We crossed the long wooded hill clattering like a troop of the queen's cavalry, and turned down toward the great level bow which the road makes before it crosses the Gauley. There was a dim light rising beyond the flat lands where the crooked elves toiled with their backs against the golden moon. But they were under the world yet, with only the yellow haze shining through the door. This was the acre of ghosts. Tale after tale I had heard, sitting on the knee of the old grey negro Clabe, about the horrors of this haunted "bend" in the Gauley. There, when I was a child, had lived old Bodkin in a stone house, now a ruin, by the river,--a crooked, mean old devil with a great hump, and eyes like a toad. He came to own the land through some suspicious will about which there clung the atmosphere of crime, as men said. When I saw him first, I was riding behind my brother, and he stopped us and tried to induce Ward to buy his land. He was mounted on a red roan horse, and looked like an old knotty spider.
I can still remember how frightened I was, and how I hid my face against my brother's coat and hugged him until my arms ached. When Ward inquired why he wished to sell, he laughed in a sort of cackle, and replied that he was going to marry a wife and go to the moon.
Now, tradition told that he had married many a wife, but that they died quickly in the poisoned chamber of this spider. Ward looked the bridegroom over from his twisted feet to his hump, and there must have been some merry shadow in his face, for Bodkin leaned over the horn of his saddle and stretched out his hand, a putty-coloured hand, with long, bony fingers. "Do you see that?" he croaked. "If I ever get that hand on a woman, she's mine."
Then I began to cry, and Ward wished the old man a happy voyage to the cloud island, and we rode on.
He did marry a wife, and one morning, but little afterwards, two of my brother's drivers found her hanging to the limb of a dead apple tree with a bridle rein knotted to her neck, and her bare feet touching the tops of the timothy grass. When they came to look for Bodkin, he had disappeared with his red roan horse. Ward explained that he had ridden through the gap of the mountains into the South, but I thought, with the negroes, that someone ought to have seen him if he had gone that way; besides, I had heard him say that he was going to the moon. Later, old Bart and Levi Dillworth, returning from some frolic, had seen Bodkin riding his horse in a terrible gallop, with the dead woman across the horn of his saddle, on his way to the moon.