THE DOOMED RIDER

SCOTLAND

The Conan flows darkly, whirling in mossy eddies. It runs past an old burial ground, with the ruins of an old church with the rose-grown mullions of an arched window. Two hundred years ago, or maybe more, the building was complete and where the wood grows thickest there once was a cornfield.

Some Highlanders were busy one day harvesting the corn in that field. At noon, when the sun shone brightest and they were busiest, they heard a voice from the river cry out, “The hour but not the man has come.”

When they looked, they saw a kelpie standing on what they call a false ford, just in front of the old church. There was a deep, black pool both above and below, but on the ford there was a ripple that showed, as you might have thought, shallow water. And just in the middle of that stood the kelpie. Again it cried, “The hour but not the man has come.” Then, flashing through the water like a drake, it vanished into the lower pool.

The folk were standing wondering what the creature might have meant when they saw a horseman riding down the hill in haste, making straight for the false ford. Then they understood the kelpie’s words.

Four of the strongest among them sprang from the com to warn the rider of his danger. They told him what they had seen and heard and urged him to turn back and take another road—or stay for an hour where he was. But he would not listen to them and would have taken the ford in spite of them, had the Highlanders, determined to save him whether he would or no, not gathered round him and pulled him from his horse. Then, for the sake of his own safety, they locked him in the old church.

When the hour had passed, the fatal hour of the kelpie, they flung the church door open and called out that he could now continue on his journey. But there was no answer.

They called out a second time and still there was no answer.

Then they went in and found the rider lying stiff and cold on the floor, his face resting in the water of the stone trough that still stands among the ruins.

His hour had come, and he had fallen in a fit, head-foremost, into the trough. And there he had drowned.