Dwight Wade found a lively conference in progress in the main camp. Tommy Eye was doing most of the talking, and it was plain that his opinions carried weight, for no one presumed to gainsay him. "And I'll say to you what I'm tellin' to them here, Mr. Wade," continued the teamster. "You saw for yourself what happened here last night. A ha'nt done it. And the ha'nt done this last. They're pickin' Skeets right and left." "Ha'nt must be in the pay of Pulaski D. Britt," remarked one rude joker. "He's been the one most interested in gettin' the tribe out of this section." Dwight Wade, love and awful fear raging in his heart, was in no mood to play dilettante with the supernatural, nor to relish jokes. "We'll have done with this foolishness, men!" he cried, harshly. "A girl has been lost in these woods." He was protecting Elva Barrett's incognito by a mighty effort of self-repression. The agony of his soul prompted him to leap, shouting, down the tote road, calling her name and crying his love and his despair. "I want this crew to beat the woods and find her." "She can't ever be found," growled a prompt rebel. "I heard the driver tell. She was picked right up and lugged off. There ain't any of us got wings." "Oh, you've got to admit that there are ha'nts!" persisted Tommy, with fine relish for his favorite topic. "And they pick up people. I see one, in the shape of a tree, pick up an ox once and break his neck." "D--n you for drooling idiots!" raved Wade, beside himself. It was the first outlet for the storm of his feelings. He ordered them to get lanterns and start on the search--he strode among them with brandished fists and whirling arms, and they dodged from in front of him, staring in amazement. "My Gawd," mourned Tommy, "this camp has had the spell put on it for sure! The ha'nt has driv' the boss out of his head, and will have him next. And if it can drive a college man out of his head, what chance has the rest of us got?" Panic was writ large in the faces of the simple woodsmen, and fear glittered in their eyes. A single queer circumstance would merely have set them to wondering; but these unexplainable events, following each other so rapidly and taking ominous shade from the glass that lugubrious Tommy Eye held over them, shook them out of self-poise. It needed but one voice to cry, "The place is accursed!" to precipitate a rout, and old Christopher Straight had the woodsman's keen scent for trouble of this sort. "A moment! A moment, Mr. Wade!" he called. He patted the young man's elbow and urged him towards the door. "I want to speak to you. Keep quiet, my men, and go in to your supper." As he passed the cook-house door he sharply ordered the cook to sound the delayed call--the cook being then engaged in discussing, with chopping-boss and cookee, a certain "side-hill lounger," a ha'nt that wrought vast mischief of old along Ripogenus gorge.