The daily morning journal and courier., 1897-09-10

mlSefable piece of road, and when a railroad in Georgia is bad it is bad with any sort of an adjective for emphasis you choose. It was twelve miles, and through mountain gap, and as it was nearly dark when started I wound up by getting lost and going the Lord knows where, till l struck a very fair tWo-story house that looked like it might have been summer hotel once upon time. T asked the man who responded to my call how far it was to the railroad, and he told me ten miles, and had bet ter light and stay all night. I light ed, and after a bite of cold bread and meat and drink of moonshine I went to bed, tired enough to have slept on a picket fence. It was then eleven o'clock, and about two hours later was awakened from my slumbers by hearing a train whistle apparently a mile or less away, and then rumble along, coming nearer and nearer until I'suddenly it stopped, and I heard no more. l was too sleepy to give it much thought, and, rolling over I went to sleep again, wondering why my host had hold me it was ten miles to the railroad, unless it was to deceive me out of the price of a nights lodging. ''In the morning at breakfact I men, | toned the fact to him, and he laughed i in an uneasy kind of way and assured me that it was ten miles to the rail- road; I would think 1t was three times that after l had driven over to it. The noise I heard, he said, was probably the wind blowing down the chimney and | Ia n ha ixbinb c old and open in many places. hadn't any more to say, and went on my way to the railroad, reaching there in three 1 hours, and noticing all the way that an old roadbed with the ties and rails still on 1t in places lay near the wagon road all the way to the station.
 "At the station while waiting for my train l got talking to the station agent, who was bright, sharp chap, and inci- dentally I asked him about that rail- road train. He looked at me quick as a wink and asked me the particulars, which I told him.
 It's a ha'nt,' he said. Last night was the night 1t always comes. When the road was first built here there was 1 a branch that run back mp in that country to a place about two or three miles beyond that house, to kind of a summer resort up there, mineral springs and a waterfall. Excursions i for day used to go there from towns down the road from here and up the other way. Ten years ago tonight an excursion was coming back from there, | and just about the neighborhood of that house the engineer saw an obstruction on the track that was going to throw the whole shebang over the bank, and whistling down brakes and cutting his engine loose he went straight fer 1t and knocked it off the track. Of course he and the engine went with it, and neith- er of them was ever any more use after that racket; but the train was saved, and that was enough for man to die l for. because there were two hundred women and children in the excursion.
 "I It was shown that some of the peo- pie in the neighborhood had attempted to wreck the train and 1t spoiled the excursion business. There was coal on l the branch that kept the last nine or ten miles of it in operation for few years longer but there never was an- other passenger train to go over the place where the engineer was killed. That Is to say, never another train that anybody ever saw; but there has been one go to the spot, or rather go to 1t and stop. One night In every year for the last ten years, have heard it, and so has the man in that house, and you are the only other man who has that I know of, because his nearest neighbor is three miles away and nobody ever gets in that neighborhood to stay all night. I suppose l would not have been there if he had not asked me as a friend to come up on one of the ami Versary nights and hear 1t, so he could talk to me about 1t and advise with me whether to move away or stick it out. l I advised him to stay, and had very nearly forgotten about it, for really the subject hasn't come to my notice for four or five years, and you can wager money never went back there to listen to it any more. I'll be blamed If I couldn't see that engineer and his en- zine whirling to destruction the night I stayed there because I knew what to expect and sat up to wait for 1t with every nerve at it's highest tension. Darn queer kind of ghost, ain't it?
 T told him I thought it was" conclu- ded the drummer, "and when I suggest ed to him that I might perhaps tell the story to some one else and it right get into the newspapers, he laughed and said that was just the same as keeping it a dead secret, for nobody in that neighborhood took newspaper or could read one if he d."-Washington Star.