It was Palmer.  He was pale, as if from excitement—­as pale as the others felt themselves to be.  His manner, too, was singularly distrait:  he neither responded to their salutations nor so much as looked at them, but walked slowly across the room in the light of the failing fire and opening the front door passed out into the darkness.

It seems to have been the first thought of both men that Palmer was suffering from fright—­that something seen, heard or imagined in the back room had deprived him of his senses.  Acting on the same friendly impulse both ran after him through the open door.  But neither they nor anyone ever again saw or heard of Andrus Palmer!

This much was ascertained the next morning.  During the session of Messrs. Holcomb and Merle at the “haunted house” a new snow had fallen to a depth of several inches upon the old.  In this snow Palmer’s trail from his lodging in the village to the back door of the Eckert house was conspicuous.  But there it ended:  from the front door nothing led away but the tracks of the two men who swore that he preceded them.  Palmer’s disappearance was as complete as that of “old man Eckert” himself—­whom, indeed, the editor of the local paper somewhat graphically accused of having “reached out and pulled him in.”

THE SPOOK HOUSE

On the road leading north from Manchester, in eastern Kentucky, to Booneville, twenty miles away, stood, in 1862, a wooden plantation house of a somewhat better quality than most of the dwellings in that region.  The house was destroyed by fire in the year following--probably by some stragglers from the retreating column of General George W. Morgan, when he was driven from Cumberland Gap to the Ohio river by General Kirby Smith.  At the time of its destruction, it had for four or five years been vacant.  The fields about it were overgrown with brambles, the fences gone, even the few negro quarters, and out-houses generally, fallen partly into ruin by neglect and pillage; for the negroes and poor whites of the vicinity found in the building and fences an abundant supply of fuel, of which they availed themselves without hesitation, openly and by daylight.  By daylight alone; after nightfall no human being except passing strangers ever went near the place.

It was known as the “Spook House.”  That it was tenanted by evil spirits, visible, audible and active, no one in all that region doubted any more than he doubted what he was told of Sundays by the traveling preacher.  Its owner’s opinion of the matter was unknown; he and his family had disappeared one night and no trace of them had ever been found.  They left everything—­household goods, clothing, provisions, the horses in the stable, the cows in the field, the negroes in the quarters—­all as it stood; nothing was missing—­ except a man, a woman, three girls, a boy and a babe!  It was not altogether surprising that a plantation where seven human beings could be simultaneously effaced and nobody the wiser should be under some suspicion.