of Absalom. At first I
thought it was an illusion and I rubbed my eyes. But there they were.
Then I thought it was a delusion; and I reined in my horse and reasoned
about it. But it was not; for I saw both men as plainly as I saw my
stirrup-leather lying there in the middle of the road, and in the same
way. My horse saw them too, and was so terrified that I could not keep
him headed to them. Again and again I pulled him around and looked at
the men and tried to reason about them; but every time I looked there
they were, and my horse snorted and wheeled in terror. I could see the
clothes they wore: the clean, white shirt and neat Sunday suit old Joel
had on, and the striped, hickory shirt, torn on the shoulders, and the
gray trousers that the lynched man wore--I could see the white rope
wrapped around the limb and hanging down, and the knot at his throat; I
remembered them perfectly. I could not get near the cart, for the road
down to Halloway's, on which it moved steadily without ever approaching,
was stopped up. But I rode right under the limb on which the other man
hung, and there he was just above my head. I reasoned with myself, but
in vain. There he still hung silent and limp, swinging gently in the
night wind and turning a little back and forth at the end of the white
rope.

"In sheer determination to fight it through I got off my horse and
picked up my stirrup. He was trembling like a leaf. I remounted and rode
back to the spot and looked again, confident that the spectres would now
have disappeared. But there they were, old Joel, sitting in his cart,
bowing to me civilly with timid, sad, friendly eyes, as much alive as I
was, and the dead man, with his limp head and arms and his toes turned
in, hanging in mid-air.

"I rode up under the dangling body and cut at it with my switch. At the
motion my horse bolted. He ran fully a mile before I could pursue him
in.

"The next morning I went to my stable to get my horse to ride to the
polls. The man a the stable said:

"'He ain't fit to take out, sir. You must 'a gi'n him a mighty hard ride
last night--he won't tetch a moufful; he 's been in a cold sweats all
night.'

"Sure enough, he looked it.

"I took another horse and rode out by Halloway's to see the place by
daylight.

"It was quiet enough now. The sycamore shaded the grass-grown track, and
a branch, twisted and broken by some storm, hung by a strip of bark from
the big bough that stretched across the r