When land warrants were allotted to Jacob Marshall and Jacob Mintges, of the Hebrew colony at Schaefferstown, there were elaborate preparations made by these two lifelong friends to migrate to the new country of the Christunn. That the warrants were laid side by side made the situation doubly pleasant, a compensation in a measure for any regrets at leaving the banks of the beautiful Milbach. The country was becoming too closely settled, opportunities were circumscribed, and the liberality of the Proprietary Government should be taken advantage of.

When the two groups of pioneers were ready to start for the new home, it was like some scene from the patriarchal days of the Old Testament. The long, lean, gaunt, black-bearded Jews, black-capped, cloaked to their heels, and carrying big staffs, led the way, followed by their families and possessions of live stock, farming and household utensils. Each head of a family had an Indian and Negro servant or two, which added to the picturesqueness of the caravans. Dogs, part wolf, herded the flocks of sheep, goats and young cattle, while the women rode on mares, the foals of which trotted along unsteadily at their sides.

Rachel, Jacob Marshall’s handsome daughter, was mounted on a piebald filly; on her back was slung her violin, a genuine Joseph Guarnerius, with which she discoursed sacred music around the campfire in the evenings, just as her ancestors may have done on some harp or cruit in remote days in Palestine or in the Arabian highlands.

These German Jews, who came to Pennsylvania in 1702 to re-convert the Indians, whom they believed to be the lost tribe of Israel, back to the ancient faith of Moses, while destined to fail as proselyters, became one of the potent root sources of the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch, “The Black Dutch” of the Christunn, Philadelphia, New York and the World.

The Pennsylvania Dutch are the most adaptable race in the world, altering the spelling of their names, their genealogies and traditions with every generation. They find success in all callings and in all walks of life like the true Nomads that they are. A Pennsylvania Dutchman’s lineage is kaleidoscopic any way–possibly German, Jewish, probably Indian, with sure admixtures of Dutch, Quaker, Swiss, Scotch-Irish, Greek, Bohemian, Spanish or Huguenot. And there were some propagandists shallow enough to try to line them up with Kaiserism in the days just anterior to the World War, and call them “Pennsylvania Germans.”

Their very swarthiness and leanness, the intenseness of their black eyes, gave the lie to any Teutonic affiliations, despite the jargon that they speak. And what a race of giants they have produced–Pershing, Hoover, Gorgas, Schwab, Replogle, Sproul, the Wanamakers, Newton Diehl Baker, Jane Addams–a group as potent as any other in the sublime effort of making the world “safe for democracy.”

When the pilgrims reached the Karoondinha, they were met by the local agents and surveyors of the Proprietors, who escorted them to their new estates, which were bounded on the south by the Christunn, now renamed “Middle Creek,” and on the north by the craggy heights of the culminating pinnacle of Jack’s Mountain, the famed “High Top,” climbed by the Pennsylvania Alpine Club, August 24, 1919.

A large gray fox, or Colishay, having led Mintges‘ dogs away from the camp, caused this “Father in Israel” to be absent during the critical moments when the line between his property and that of Marshall was being confirmed by the Proprietary surveyors. When he returned, exultingly swinging the fox’s pelt above his head and looking all the world like a lower Fifth Avenue fur jobber, the day was almost spent and the surveyors were gathering up their instruments.

Marshall, who was a kindly and just man, tried to explain to his friend, before the sun went down, just where the line was blazed. It seemed fair enough at the time to Mintges. Later on, when alone one day, he walked over the line, comparing it with the warrant, and it did not seem to satisfy him as much. He believed that the surveyors had deviated a rod or two all along, to his disadvantage. Doubtless if such was the case, it had been due to their haste to get through, for they had a daily grind of similar cases, but Marshall, he thought, should have compelled them to follow the parchment drafts, and not uncertain instruments.

Nevertheless, he decided to say nothing to his friend; they had always been good intimates, why should their relations be jeopardized for a paltry rod or two. Mintges confided the mistake to his wife, and later on to his children. It was unfortunate, but where therethere were so few neighbors it was hardly worth a fight.

