"Well, spooks travel about a bit, being restless sort of things. Thirty or forty years back, people swore that old Quill and the other people who croaked up there used to come back during the dark of the moon and hold high revels, as the novel writers would say. Strange to say, they suddenly stopped coming back when the sheriff snook up there one night with a couple of deputies and arrested a gang of male and female mortals and confiscated a couple of kegs of beer at the same time. Shortly after old David Windom confessed that he killed Alix's father and buried him on the rock, people begin to talk about seeing things again. Funny that Eddie Crown's ghost neglected to come back till after he'd been dead eighteen years or so. Ghosts ain't usually so considerate. Nobody ever claims to have seen him floating around the old Windom front yard before Mr. Windom confessed. But, by gosh, the story hadn't been printed in the newspapers for more than two days before George Heffner saw Eddie in the front yard, plain as day, and ran derned near a mile and a half past his own house before he could stop, as he told some one that met him when he stopped for breath. Course, that story sort of petered out when George's wife went down and cowhided a widow who lived just a mile and a half south of their place, and that night George kept on running so hard the other way that he's never been heard of since. Since then there hasn't been much talk about ghosts,--'specially among the married men." "And the rattlesnakes?" said Courtney, grinning. "Along about 1875 David Windom killed a couple of rattlers up there. It's only natural that their ghosts should come back, same as anybody else's. Far as I can make out, nobody has ever actually seen one, but the Lord only knows how many people claim to have heard 'em." He went on in this whimsical fashion for half an hour or more, and finally came back to Alix Crown again. "She did an awful lot of good during the war,--contributed to everything, drove an ambulance in New York, took up nursing, and all that, and if the war hadn't been ended by you fellers when it was, she'd have been over in France, sure as you're a foot high." "Strange she hasn't married, young and rich and beautiful as she is," mused Courtney. "Plenty of fellers been after her all right. She don't seem to be able to see 'em though. Now that the war's over maybe she'll settle down and pay some attention to sufferin' humanity. There's one thing sure. If she's got a beau he don't belong around these parts. Nobody around here's got a look-in." "Does she live all alone in that house up there? I mean, has she no--er--chaperon?"