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His Unquiet Ghost
by
This initial devoir of his reformation, however, Wyatt found no easy matter. The event had been craftily planned to seem an accident, a fall from a cliff in pursuing the wagon, and only the most ardent and cogent urgency on Wyatt’s part prevailed at length. He argued that this interpretation of the disaster would not satisfy the authorities. To take the raider’s life insured discovery, retribution. But as he had been brought to the still in the night, it was obvious that if he were conveyed under cover of darkness and by roundabout trails within striking distance of the settlements, he could never again find his way to the locality in the dense wilderness. In his detention he had necessarily learned nothing fresh, for the only names he could have overheard had long been obnoxious to suspicion of moonshining, and afforded no proof. Thus humanity, masquerading as caution, finally triumphed, and the officer, blindfolded, was conducted through devious and winding ways many miles distant, and released within a day’s travel of the county town.
Walter Wyatt was scarcely welcomed back to life by the denizens of the cove generally with the enthusiasm attendant on the first moments of his resuscitation, so to speak. He never forgot the solemn ecstasy of that experience, and in later years he was wont to annul any menace of discord with his wife by the warning, half jocose, half tender: “Ye hed better mind; ye’ll be sorry some day fur treatin’ me so mean. Remember, I hev viewed ye a-weepin’ over my grave before now.”
A reformation, however complete and salutary, works no change of identity, and although he developed into an orderly, industrious, law-abiding citizen, his prankish temperament remained recognizable in the fantastic fables which he delighted to recount at some genial fireside of what he had seen and heard as a ghost.
“Pears like, Watt, ye hed more experiences whenst dead than living” said an auditor, as these stories multiplied.
“I did, fur a fack,” Watt protested. “I war a powerful onchancy, onquiet ghost. I even did my courtin’ whilst in my reg’lar line o’ business a-hanatin’ a graveyard.”