As Mintges grew older the matter began to prey on his mind, to obsess him. It worried him until his head ached, and he could not drive it away. Marshall and his heirs were profiting at his expense; it should not be allowed to rest that way.

The surveyors had placed a great stone at the upper corner of the line, at the slope of the mountain, and there Jacob Mintges repaired one moonlight night, armed with a crowbar, and reset the stone two rods on the alleged domain of Jacob Marshall. Mintges was an old man at the time, rabbinical in appearance, and he chuckled and “washed his hands” as he stood and viewed the fruits of his labor. A wrong had been quietly righted; why hadn’t he done it twenty years ago?

It so happened that Jacob Marshall went out for chestnuts a week or so after Mintges’ performance, and saw the altered position of the stone. Instead of hastening to his friend’s house and asking him for a frank explanation, he, not being conscious of any wrong-doing, moved the stone back to its original position, to rebuke the presumptuous Mintges. Then he stood admiring his work, while hehe stroked his long black beard.

A few weeks later Mintges and his sons went to the mountain to brush out a road on which to haul logs with their oxteams in the winter-time. One of the boys, named Lazarus, called his father’s attention to the stone’s position. It made the old man “see red,” and he would not rest until, with the aid of his sons, it was again set where he felt it should rightfully be.

All this produced a coolness, almost a feud, between the two families, which kept up until Jacob Mintges died at the age of eighty years. Jacob Marshall, friend of his youth and companion of his “trek” to the wilderness, did not attend the obsequies.

It was not many nights afterwards when reports were made on all sides that Mintges’ spook was abroad, walking about the fields and lanes adjacent to Jacob Marshall’s home, his arms holding aloft a great block of stone. Marshall saw the apparition several times, but shunned it as he had the living Mintges the last years of his life.

What he wanted was very plain, for sometimes the night wind wafted the mournful words down Marshall’s bedroom chimney (for he always kept his windows nailed shut): “Where shall I put it; oh, where shall I put it?”

The ghost began his hauntings in the spring, kept it up all summer, fall, winter, then another spring and summer. He had affixed himself to the family, Marshall thought, as he racked his brain to lay the troublesome night prowler.

It was during the fall of the second year that a big party of moonlight ’coon hunters went up the lane which led between the Marshall and Mintges farms, headed for the rocky heights of Jack’s Mountain. In the party was Otto Gleim, the half-witted drunkard of Selin’s Grove, little, dumpy, long-armed High German, high-shouldered Otto Gleim, who was left at the foot of the mountain to hold one of the lanterns.

Gleim was half full on this occasion, as it was in the cider season, and he staggered about under the aged chestnut trees, while his wits revolved in his head with the speed of an electric fan. He felt lonesome, sick and uncomfortable. It was a relief to see a great, tall figure, with a long, black beard, approaching him, holding aloft a huge stone. It looked like “Uncle Jake” Marshall at first; no, it wasn’t–it was no one else but the late “Uncle Jake” Mintges, his neighbor.

As the gaunt figure drew nearer, it began groaning and wailing: “Where shall I put it; oh, where shall I put it?” in tones as melancholymelancholy as those of the Great Horned Owl on a New Year’s Eve.

“Put it where it belongs,” spluttered Otto Gleim, the drunkard, with a gleam of super-human prescience, and lo and behold, the ghost set the stone where it had been for twenty years after the surveyors had placed it there. Then the apparition vanished, and Gleim, in a matter-of-fact way, sat down on the cornerstone, where he waited until the ’coon hunters returned.

Jake Mintges’ ghost ceased to wander and lament, but instead allied itself closely with Jake Marshall’s family as private stock banshee, warning, token or familiar. Whenever a disaster was due to any member he would show his grinning tusks, as much as to say: “Now, make the best of what is coming; life is short anyway.”

