re in the Guyan Valley, through which Main Island
Creek flows--you may see and hear things strangely unaccountable.

Close beside the captain's grave is another. On the stone is carved the
name--Levisa Chafin Hatfield. If you were among the many who attended
her funeral you will remember how peaceful she looked in her black
burying dress she'd kept so long for the occasion. Again you will see
her as she lay in her coffin, hands primly folded on the black frock,
the frill of lace on the black bonnet framing the careworn face. You
look up suddenly to see a mountain woman in a somber calico frock and
slat bonnet. She is putting new paper flowers, to take the place of the
faded ones, in the glass-covered box between the grave of Devil Anse and
the mother of his children.

"You best come home with me," she invites with true hospitality, after
an exchange of greetings. You learn that Molly claims kin to both sides,
being the widow of a Hatfield and married to a McCoy, and at once you
are disarmed.

That night as you sit with Molly in the moonlight in the dooryard of her
shack, a weather-beaten plank house with a clapboard roof and a crooked
stone chimney, she talks of life in the West Virginia hills. "There's a
heap o' things happens around this country that are mighty skeery."
Suddenly in the gloaming a bat wings overhead, darts inside the shack.
You can hear it blundering around among the rafters. An owl screeches
off in the hollow somewhere. "Do you believe in ghosts and haynts?"
There are apprehension and fear in Molly's voice.

Presently the owl screeches dolefully once more and the bat wheels low
overhead. A soft breeze stirs the pawpaw bushes down by the fence row.
"Did you hearn something mourn like, just then?" Molly, the widow of a
Hatfield and wife of a McCoy, leans forward.

If you are prudent you make no answer to her questions.

"Nothing to be a-feared of, I reckon. The ghosts of them that has been
baptized they won't harm nobody. I've heard Uncle Dyke Garrett say as
much many's the time." The woman speaks with firm conviction.

A moth brushes her cheek and she straightens suddenly.

The moon is partly hidden behind a cloud; even so by its faint light you
can see the clump of pawpaw bushes, and beyond--the outline of the
rugged hills. Farther off in the burying ground atop the ridge the
marble figure of the leader of the Hatfields rises against the
half-darkened sky.

At first you think it is the sound