Of course I had to go out there and see the fool business through. I loaded up with cigars and matches and carried a heavy walking-stick. The stick was for dogs and tramps. It would be useless against the sort of “people” I might be going to meet, I knew.
Oakland is a lovely cemetery. It is on a rolling. bluegrass hill running right up to the bluffs of the great river. There are many beautiful trees. I’ve known of men who died thousands of miles away and asked that they be buried in our cemetery because of its singular picturesqueness and solemnity.
It was a pretty, moonlight night, and I chose to walk rather than hire a car. I knew all about the place—in day time. You rarely see people who have business in a graveyard at night. The trees were grotesquely large and the thick foliage shut out the rays of the moon. It was intensely dark, but I had a flashlight and could follow the driveway. At times there would be queer rustlings among the grass and leaves. Occasionally there was the strange cry of a night bird, and the distant bay of a hound.
“Sacred to the memory of—”
I knew how all those headstones read, terminal marks for life’s journey. On the very old ones were indexes pointing upward, always upward. God grant “they” traveled that way.
“If there is a way—”
I shuddered. In a moment I would know. The vault was on a sort of cleared space, not far from the edge of the tall bluff, the foot of which was lashed by the tide.
“Hello!” I cried.
A woman was standing at the front of the vault, moving her arms dramatically. She wheeled on me, and I was startled by the unearthly beauty of her pallid face. Cold shivers ran down-my spine. I might as well set it down right here that I believed I had met a being from the other world—the time, the place, the dark dress, with the hood thrown back revealing a face of rare loveliness, but pale as death—what could it mean? But she broke the spell:
“Who are you?”
Her voice quivered with emotion. She had been weeping.
“A good friend of Dr. St. Clair’s,” I replied, and my voice showed the agitation I felt. "Did you know him?"
It was evident my presence had not scared her, and that was why I still regarded her with doubt.
“Yes. He saved me from hunger—then killed my soul!”
I cannot convey the intensity of the words. As she stood there, her hands clenched, with deep furrows in her forehead, I wondered whether she was human or something sent up by the fiend to curse the dead. Certainly none with a right heart could feel bitter toward a man like Dr. St. Clair.
“You are a friend of his—then listen,” she went on passionately. "He never wronged me in the usual way—not that. But he was always kind and gentle and good whenever he came about me; he would lay his hand on my shoulder and call me ‘his good little girl.’ I was a nurse, and he let me love him—love! Why, I would have died for him, and he knew it! He knew it as well as if I had told him. But I was no more to him than the boards he walked on!”
“Go on,” I said, sitting down on a bench near the vault.
“He died suddenly and I never got to tell him,” she said. “But I knew he had an odd fancy that the dead might come back over their graves and communicate with the living. His idea was they awakened after midnight. And I came all the way to
