"I have seen nothing Jim. But the village people are already making a legend about the Wicked Colonel. They say he walks. I hope, now that this innocent child is here, that they will leave off inventing such horrid things. I don't want 'The Pines' to have the reputation of being haunted. And you know how stories grow, Jim." "I know this," replied Dr. Herrick, "that Carr was murdered in a room which has vanished into thin air. If his ghost walks anywhere it must be in the Pine wood. There is no call for him to haunt this place." Some one repeated this saying of Herrick's, and what he had said in jest was spoken of in earnest. In a few months it was commonly reported that the Wicked Colonel had been seen in the Pine wood, surrounded with a red glow, significant of the habitation his spirit, for its sins, dwelt in. In vain more sensible people laughed at this tale. It came to be firmly believed in, and it was said that when any misfortune was about to befall the Marsh-Carr family, that the shade of the Colonel appeared. "It is the penalty of greatness," said Dr. Jim to Stephen, "a county family is not really respectable until it has its private ghost." And in this way Wicked Colonel Carr became a tradition. THE END End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Silver Bullet, by Fergus Hume