“Has it? Has it indeed?” Dr. Tully was so excited that he spilled some of his mint tea. “Now that brings us to something I’ve neglected to investigate, the possibility of a connection between the appearances of General Caine and the exhumation of his body. The interesting thing is that there were apparently no appearances for a number of years between the early 1920s and the early 1960s—the time when Miss Hannah Caine was in good health and able to keep a watch on the place. Then, about 1962, she became bedridden a good part of the time and it was then she employed Mrs. Reddy.”

“And when was the next supposed appearance of the General?” asked Father Jackson.

“According to the stories I’ve collected, it may have been that same summer. I’ll have to check my records, but I think it was in August, 1962, that a fifteen-­year-­old boy named McDaniels saw a man fitting the description of General Caine in the woods near the Caine farm. The boy was setting muskrat traps in a creek and he saw a man in a Civil War uniform standing on the bank watching him.”

Dr. Tully had been mopping up his spilled tea and he waited now until the proprietor brought him a fresh pot. “Now then,” he said, “it seems obvious that the General needs a body of some sort for these visits. He doesn’t seem to be a spirit. It’s nothing of an ectoplasmic nature. He’s never diaphanous and trailing vapors, that sort of thing. Am I right, Mrs. Caine? No, he just appears in solid human form and then apparently walks away. No one has ever reported seeing him vanish into thin air.”

“What about last night?” I said. “I drove my car right through the horse and rider.”

“It may have seemed so at the moment, but maybe the rider pulled up the horse and avoided the car at the last instant. Maybe you closed your eyes for a couple of seconds.”

I had to admit it was possible. It would have been the normal reaction, frightened as I was. But the horse had been so close. I could still see it rearing, seemingly not ten feet away and almost directly in front of me. Maybe I did close my eyes then, but could the horse have been swung away with the car that close?

“You think it was a real horse then too?”

“Oh, undoubtedly. If it was there at all, it was real. I’ve never heard of a ghost horse.” Dr. Tully chuckled. “That’s something that ought to be fairly easy to check on. There aren’t that many horses around here anymore.”

“And the rider?” I asked.

“It could well have been General Caine. But according to what the members of his sect believe, not General Caine in his own body. In someone else’s body.”