Lost Man’s Lane

were preparations I had long been accustomed to in women of this kind, and I was not at all surprised when she announced in a way that admitted of no dispute:

“Oh, there’s no wonder the child is sick. We would be sick under the circumstances. He has seen the phantom coach.”

The phantom coach! So that was what the locksmith meant. A phantom coach! I had heard of every kind of phantom but that. Somehow the idea was a thrilling one, or would have been to a nature less practical than mine.

“I don’t know what you mean,” said I. “Some superstition of the place? I never heard of a ghostly appearance of that nature before.”

“No, I expect not. It belongs to X. I never heard of it beyond these mountains. Indeed, I have never known it to have been seen but upon one road. I need not mention what road, madam. You can guess.”

Yes, I could guess, and the guessing made me set my lips a little grimly.

“Tell me more about this thing,” I urged, half laughing. “It ought to be of some interest to me.”

She nodded, drew her chair a trifle nearer, and impetuously began:

“You see this is a very old town. It has more than one ancient country house similar to the one you are now living in, and it has its early traditions. One is, that an old-fashioned coach, perfectly noiseless, drawn by horses through which you can see the moonlight, haunts the highroad at intervals and flies through the gloomy forest road we have christened of late years Lost Man’s Lane. It is a superstition, possibly, but you cannot find many families in town but believe in it as a fact, for there is not an old man or woman in the place but has either seen it in the past or has had some relative who has seen it. It passes only at night, and it is thought to presage some disaster to those who see it. My husband’s uncle died the next morning after it flew by him on the highway. Fortunately years elapse between its going and coming. It is ten years, I think they say, since it was last seen. Poor little Rob! It has frightened him almost out of his wits.”

“I should think so,” I cried with becoming credulity. “But how came he to see it? I thought you said it only passed at night.”

“At midnight,” she repeated. “But Rob, you see, is a nervous lad, and night before last he was so restless he could not sleep, so he begged to be put in the window to cool off. This his mother did, and he sat there for a good half-hour alone, looking out at the moonlight. As his mother is an economical woman there was no candle lit in the room, so he got his pleasure out of the shadows which the great trees made on the highroad, when suddenly⁠—you ought to hear the little fellow tell it⁠—he felt the hair rise on his forehead and all his body grow stiff with a terror that made his tongue feel like lead in his mouth. A something he would have called a horse and a carriage in the daytime, but which, in this light and under the influence of the mortal terror he was in, took on a distorted shape which made it unlike any team he was accustomed to, was going by, not as if being driven over the earth and stones of the road⁠—though there was a driver in front, a driver with an odd three-cornered hat on his head and a cloak about his shoulders, such as the little fellow remembered to have seen hanging in his grandmother’s closet⁠—but as if it floated along without sound or stir; in fact, a spectre team which seemed to find its proper destination when it turned into Lost Man’s Lane and was lost among the shadows of that ill-reputed road.”

“Pshaw!” was my spirited comment as she paused to take her breath and see how I was affected by this gruesome tale. “A dream of the poor little lad! He had heard stories of this apparition and his imagination supplied the rest.”

“No; excuse me, madam, he had been carefully kept from hearing all such tales. You could see this by the way he told his story. He hardly believed what he had himself seen. It was not till some foolish neighbor blurted out, ‘Why, that was the phantom coach,’ that he had any idea he was not relating a dream.”

My second “Pshaw!” was no less marked than the first.

“He did know about it, notwithstanding,” I insisted. “Only he had forgotten the fact. Sleep often supplies us with these lost memories.”

“Very true, and your supposition is very plausible, Miss Butterworth, and might be regarded as correct, if he had been the only person to see this apparition. But Mrs. Jenkins saw it too, and she is a woman to be believed.”

This was becoming serious.

“Saw it before he did or afterwards?” I asked. “Does she live on the highway or somewhere in Lost Man’s Lane?”

“She lives on the highway about a half-mile from the station. She was sitting up with her sick husband and saw it just as it was going down the hill. She said it made no more noise than a cloud slipping by. She expects to lose old Rause. No one could behold such a thing as that and not have some misfortune follow.”

I laid all this up in my mind. My hour of waiting was not likely to prove wholly unprofitable.

“You see,” the good woman went on, with a relish for the marvellous that stood me in good stead, “there is an old tradition of that road connected with a coach. Years ago, before any of us were born, and the house where you are now staying was a gathering-place for all the gay young bloods of the county, a young man came up from New York to visit