a couple of mules, for those which had belonged to my uncle had been taken away, José said, by the men who had carried him off. Strange to say, though we made three complete circuits round the house at increasing distances, we could nowhere learn that such a body of brigands had been seen corresponding with the description given by José—which had been very precise, and rendered identification easy, apart from the presence of my uncle among them.
Leaving our mules at the places from whence they had been borrowed, we walked towards the house. Everything seemed as quiet and tranquil as when I arrived in the morning. In my uncle’s room there was still a large fire burning, and when I asked José why he continued to keep such a fire now, seeing that my uncle was not there, he said that his orders were peremptory—that whether my uncle were there or not, he was always to keep a good fire burning in that room. I next asked him if there had been any repetition of the noises we had heard in the morning, and he said there had, several times. As all was quiet now, I thought the moment a good one for taking some refreshment. There was little to be had beside bread and some fruit which Mindanho himself picked in the garden. As to wine, I refused to take any, though José brought several kinds, which, he said, my uncle was in the habit of praising very highly. It wanted a few minutes to nine o’clock when we went back into the house,—for we had taken our meal in the garden—and here I found that José, notwithstanding my refusal to drink wine, had placed several decanters, with boxes of cigars, as though he was anxious to show his desire to please his master’s nephew. I don’t know precisely what Mindanho’s position was in my uncle’s office, but he must have had much of his confidence, and, in return, he appeared very much attached to him, and showed himself as willing and anxious to discover what had become of him, as I was myself. I mention this chiefly because I believe that nothing else would have induced him to stay in the house with me that night, firmly convinced as he was that the sounds arose from supernatural causes, and to relieve him from any blame that might be cast upon him on the score of what happened to me on the succeeding night.
To return to this, the first night of my watch.
We had not been sitting long before the same dull metallic sound I have already spoken of became plainly audible. It continued for several minutes, and was then interrupted by a rapid succession of shrieks which chilled my blood. These were followed by the clashing of weapons, as though men were engaged in fierce combat. After a time this too ceased, and there was a dead silence for some minutes. Then suddenly burst forth a louder noise than ever; without being distinct enough for me to distinguish words, I yet imagined that cries for help were mingled with curses and inarticulate utterances, all of which seemed gradually to subside into groans and passionate weeping, and finally into sounds of a less definite character.
All that the imagination can conceive of the sounds which issue from that place where there is said to be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, were here more than realised. I confess that when it was over I found myself trembling from head to foot, and bathed in perspiration. I looked at Mindanho, and from the expression of his face, I feared that he had lost his senses. As for José, who had volunteered to sit up with us, he was huddled together in a heap in one corner of the room, staring at the fire as though his eyeballs were about to start from his head.
As soon as I had recovered myself sufficiently to reason on what we had just heard, I again appealed to Mindanho for his opinion as to the cause of it. I might as well have spoken to a statue—he neither answered nor moved. José, rather to my surprise, though he had exhibited greater signs of fright, was much more composed than he, but all I could get from him was a repetition of his belief that his master had been murdered. When I told him that, even if he had, that could have nothing to do with the sounds we had just heard, he only shook his head, and repeated that it was my uncle’s spirit.
Finding it was impossible to rouse Mindanho, I made José take a lamp and go before me into every room, but, as before, without discovering anything which gave me the slightest clue to the origin of the noises.
On returning to the room I had left, I missed Mindanho. He was of no assistance to me, it is true, but only those few who have been situated as I was, can realise the fortitude one derives at critical moments from the mere presence of a human being, however useless in a material point of view. Remembering the condition in which I had left him, I feared he might do himself some injury, and therefore left the house to look for him, perhaps not altogether sorry to have an excuse for abandoning the post I had determined not to quit till I had exhausted all hope of getting at the secret of the disturbances. Be this as it may, I spent the rest of the night in the garden, and in the fields round it, in a vain search for the poor fellow. It was not till the morning, when I was able to inquire of the villagers, that I learnt he had taken one of the mules we had borrowed the day before and returned to the town.
I was now left to my own resources, and poor as these were, I was fixed on one point, that I would not leave the neighbourhood till I had exhausted every means I could imagine of discovering the fate of my uncle. First of all, and before returning to the house, I engaged several of the peasants to go in search of him in the surrounding country, and with particular instructions to inquire of every armed man they met concerning him.
Not to repeat the same thing again, I may say, that repeatedly during the day there was the like horrible outcry, with some variations. Sometimes the shrieks lasted a longer time than at others, and were not followed or preceded by the clashing of swords; but the deep groans, as of persons suffering intense agony, were almost incessant. There was one time when the shrieks sounded louder than ever, and this was, when I was in the