“I will not submit unheard.  There may be powers that are not malignant traveling this accursed road.  I shall leave them a record and an appeal.  I shall relate my wrongs, the persecutions that I endure—­I, a helpless mortal, a penitent, an unoffending poet!” Halpin Frayser was a poet only as he was a penitent:  in his dream.

Taking from his clothing a small red-leather pocketbook, one-half of which was leaved for memoranda, he discovered that he was without a pencil.  He broke a twig from a bush, dipped it into a pool of blood and wrote rapidly.  He had hardly touched the paper with the point of his twig when a low, wild peal of laughter broke out at a measureless distance away, and growing ever louder, seemed approaching ever nearer; a soulless, heartless, and unjoyous laugh, like that of the loon, solitary by the lakeside at midnight; a laugh which culminated in an unearthly shout close at hand, then died away by slow gradations, as if the accursed being that uttered it had withdrawn over the verge of the world whence it had come.  But the man felt that this was not so—­that it was near by and had not moved.

A strange sensation began slowly to take possession of his body and his mind.  He could not have said which, if any, of his senses was affected; he felt it rather as a consciousness—­a mysterious mental assurance of some overpowering presence—­some supernatural malevolence different in kind from the invisible existences that swarmed about him, and superior to them in power.  He knew that it had uttered that hideous laugh.  And now it seemed to be approaching him; from what direction he did not know—­dared not conjecture.  All his former fears were forgotten or merged in the gigantic terror that now held him in thrall.  Apart from that, he had but one thought:  to complete his written appeal to the benign powers who, traversing the haunted wood, might some time rescue him if he should be denied the blessing of annihilation.  He wrote with terrible rapidity, the twig in his fingers rilling blood without renewal; but in the middle of a sentence his hands denied their service to his will, his arms fell to his sides, the book to the earth; and powerless to move or cry out, he found himself staring into the sharply drawn face and blank, dead eyes of his own mother, standing white and silent in the garments of the grave!

II

In his youth Halpin Frayser had lived with his parents in Nashville, Tennessee.  The Fraysers were well-to-do, having a good position in such society as had survived the wreck wrought by civil war.  Their children had the social and educational opportunities of their time and place, and had responded to good associations and instruction with agreeable manners and cultivated minds.  Halpin being the youngest and not over robust was perhaps a trifle “spoiled.”  He had the double disadvantage of a mother’s assiduity and a father’s neglect.  Frayser pere was what no Southern man of means is not—­a politician.  His country, or rather his section and State, made demands upon his time and attention so exacting that to those of his family he was compelled to turn an ear partly deafened by the thunder of the political captains and the shouting, his own included.