THE PHANTOM COACH: Collected Ghost Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

away; but was simply gone, as if he had never been. Pale as death, Battisto fell upon his knees, and covered his face with his hands. My brother, awe-stricken and speechless, leaned against the rock, and felt that the object of his journey was but too fatally accomplished. As for the guides, they could not conceive what had happened.
    ‘Did you see nothing?’ asked my brother and Battisto, both together.
    But the men had seen nothing, and the one who had remained below, said: ‘What should I see, but the ice and the sunlight?’
    To this my brother made no other reply than by announcing his intention to have a certain crevasse, from which he had not once removed his eyes since he saw the figure standing on the brink, thoroughly explored before he went a step farther; whereupon the two men came down from the top of the crag, resumed the ropes, and followed him, incredulously. At the narrow end of the fissure, he paused, and drove his Alpenstock firmly into the ice. It was an unusually long crevasse—at first a mere crack, but widening gradually as it went, and reaching down to unknown depths of dark deep blue, fringed with long pendent icicles, like diamond stalactites. Before they had followed the course of this crevasse for more than ten minutes, the youngest of the guides uttered a hasty exclamation.
    ‘I see something!’ cried he. ‘Something dark, wedged in the teeth of the crevasse, a great way down!’
    They all saw it—a mere indistinguishable mass, almost closed over by the ice-walls at their feet. My brother offered a hundred francs to the man who would go down and bring it up. They all hesitated.
    ‘We don’t know what it is,’ said one.
    ‘Perhaps it is only a dead chamois,’ suggested another.
    Their apathy enraged him.
    ‘It is no chamois,’ he said, angrily. ‘It is the body of Christien Baumann, native of Kandersteg. And, by Heaven, if you are all too cowardly to make the attempt, I will go down myself!’
    The youngest guide threw off his hat and coat, tied a rope about his waist, and took a hatchet in his hand. ‘I will go, monsieur,’ said he; and without another word, suffered himself to be lowered in.
    My brother turned away. A sickening anxiety came upon him, and presently he heard the dull echo of the hatchet far down in the ice. Then there was a call for another rope, and then—the men all drew aside in silence, and my brother saw the youngest guide standing once more beside the chasm, flushed and trembling, with the body of Christien lying at his feet.
    Poor Christien! They made a rough bier with their ropes and Alpenstocks, and carried him, with great difficulty, back to Steinberg. There, they got additional help as far as Stechelberg, where they laid him in the char, and so brought him on to Lauterbrunnen. The next day, my brother made it his sad business to precede the body to Kandersteg, and prepare his friends for its arrival. To this day, though all these things happened thirty years ago, he cannot bear to recall Marie’s despair, or all the mourning that he innocently brought upon that peaceful valley. Poor Marie has been dead this many a year; and when my brother last passed through the Kander Thal on his way to the Gemmi, he saw her grave, beside the grave of Christien Baumann, in the village burial-ground.
    This is my brother’s Ghost Story.

 
     
     
     
    The Eleventh of March
     
     
    ( From a Pocket-book of Forty Years ago .)
     
    FORTY YEARS AGO!
    An old pocket-book lies before me, bound in scarlet morocco, and fastened with a sliver clasp. The leather is mildewed; the silver tarnished; the paper yellow; the ink faded. It has been hidden away at the back of an antique oaken bureau since the last day of the year during which I had it in use; and that was forty years ago. Aye, here is a page turned down—turned down at Wednesday, March the eleventh, eighteen hundred and twenty-six. The entry against that date is brief and obscure enough.
    ‘Wednesday, March 11 th —