vanished! The
moonlight revealed the empty garden,--the ground she had gazed at,--but
nothing more!
She had never been superstitious. As a child she had heard the negroes
talk of "the hants,"--that is, "the HAUNTS" or spirits,--but had
believed it a part of their ignorance, and unworthy a white child,--the
daughter of their master! She had laughed with Dick Ruggles over the
illusions of Larry, and had shared her father's contemptuous disbelief
of the wandering visitant being anything but a living man; yet she would
have screamed for assistance now, only for the greater fear of making
her weakness known to Mr.
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