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While the Lightning Flashed the Phantom Figures on the Phantom Ship Reefed Their Sails and Hurled Blasphemy at Each Other, the Death Fires Hovered O'er, and Slimy Serpents Twined Themselves in the Rigging of the Vessel.

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      "Do you mean to say you never heard of the ghost of the Dismal Swamp?" said an an old Georgia traveling man to a Post reporter the other evening in the lobby of the Metropolitan Hotel. "No, I don't mean the Indian hunter and his ghostly sweetheart, that are celebrated in the old school reader poem. It is not so well known a ghost as that pair, but it is infinitely more gruesome. It is a regular Flying Dutchman of the swamp, and to see it brings death within a year, sure as yellow fever. I've seen it, or a part of it, but I suppose it's because I didn't get a real good look at it that I am here now.

      "It's a queer story, that of the ghost ship, and it is told with more or less picturesque variations by the Indians and some of the swamp crackers. From what I have seen, I am inclined to believe there is some foundation of truth, at least, in the part of the story that says there is a full rigged ship stranded up somewhere in the center of the swamp.

      "I was up hunting in the little Dismal when I came near solving the mystery of the swamp. It's a real nice region for fishing and fevers, though not much good for anything else. It contains about 10,000 acres, and a man lost in there might wander for years without getting out if he did not starve to death or get eaten up by snakes and alligators, which he probably would in short order.

Guides Who Knew Their Business.

      I had two good Indian guides with me, so I was not much afraid of getting lost or starving. We worked our way up into the swamp by way of Alligator River, and in the course of a couple of weeks' hunting, got clear beyond the track of even ordinary hunting parties. The Indians knew the paths of the swamp that no one else knew anything about, and I would go off with one of them for a couple of days, excursion through the tamarack, and finally break out some night on the edge of a swamp lake or a big lagoon and find the other guide with the batteau drawn up on shore and a fire ready to cook supper.

      It is a wonderful country for a man who loves the picturesque and mysterious in nature. Where the forest closes in on the river there is a wild, solemn beauty, that appeals to the imagination, especially in the cool, gray light of the morning or in the warmer light of the afternoon, that gives the color of the atmosphere to the surrounding wilderness and to the narrow, tortuous bayous that wind on and on out of sight into the shadows on either hand.

      "Toward the last hour of light the effect is something magical. From the boughs of the dark spreading live oak and from the phantom arms of the cypress, the long, motionless pendants of pale gray moss point down to their inverted images in the water below them. You can feel the stillness, and at the same time hear the thousand voices of the swamp almost as in a dream. You can hear the swish of wings as a blue crane or a big white heron flags quietly away, fifty yards ahead of you down the stream, and feel the pulse of the ripples as a musk rat swims across with his nose just breaking up the water in the golden path of the sunlight through the trees.

The Indians Were Queer.

      "But it was not poetry and picturesqueness that we were after, that is, not altogether. We had hunting and fishing in plenty, and finally, when, as I say we had gotten out of sight and sound of the average hunting party, we made what we decided was to be our last camp before returning. It was on one of the big swamp hummocks overgrown with short, sweet grass, and covered with great spreading tamarack trees. It was a regular island in the jungle of the swamp, from which no white man could ever have found his way out again.

      "The swamp was overgrown with giant trees, through which were opened vistas into the deeper shadowland of the swamp around. But from the looks of the stream I Judged that there must be the opening of some big swamp lake not far ahead. I suggested that we might push ahead and see what we found the next day. But the Indians acted queer, and said we had gone plenty far enough, which I thought was rather strange, seeing that they were getting paid by the week. I questioned them, but could not get anything out of them, and all the rest of the evening they were hobnobbing over the fire and pointing off into the swamp till I might almost have thought there was some plan on hand to plant me permanently in the swamp and make off with my valuables, had I not known the fellows so long and been on so many similar expeditions with them before.

Saw the Phantom Ship.

      "Just about sunset I climbed one of the trees and took a look about. You must remember that up to that time I had never heard anything of the swamp ship, but looking off in the direction I judged the lake must be, I was almost certain I saw the top masts of a big vessel mingle with the tangle of the trees. It seemed to be fully half a mile away, too far to tell what sort of a craft it was, but one mast was gone at the cross trees, and the other canted over like a part of an old crumbling wreck.