No doubt his visits of forewarning strengthened the nerves of the family to face trouble with a greater degree of equanimity; in all events the poor old fellow meant it that way. Old and young, rich and poor, in cities or in the wilds, wherever the blood of Jacob Marshall flowed, the ghost of Mintges was in evidence at the climacteric moments of their lives. They were all used to him, and never resented his visits or tried in any way to lay him.

The scene shifts to one of the last to encounter this strange old ghost. It is in a great city, in a high-ceilinged, yet gloomy room, furnished in the plush and mahogany of the middle eighties of the last century. A very dark girl, with full pouting lips and black eyes, half closed and sullen, yet beautiful in the first flush of youth withal, is seated on one of the upholstered easy chairs. Standing in the bay window facing her is a very tall man, equally dark, his drooping black mustache and long Prince Albert coat making him appear at least ten years older than the twenty-eight which was his correct age.

On a centre table, with a top of brown onyx, on which were also several bisque ornaments, lay an ancient violin and bow, a veritable Joseph Guarnerius. It was made of a curious piece of spruce which, when growing in some remote forest of Northern Italy, had been punctured by a “Gran Pico” or large green woodpecker, and the wood stained, giving a unique and picturesque touch to this specimen of the skill of the old master of Cremona.

“I have determined to go home tonight,” said the dark girl, with decision, “and nothing can stop me. When any of our family see the face of Jacob Mintges, it means disaster to some one near to us; my mother and her old parents, whom I left so suddenly, may be grieving to death; I will go to them tonight.”

The tall man fumbled with his long fingers among the tassels on the back of a chair in front of him, as if trying to frame up a decisive answer. “This is what I call base ingratitude,” he faltered at length, in high, almost feminine tones. “Just when I have had your musical talent developed, turning you from a common fiddler to a finished artiste, and having you almost ready to make your stage debut as a popular juvenile, you leave me in the lurch, and all because you imagined you saw a ghost–imagined, I say, for there are no such things.”

The dark girl sat perfectly still, biting her full red lips, her immoble face as if made of ivory.

“What are you, anyway?” she finally responded; “nothing but what my father called a mountebank; he hated them, an actor, and I owe you nothing but contempt for having brought me here to be your plaything while my youth and good looks last.”

Then, as she got up and started towards a door, the tall man darted after her.

“I’ll not let you make a fool of yourself,” he hissed, theatrically. Catching her by the wrists, he attempted to detain her.

“Sit down; we must have this out.”

She was almost as tall as he, and very muscular, and the Jewish strain in her blood was hot. The pair struggled about the room, until the man in his anger seized the old violin and hit her a heavy blow over the head. She sank down on the floor in a limp mass, and the man, picking up his brown Fedora, ran out of the room and down the long flight of stairs and out into the street. The girl was not badly hurt, only stunned, and came to herself in about fifteen minutes. She saw that she was alone, and the Guarnerius was around her neck.

Gathering herself up, her first thought was for the violin, and tying the smallest chips in her handkerchief she went to the inner room and began to pack a large portmanteau. Then she put on her hat, veil and cloak and, locking the apartment door and slipping the key in her grip, she left the house and hurried down town towards the railroad depot.

It was dark when she reached there, and she quickly boarded a local, to wait in the suburbs until the night sleeping car train for Derrstown made its stop there. All went well, and by midnight she was boarding the sleeper and was soon afterwards undressed and under the sooty-smelling blankets in a lower berth.

She did not know how long she had been sleeping when the train suddenly stopped with a jerk and she was awake. Looking around, she saw a face peering through the curtains. It was not the porter, but the leering, open mouth, old Jacob Mintges himself, tusks and all.

Twice now in twenty-four hours he had come to her, for the night previous she had waked just in the gray half light before dawn, and had seen him standing grinning by her bedside.

