se. Tony Green and his
friends went to the garden and examined the body of Major Atwood. What
had killed him no one could say. No bullet had struck him. There were
no wounds, no knife thrust, no sword slash. Tony held the lantern with
its swaying yellow glow close to the murdered man's body. The August
night was warm; the garden, banked by trees and shrubbery, was
breathless and oppressively hot; yet the body of Atwood seemed frozen!
He had been dead but a short while, and already the body was stiff.
More than that, it was ice cold. The face, the brows were wet as
though frost had been there and now was melted!

Tony Green's hand shook as he held the lantern. He tried to tell his
comrades that Atwood had died from failure of the heart. Undoubtedly
it was that. He had seen what he supposed was an apparition;
something had frightened him; and a weak heart had brought his death.

* * * * *

Then, in another part of the garden, one of the searching officers
found a sheet of parchment scroll with writing on it. Yet it was not
parchment, either. Some strange, white, smooth fabric which crumpled
and tore very easily, the like of which this young British officer of
Howe's staff had never seen before. It was found lying in a flower bed
forty or fifty feet from Atwood's body. They gathered in a group to
examine it by the light of the lantern. Writing! The delicate script
of Mary Atwood! A missive addressed to her father. It was strangely
written, evidently not with a quill.

Tony read it with an awed, frightened voice:

"Father, beware of Tugh! Beware of Tugh! And, my dear
Father, good-by. I am departing, I think, to the year of our
Lord, 2930. Cannot explain--a captive--good-by--nothing you
can do--

Mary."

Strange! I can imagine how strange they thought it was. Tugh--why he
was the cripple who had lived down by the Bowling Green, and had
lately vanished!

They were reading this singularly unexplainable missive, when as
though to climax their own fears of the supernatural they saw
themselves a ghost! And not only one ghost, but two!

Plain as a pikestaff, peering from a nearby tree, in a shaft of
moonlight, a ghost was standing. It was the figure of a young girl,
with jacket and breeches of black and gleaming white. An apparition
fantastic! And a young man was with her, in a long dark jacket and
dark tubular pipes, fo