      "It was a beautiful outlook from my perch, the sun gilding the tops of the trees and then sinking out of sight through their branches, lighting up all the west like a great conflagration, and turning the black, still waters of the bayou blood red. There were three buzzards circling through the sunset quadrant like moats in a sunbeam, and as it got darker they settled down like black shadows seemingly on the very masts of the old wreck.

      "I went down and told the Indians what I had seen, and then they acted scared sure enough. They assured me that they loved me like a father, and that they were utterly devoted to me so long as I had a plug of tobacco left, but they grieved to say that I was a dead man. I told them I was naturally sorry to hear that, but craved to know what blight I had incurred from watching an unusually fine sunset from the top of a tamarack tree. They said that it was not a matter that was good to talk about, especially at such a time and place, but that, since I was doomed I might as well be told about it, and lighting their pipes after supper was over they lay down by the fire and told me the story of the ghost ship.

A Particular Friend of His.

      "They said it was two men's lives before the stars fell, which would bring it about the close of the Revolution, the great meteorological shower of 1833 serving as a calculating point for dates all through the south, that the buccaneers from the West Indies were very bad and equally plenty off the coast. One in particular was of a most evil reputation, a devilish pirate with a black beard, and eyes like fire coals in the back of a chimney, a description that corresponded very well to that of the notorious 'Spade-Beard,' so I nodded my head and told them that he was a particular friend of mine.

      "They seemed rather staggered at my assurance, but proceeded with the story, which was that this two-legged sea-serpent had fallen in with a British merchantman, bullion laden, under convoy of a frigate. A storm came up and separated the treasure ship from her escort, and the buccaneer, falling in with her in the storm, ran her aboard, lashed to her, and murdering all her crew, secured the treasure and made off under cover of the storm, his own vessel being almost dismantled in the adventure.

      "He ran inside the sen islands, but the storm continued to increase in fury such as was never known before or since along the coast, and finally culminated in a great tidal wave, sent, of course, for the pirate's just punishment, that overflowed the island barrier and carried the robber vessel, with all her black-hearted crew, up through the reaches of the swamp river, over the tree-tops, miles inland, where the receding waters left her.

Corpses in the Rigging.

      "While the Indians were telling the story with lowered voices and mysterious gestures, the night had fallen, and there had come up a regular Southern thunder storm. It interrupted the tale, and we tipped up our boat for shelter and staked down our tarpaulin over it. When we had rigged up this shelter and the wind was howling like panthers through the trees, the Indians, as a sort of cheerful accompaniment to the storm, continued their tale of how, at intervals, the pirate vessel had been seen on stormy nights — a rotten, crumbling wreck, sailing the swamp, down the bayous that were scarcely wide enough for her masts to pass through the tress, and then again how she would rise and fly over the tree-tops.

      "All her sails and rigging was gone, they said, but the swamp moss had grown to the spars in their place, and the crew of ghastly corpses could be seen in the tops and on the yards, reefing the swamp sails with live snakes, and cheering all sorts of blasphemy to each other every time lightning struck the masts. Death fires, the Indians said, floated over the rotten decks, and green lights glowed through the gaping seams of the hull, and the pirate captain, with one arm torn off at the shoulder and one side of his head carried away by a round shot, would fire noiselessly broadsides from the rusty cannon on the deck while the lightning flashes seemed to especially pick out the wreck as their mark though they went straight through it without damaging it in the least.

Sure Death to Look Upon It.

      No one, the Indians assured me, ever lived more than a year after seeing the phantom, which was very encouraging, as I thought I had seen a part of it at least that very afternoon.

      "The storm that night was fearful. The lightning licked through the trees like whip-lashes and fired the forest in half a dozen places. But when the rain came down and put out the fire and churned up the waters of the bayou till the black water was turned to white foam that overflowed the banks and surrounded the knoll on which we were camped. Then the snakes and all the rest of the crawling demons of the swamp seemed to pick out the knoll where we camped as their especial refuge, and we could see hundreds more of them carried down on the flood through the swamp twisting and writhing In the water. The animals were driven from cover, too. The panthers howled in the trees around, and we saw one deer and dozens of smaller animals carried down on the roaring stream.

      "You may bet I kept an involuntary lookout for the phantom pirate, but the only glimpse I had of her was once when a sheet of lightning flooded the whole of the western sky. Then I could have sworn I saw the same leaning mast, the broken cross-trees outlined against the heavens, and at the moment I would not have sworn but that there as a corpse struggling with the snakes in the rigging."