nts were encamped along the edge of a
belt of pine woods, and after their creepy experience together on picket
duty, they naturally sought each other as often as possible. There is a
'witching romance lingering about a camp fire in the woods that
stimulates the imagination, and when these two newly made friends could
meet for an evening's visit beside theirs, many a tale of youthful
experience and boyish escapade was exchanged.

"Speaking of ghosts," said Manson, one evening, "I do not believe in
their existence exactly, and yet there is a strange fascination about
the idea that I can't understand. Now I do not believe we saw a man
walking on fog the other night, and yet I can't resist the desire to
hunt the matter out and discover what sort of an optical illusion it
was. I am not at all certain the man who took a shot at us was the one
we saw across the ravine, either. I had an experience once when I was
about nine years old, that, in a way, tainted my mind with the ghost
idea, and perhaps that is the reason why the possibility of seeing one
affects me in the way it does. A couple of miles from the farm where I
was reared there stood an old deserted ruin of a house known as the Tim
Buck place. It was hidden away behind hills and woods and reached from
the highway through a half-mile lane, thick grown with bushes. Here,
years before I was born, there had once lived a man by the name of Buck,
who hanged himself in the garret one day, while his wife was away. It
was said she came back just at dusk and found him hanging lifeless from
a rafter in the garret. What became of her I never knew, but no one ever
lived on the place afterward, and in time the farm and house reverted to
the town for taxes. It also soon obtained the reputation of being
haunted, and no one ever went near it after dark. A couple of 'coon
hunters told how they had taken refuge in it from a sudden shower at
night, but left in a hurry when they heard some one walking on the
chamber floor above. Some one else said they had seen a white figure
walking on the ridge-pole just at dusk. All this was current gossip in
the town, and believed by many.

"My parents had sense enough not to tell me, but when I was old enough
to be sent to the district school, I heard all this, and more, too; and
the worst of it was I believed all I heard. I had never been near the
house, but when I heard the stories, I got another boy for company and
went to look at it from the top