Ghosts I have Met and Some Others

Our patient soon recovered his senses and evinced no little
gratitude for the service we had rendered him, insisting upon our
accepting at his hands, merely, he said, as a souvenir of our good
-Samaritanship, and as a token of his appreciation of the same, a
small pocket-flask and an odd diamond-shaped stone pierced in the
centre, which had hung from the end of his watch-chain, held in
place by a minute gold ring. The flask became the property of
Parton, and to me fell the stone, the exact hue of which I was never
able to determine, since it was chameleonic in its properties. When
it was placed in my hands by our "grateful patient" it was blood
-red; when I looked upon it on the following morning it was of a
livid, indescribable hue, yet lustrous as an opal. To-day it is
colorless and dull, as though some animating quality that it had
once possessed had forever passed from it.

"You seem to have met with an accident," said Parton, when the
injured man had recovered sufficiently to speak.

"Yes," he said, wincing with pain, "I have. I set out for Saddleback
this morning--I wished to visit the Scales Tarn and get a glimpse of
those noonday stars that are said to make its waters lustrous, and--"

"And to catch the immortal fish?" I queried.

"No," he replied, with a laugh. "I should have been satisfied to see
the stars--and I did see the stars, but not the ones I set out to
see. I have always been more or less careless of my safety, walking
with my head in the clouds and letting my feet look out for
themselves. The result was that I slipped on a moss-covered stone
and fell over a very picturesque bit of scenery on to some more
stones that, unfortunately, were not moss-covered."

"But the cut in your arm?" said Parton, suspiciously. "That looks as
if somebody else had given it to you."

The stranger's face flushed as red as could be considering the
amount of blood he had lost, and a look of absolute devilishness
that made my flesh creep came into his eyes. For a moment he did not
speak, and then, covering the delay in his answer with a groan of
anguish, he said:

"Oh, that! Yes--I--I did manage to cut myself rather badly and--"

"I don't see how you could, though," insisted Parton. "You couldn't
reach that part of yourself with a knife, if you tried."