ETER MASKIN was dead and in his grave. The mill where he ground corn, and more than corn, was silent in the gully of the run. There was no one to lift the shuntboard and let the water pour down over the great overshot wheel. The corn that was in the toll-bin grew musty and sour where it lay heaped.
There was no one, so far as the countryside knew, who could claim the mill and thirty acres of land. The bullet that bored through the heart of Old Pete the Miller made joy where there had been suffering and dismay.
It seemed as if the man's bones had cast their blight, like salt, across the mill lot, for only rank weeds grew there, except at the entrance to the mill: there was hard, bare ground. It was easily believed that the bones did not rest.
The crowd that came to the man's funeral was large—not to increase the mourning, but to see with their own eyes that Old Pete had not been too mean to die, as some had said. If he had stood up in his coffin and demanded tolls, demanded interest money, demanded payments, there would have been fear, dread, horror, but no surprise.
The face was no grayer in death than it had been in life; across that countenance had spread the terrible disease of avarice.
He would have cursed the extravagance that took from his leather pocketbook the money for the coffin in which to inter his own remains. A box, made with his own hands from weather-old fence-boards had been good enough for his wife; he asked no better for himself. He had denied none more than he denied himself.
Now. when the wind blew at night, with Old Pete in that extravagant box of his—the box that had made the undertaker and the coroner grin with triumph—there came loud wails from the old mill; there came low howls, quavering yells, bellowings, and laughter. It was the laughter that made that road unpopular at night.
When the screams of the wind whirling through the mill were loudest one could see by moonlight pale figures come pouring out of the door between slams—figures that danced whirling over the bare place, killing all the things that might have grown there, and then leaped up over the burdocks and were gone in a puff.
By day the snakes gathered on that bare ground in sunny weather and made trails across the dust of bran and corn.
It was a brave man who would go to that old mill and stand in the gloom, looking into the dusty recesses, curtained by the wavering cobwebs swung down from beams and frames.
Youths made passing the old mill the test of their courage. They reported green eyes in the dark of the mill. Every one knew that it was Old Pete the Miller's cat, but none knew whether the cat was alive or dead.
The cat had been Old Pete's wild companion—a lank, black hunter that never grew fat. The very rats in the mill were lean from dodging the angry miller and his no less angry cat. A mad she-cat, an old maid that had never littered kittens, helped make the place untenantable, no matter whether she was alive or dead.
There was yet the hoarded gold.
It was gold that had transformed the pretty, green water, Maskin's Run Gully, into the terrible mill site that it had become. Every one knew the story of that gold. It lured while it repelled.
When Peter Maskin was a young man he was like all the other young men of the land. He skylarked round, courted the girls, and even spent his money for moonshine. He used to go down the river on log rafts, and came home on the train and overland on the stage with the long coil of handyline rope over his shoulder with the rest of them.
One trip the Chattanooga sawmill paid him off in gold—paid him one hundred dollars in gold for his string of logs. He had never seen gold before: if the word was a part of his vocabulary none remembered ever hearing him use it; if he had ever hungered for gold not a man or woman in all the world knew it.
Now he stared at the coins, the five coins, and his companions saw growing in his eyes the terrible look which was never again to leave them—the look that spread across his countenance and stretched down into his hands and fingers, changing them into hooks that always pulled toward him.
Never a piece of gold did Peter Maskin spend! He doled out his pennies and his silver and eked out his toll of corn, but never did a gold coin slip past those hooked hands of his. If he loaned money he paid it over in silver and paper, and drew it back in gold.
"Pay me back in gold!" he would demand as he counted out his paper and his silver. Always he had paper and silver.
They paid for his coffin with paper and silver: they paid the coroner's fees, the sheriff's fees, everybody's fees, with silver and paper from the dead man's wallet.
