We will print you a perfectly bound paperback of your selected title and send it to you at your nominated address

CAN SUCH THINGS BE?




Contents:

The death of Halpin Frayser
The secret of Macarger’s Gulch
One summer night
The moonlit road
A diagnosis of death
Moxon’s master
A tough tussle
One of twins
The haunted valley
A jug of sirup
Staley Fleming’s hallucination
A resumed identity
Hazen’s brigade
A baby tramp
The night-doings at “Deadman’s”
A story that is untrue
Beyond the wall
A psychological shipwreck
The middle toe of the right foot
John Mortonson’s funeral
The realm of the unreal
John Bartine’s watch
A story by a physician
The damned thing
Haïta the shepherd
An inhabitant of Carcosa
The Stranger



THE DEATH OF HALPIN FRAYSER



I

For by death is wrought greater change than hath been shown.  Whereasin general the spirit that removed cometh back upon occasion, and issometimes seen of those in flesh (appearing in the form of the bodyit bore) yet it hath happened that the veritable body without the spirithath walked.  And it is attested of those encountering who havelived to speak thereon that a lich so raised up hath no natural affection,nor remembrance thereof, but only hate.  Also, it is known thatsome spirits which in life were benign become by death evil altogether.- Hali.


One dark night in midsummer a man waking from a dreamless sleepin a forest lifted his head from the earth, and staring a few momentsinto the blackness, said: “Catherine Larue.”  He saidnothing more; no reason was known to him why he should have said somuch.

The man was Halpin Frayser.  He lived in St. Helena, but wherehe lives now is uncertain, for he is dead.  One who practices sleepingin the woods with nothing under him but the dry leaves and the dampearth, and nothing over him but the branches from which the leaves havefallen and the sky from which the earth has fallen, cannot hope forgreat longevity, and Frayser had already attained the age of thirty-two. There are persons in this world, millions of persons, and far and awaythe best persons, who regard that as a very advanced age.  Theyare the children.  To those who view the voyage of life from theport of departure the bark that has accomplished any considerable distanceappears already in close approach to the farther shore.  However,it is not certain that Halpin Frayser came to his death by exposure.

He had been all day in the hills west of the Napa Valley, looking fordoves and such small game as was in season.  Late in the afternoonit had come on to be cloudy, and he had lost his bearings; and althoughhe had only to go always downhill - everywhere the way to safety whenone is lost - the absence of trails had so impeded him that he was overtakenby night while still in the forest.  Unable in the darkness topenetrate the thickets of manzanita and other undergrowth, utterly bewilderedand overcome with fatigue, he had lain down near the root of a largemadroño and fallen into a dreamless sleep.  It was hourslater, in the very middle of the night, that one of God’s mysteriousmessengers, gliding ahead of the incalculable host of his companionssweeping westward with the dawn line, pronounced the awakening wordin the ear of the sleeper, who sat upright and spoke, he knew not why,a name, he knew not whose.

Halpin Frayser was not much of a philosopher, nor a scientist. The circumstance that, waking from a deep sleep at night in the midstof a forest, he had spoken aloud a name that he had not in memory andhardly had in mind did not arouse an enlightened curiosity to investigatethe phenomenon.  He thought it odd, and with a little perfunctoryshiver, as if in deference to a seasonal presumption that the nightwas chill, he lay down again and went to sleep.  But his sleepwas no longer dreamless.