nner puzzled him. She
had said _it_ had been in the house, that now _they_ could come in, and
that out here _they_ were not men. Had the loneliness imposed upon her
intelligence such a repulsive credulity?

He had to admit that imagination in such a medium could precipitate
shameful and deceptive fancies.

Then, without realizing at first why, Garth knew he had been unjust. He
found his eyes striving to penetrate the night to the left. Surely it
was not the old illusion of moving trees and branches that had set the
fog in lazy motion over there. He stepped cautiously behind a pine tree.
The chill increased. A charnal atmosphere had crept into the woods. As
he shivered he realized that this sepulchral place had filled with
plausible inhabitants--shapes as restless and unsubstantial as if sprung
solely from a morbid somnambulism.

CHAPTER IX

THE PHANTOM ARMY

Shadows advanced through the shadowy fog, and Garth could define them as
no more than shadows. In one place the mist thinned momentarily, and he
glimpsed, apparently floating forward, the trunk of a man's figure.
Pallid tatters, such as might survive in a mortuary, flapped about bare
shoulders, and from a little distance beyond came a sickly gleam--the
doubtful response uncertain moonlight might draw from a bayonet or a
musket barrel.

The fog closed in. There were no more shadows. Garth, eager to follow,
forced himself to wait. He told himself that the march of phantoms
possessed a meaning which would give direction to his task. The
unveiling of its impulse, he was confident, would unveil the mystery at
the house. Against so many only caution was useful at present.

He was glad Nora was not with him. He knew how profoundly she would have
been stirred, how ready she would have been to discard a rational
explanation for the occult. He could smile a little. In this one respect
of vulnerability to superstition he felt himself immeasurably her
superior. He was glad she had not involved herself in such a case.

Finally, phantom-like himself, he proceeded through the fog in the
direction the silent shadows had taken. He walked for some distance.

Without warning he stumbled and pitched forward to his knees. Reaching
out to save himself, his fingers touched something wet, cold, and
possessed of a revealing quality which in one breathless moment drove
into his brain the excuse for those at the house, and focussed for him
their terror of the unexplored wor