The Ghost Walker

Don Murdock came to the territories with three guns and a breaking
heart. At least he had tried to keep the rifts wedged open and still
preserved the similitude of hopeless grief and .unconquerable despair.
It had been easy enough that night when the New York skyline was
falling astern and he had looked over the side of the Berengaria and
had seen, almost on the verge of tears, the pilot's hazardous climb to
the waiting boat.

This man, thought Donald, swallowing a lump in his throat, was going
back to a woman who loved him. A sane, shrewd mother of children, who
went to church on Sundays and scoffed at ghosts. He could not imagine
Mr. Pilot and Mrs. Pilot facing one another, trembling with fury over
the matter of manifestations.

He could not imagine Mrs. Pilot drawing her wedding ring from her
finger, flinging it on to the table and saying: "I think we are wasting
time, Donald: you cannot understand and never will understand. You are
just puffed up with conceit like every other college boy--you think
people are crazy because you haven't the vision or the enterprise to
get outside your own narrow circle..."

All that sort of stuff, mostly illogical, but very, very,
poignant.

So Donald went tragically to the wilds and made a will before
leaving New York, leaving half of his four million dollars to Jane
Fellaby and the other half to found a society for the suppression of
Spiritualism.

Jane had been bitten very badly. She had sat in at seances and had
heard voices and seen trumpets move and heard tambourines play, and had
had other spiritual experiences. And she objected to his description of
Professor Steelfit as a "fake" and her spiritualistic aunt as a
halfwit--and here he was sailing for Africa, the home of primitive
realities and lions and fever.

Mr. Commissioner Sanders did not like visitors in the Territories.
They were a responsibility, and usually he ran them up to Chubiri on
the lower river (which is as safe as Bond Street and much safer than
Broadway) and sent them back to the ship with a thrilling sense of
having faced fearful dangers.

Bones was usually the guide on these occasions.

"On your right, dear old friends, is the village of Goguba, where
there was a simply fearful massacre...shockin' old bird named N'sumu
used to be chief an' the silly old josser got tight an' behaved simply
scandalously. On the left, dear young miss, is the island where all
these old johnnies are buried...over there's where a perfectly ghastly
feller named Oofaba drowned his naughty old self..."

But the "tourist" with letters of introduction was not really
welcome, though he or she had little to complain of in the matter of
courtesy and loving-kindness.

"Bones, here's a job for you." Sanders looked up from the letters he
was reading at breakfast. "We are getting a 'Cook' for a couple of
weeks."