An inexperienced person might have screamed, but not so Eugenie Carlevan, the great-great-granddaughter of Jacob Marshall. When their eyes met, Mintges quickly withdrew, and the girl, wide awake, began thinking over the past years of her life, as the train again started to roll on into the night. She had always been fond of music and theatres. The violin given to her on her sixth birthday by her grandfather Marshall had become the evil genius of her destiny. Her father had died and her mother was too much of a drudge to control her. She had attended every circus, burlesque, minstrel show or dramatic performance that had come to the town where she had lived, since she was thirteen years old.

When the young Thespian who called himself Derment Catesby had come to Swinefordstown, where she was visiting an aunt, with the “Lights O’London” Company, she had fallen violently in love with him, had made his acquaintance, and he, struck by her imperious beauty and musical predilections, had asked her to go away with him.

She had joined him a few days later in Sunbury, bringing her precious violin, and traveled with him to the great city. There the actor soon signed up to play in repertoire at a stock company. She liked him well enough, despite his vanity and selfishness, for he was very handsome. It was before the days when actors were clean-shaven like every servant, and looked much like other people. However much she had loved him, Jacob Mintges’ ghost had revealed a more pressing duty twice, and she was on her way home.

Soon she fell asleep again, and did not wake until the porter’s face appeared to notify her that the train was leaving Sunbury. Her mother lived with her aged parents out near Hartley Hall, among the high mountains; it would be a relief to see those lofty peaks and wide expanse of vision once more, after the cramped outlook of the city. How peculiarly sweet the air seemed, with the sun coming up behind the fringe of old yellow pines and oaks along the river! What refreshing zephyrs were wafted from those newly-ploughed fields. The bluebirds and robins were singing in the maple trees about the station. On a side-track stood the little wood-burner engine, with its bulbous stack, puffing black smoke, ready to pull its train of tiny cars out to the wonderful, wild mountain country, the land of Lick Run Gap, the Lost Valley, the High Head, Big Buffalo, Winklebleck and Shreiner!

How well she remembered the first time she had seen that wood-burner, as a little tot, going on a visit with her father and mother. It was in the golden hour, and deep purple shadows fell from the station roof athwart the golden light on the platform!

All these thoughts were crowding through her head until the bell on the little engine reminded her that the L. & T. train was soon to depart.

She reached home in time for dinner, was received with no enthusiasm, for her mother and grandparents were true mountaineers, and their swarthy faces masked their feelings, yet she was made to feel perfectly welcome.

Nobody had died, no one was sick, the house hadn’t burned down, evidently the trials foretold by Jake Mintges were yet to come.

That afternoon she showed the broken violin to her grandfather, who took it to his workbench in an out-house to repair it, undaunted by the seeming endlessness of the reconstruction.

Eugenie seemed perfectly contented to be at home, She had had enough of the bizarre, and reveled again in the humdrum. Five or six days after her return the weekly county paper appeared at the house, with its boiler plate front page and patent insides. Some instinct mademade her open the wrapper as it lay on the kitchen table. On the front page she saw the likeness of a familiar face, the well-known full eyes, oval cheeks, rounded chin and drooping mustache, Derment Catesby. Then the headlines caught her eyes, “Handsome Actor Shot to Death by Insanely Jealous Husband at Stage Door.” Then she glanced at the date and the hour. It was the night that she had taken the train–the very moment, perhaps, that Jacob Mintges’ grinning face had looked through the curtains of her berth. Yes, the murderer had waited a long time, as the victim had tarried in the green-room.

Eugenie sucked her full lips a moment, then looked hard at the picture and the whole article again. Then she turned to her mother and grandparents, who were seated about the stove.

“Say, folks,” she said, coldly,coldly, “there’s the fine gent I went away with from Swinesfordstown. I got out in time, the very night he was murdered.”

The mother and the old people half rose in their chairs to look at the wood cut.

“How did you know he was playing you false?” said the old grandfather.

“How did I know, gran’pap?” she replied. “Why, the night before, Jake Mintges came to me, and I knew something was due to go wrong, and home was the place for little me. You see I missed it all by a stone’s throw.”

"You’re right, ‘Genie’," said the old mountaineer. “Mintges never comes to us unless he means business.”