Though poor in purse, Frayser was no less proud
in spirit than he had been in the years that seemed
ages and ages ago. He would accept no assistance
from strangers, and it was while living with a fellow
survivor near the town of St. Helena, awaiting news
and remittances from home, that he had gone gun-
ning and dreaming.
3
The apparition confronting the dreamer in the
haunted wood--the thing so like, yet so unlike, his
mother--was horrible! It stirred no love nor long-
ings in his heart; it came unattended with pleasant
memories of a golden past--inspired no sentiment
of any kind; all the finer emotions were swallowed
up in fear. He tried to turn and run from before it,
but his legs were as lead; he was unable to lift his
feet from the ground. His arms hung helpless at his
sides; of his eyes only he retained control, and these
he dared not remove from the lustreless orbs of the
apparition, which he knew was not a soul without
a body, but that most dreadful of all existences in-
festing that haunted wood--a body without a soul!
In its blank stare was neither love, nor pity, nor
intelligence--nothing to which to address an ap-
peal for mercy. 'An appeal will not lie,' he thought,
with an absurd reversion to professional slang, mak-
ing the situation more horrible, as the fire of a cigar
might light up a tomb.
For a time, which seemed so long that the world
grew grey with age and sin, and the haunted forest,
having fulfilled its purpose in this monstrous cul-
mination of its terrors, vanished out of his conscious-
ness with all its sights and sounds, the apparition
stood within a pace, regarding him with the mind-
less malevolence of a wild brute; then thrust its
hands forward and sprang upon him with appalling
ferocity! The act released his physical energies with-
out unfettering his will; his mind was still spell-
bound, but his powerful body and agile limbs,
endowed with a blind, insensate life of their own, re-
sisted stoutly and well.
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