The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Phantom Of Bogue Holauba, by
Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

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Title: The Phantom Of Bogue Holauba
1911

Author: Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

Release Date: November 19, 2007 [EBook #23552]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PHANTOM OF BOGUE HOLAUBA ***

Produced by David Widger

THE PHANTOM OF BOGUE HOLAUBA

By Charles Egbert Craddock

1911

Gordon never forgot the sensation he experienced on first beholding
it. There was no mist in the midnight. The moon was large and low. The
darkness of the dense, towering forests on either hand impinged in no
wise on the melancholy realm of wan light in which the Mississippi lay,
unshadowed, solitary, silent as always, its channel here a mile or more
in breadth.

He had been observing how the mighty water-course was sending out its
currents into a bayou, called Bogue Holauba, as if the larger stream
were a tributary of the lesser. This peculiarity of the river in the
deltaic region, to throw off volume instead of continually receiving
affluents, was unaccustomed to him, being a stranger to the locality,
and for a moment it focussed his interest The next, his every faculty
was concentrated on a singular phenomenon on the bank of the bogue.

He caught his breath with a gasp; then, without conscious volition, he
sought to explain it to his own shocked senses, to realize it as some
illusion, some combination of natural causes, the hour, the pallor
pervading the air, the distance, for his boat was near the middle of the
stream,--but the definiteness of the vision annulled his efforts.

There on the broad, low margin, distinct, yet with a coercive conviction
of unreality, the figure of a man drawn in lines of vague light paced
slowly to and fro; an old man, he would have said, bent and wizened,
swaying back and forth, in expressive contortions, a very pantomime of
woe, wringing gaunt hands and arms above his head, and now and again
bowing low in recurrent paroxysms of despair. The wind held its breath,
and the river, mute as ever, made no sign, and the e