Hi and welcome back to Nighty Night, bedtime stories to keep you awake.

I'm your host, Rabiakjadri. In this week's story, by one of my favorite

authors, Ambrose Biers, we are led on a slow, suspenseful climb to terror.

We're at the summit, we are met with not one but two fantastic plot twists.

A holy terror by Ambrose Beers.

Part 1. There was an entire lack of interest in the latest arrival at Herdy Gurdy.

He was not even christened with a picturesquely descriptive nickname which is so frequently a mining

camp's word of welcome to the newcomer.

In almost any other camp thereabout, this circumstance would of itself have secured him some such appellation as the white-headed

conundrum or no sarvy, an expression naively supposed to suggest to quick intelligences

the Spanish, who knows. He came without provoking a ripple of concern

upon the social surface of Herdy Gurdy, a place which to the general Californian

contempt of men's personal history,

super added a local indifference of its own.

The time was long past when it was of any importance who came there,

or if anybody came. No one was living at Herdy Gurdy.

Two years before the camp had boasted a stirring population of two or three thousand males

and not fewer than a dozen females.

A majority of the former had done a few weeks earnest work in demonstrating

to the disgust of the latter the singularly mendacious character of the person whose ingenious tales of rich gold deposits

had lured them tither. Work, by the way, in which there was as little mental satisfaction as pecuniary profit.

For a bullet from the pistol of a public spirited citizen had put that imaginative gentleman beyond the

...