It was a vast silence of pines, redolent with balsamic breath, and muffled with the dry
dust of dead bark and matted mosses. Lying on our backs, we looked upward through a
hundred feet of clear, unbroken interval to the first lateral branches that formed the flat
canopy above us. Here and there the fierce sun, from whose active persecution we had
just escaped, searched for us through the woods, but its keen blade was dulled and turned
aside by intercostal boughs, and its brightness dissipated in nebulous mists throughout the
roofing of the dim, brown aisles around us. We were in another atmosphere, under
another sky; indeed, in another world than the dazzling one we had just quitted. The
grave silence seemed so much a part of the grateful coolness, that we hesitated to speak,
and for some moments lay quietly outstretched on the pine tassels where we had first
thrown ourselves. Finally, a voice broke the silence:--
"Ask the old Major; he knows all about it!"
The person here alluded to under that military title was myself. I hardly need explain to
any Californian that it by no means followed that I was a "Major," or that I was "old," or
that I knew anything about "it," or indeed what "it" referred to. The whole remark was
merely one of the usual conventional feelers to conversation,--a kind of social preamble,
quite common to our slangy camp intercourse. Nevertheless, as I was always known as
the Major, perhaps for no better reason than that the speaker, an old journalist, was
always called Doctor, I recognized the fact so far as to kick aside an intervening saddle,
so that I could see the speaker's face on a level with my own, and said nothing.
"About ghosts!" said the Doctor, after a pause, which nobody broke or was expected to
break. "Ghosts, sir! That's what we want to know. What are we doing here in this blanked
old mausoleum of Calaveras County, if it isn't to find out something about 'em, eh?"
"Thar's that haunted house at Cave City. Can't be more than a mile or two away, anyhow.
Used to be just off the trail."
The Doctor (addressing space generally) "Yes, sir; it WAS a mighty queer story."
Still the same reposeful indifference. We all knew the Doctor's skill as a raconteur; we all
knew that a story was coming, and we all knew that any interruption would be fatal. Time
and time again, in our prospecting experience, had a word of polite encouragement, a
rash expression of interest, even a too eager attitude of silent expectancy, brought the
Doctor to a sudden change of subject. Time and time again have we seen the unwary
stranger stand amazed and bewildered between our own indifference and the sudden
termination of a promising anecdote, through his own unlucky interference. So we said
