While I was thus reflecting, he rode quietly by my side.  Half turning in the saddle, I looked steadily at his face, and said, in an earnest voice,—­

“Eber Nicholson, who was it to whom you were married in the sight of God?”

He started as if struck, looked at me imploringly, turned away his eyes, then looked back, became very pale, and finally said, in a broken, hesitating voice, as if the words were forced from him against his will,—­

“Her name is Rachel Emmons.”

“Why did you murder her?” I asked, in a still sterner tone.

In an instant his face burned scarlet.  He reined up his horse with a violent pull, straightened his shoulders so that he appeared six inches taller, looked steadily at me with a strange, mixed expression of anger and astonishment, and cried out,—­

“Murder her? Why, she’s livin’ now!”

My surprise at the answer was scarcely less great than his at the question.

“You don’t mean to say she’s not dead?” I asked.

“Why, no!” said he, recovering from his sudden excitement, “she’s not dead, or she wouldn’t keep on troublin’ me.  She’s been livin’ in Toledo, these ten year.”

“I beg your pardon, my friend,” said I; “but I don’t know what to think of what I heard last night, and I suppose I have the old notion in my head that all ghosts are of persons who have been murdered.”

“Oh, if I had killed her,” he groaned, “I’d ‘a’ been hung long ago, an’ there ’d ‘a’ been an end of it.”

“Tell me the whole story,” said I.  “It’s hardly likely that I can help you, but I can understand how you must be troubled, and I’m sure I pity you from my heart.”

I think he felt relieved at my proposal,—­glad, perhaps, after long silence, to confide to another man the secret of his lonely, wretched life.

“After what you’ve heerd,” said he, “there’s nothin’ that I don’t care to tell.  I’ve been sinful, no doubt,—­but, God knows, there never was a man worse punished.

“I told you,” he continued, after a pause, “that I come from the Western Reserve.  My father was a middlin’ well-to-do farmer,—­not rich, nor yit exactly poor.  He’s dead now.  He was always a savin’ man,—­looked after money a leetle too sharp, I’ve often thought sence:  howsever, ’t isn’t my place to judge him.  Well, I was brought up on the farm, to hard work, like the other boys.  Rachel Emmons,—­she’s the same woman that haunts me, you understand,—­she was the girl o’ one of our neighbors, an’ poor enough he was.  His wife was always sickly-like,—­an’ you know it takes a woman as well as a man to git rich farmin’.  So they were always scrimped, but that didn’t hinder Rachel from bein’ one o’ the likeliest gals round.  We went to the same school in the winter, he an’ me, (’t isn’t much schoolin’ I ever got, though,) an’ I had a sort o’ nateral hankerin’ after her, as fur back as I can remember.  She was different lookin’ then from, what she is now,—­an’ me, too, for that matter.