“Better not?” I repeated, staring.

He answered with a portentous head-shake.

“Oh, nonsense, Cookie!” I said impatiently, “There’s not a thing on the island but the pigs!”

“Miss Jinny,” he solemnly replied, “dey’s pigs and pigs.”

“Yes, but pigs is pigs, you know,” I answered, laughing.  I was about to walk on, but once more Cookie intervened.

“Dey’s pigs and pigs, chile—­live ones and—­dead ones.

“Dead ones?  Of course—­haven’t we been eating them?”

“Yo’ won’t neveh eat dis yere kind o’ dead pig, Miss Jinny.  It’s—­it’s a ha’nt!”

The murder was out.  Cookie leaned against a cocoa-palm and wiped his ebon brow.

Persistently questioned, he told at last how, today and yesterday, arising in the dim dawn to build his fire before the camp was stirring, he had seen lurking at the edge of the clearing a white four-footed shape.  It was a pig, yet not a pig; its ghostly hue, its noiseless movements, divided it from all proper mundane porkers by the dreadful gulf which divides the living from the dead.  The first morning Cookie, doubtful of his senses, had flung a stone and the spectral Thing had vanished like a shadow.  On its second appearance, having had a day and a night for meditation, he had known better than to commit such an outrage upon the possessor of ghostly powers, and had resorted to prayer instead.  This had answered quite as well, for the phantom pig had dissolved like the morning mists.  While the sun blazed, what with his devotions and his rabbit’s foot and a cross of twigs nailed to a tree.  Cookie felt a fair degree of security.  But his teeth chattered in his head at the thought of approaching night.  Meanwhile he could not in conscience permit me to venture forth into the path of this horror, which might, for all we knew, be lurking in the jungle shadows even through the daylight hours.  Also, though he did not avow this motive, I believe he found my company very reassuring.  It is immensely easier to face a ghost in the sustaining presence of other flesh and blood.

“Cookie,” said I sternly, “you’ve been drinking too much cocoanut-milk and it has gone to your head.  What you saw was just a plain ordinary pig.”

Cookie disputed this, citing the pale hue of the apparition as against the fact that all our island pigs were black.

“Then there happens to be a blond pig among them that we haven’t seen,” I assured him.

But the pig of flesh, Cookie reminded me, was a heavy lumbering creature.  This Shape was silent as a moonbeam.  There was also about it a dreadful appearance of stealth and secrecy—­Cookie’s eyes bulged at the recollection.  Nothing living but a witch’s cat could have disappeared from Cookie’s vision as did the ghostly pig.

For a moment I wavered in my determination.  What if the island had its wild creatures after all?  But neither lynx nor panther nor any other beast of prey is white, except a polar bear, and it would be unusual to meet one on a tropical island.