It turned the milk sour, lamed horses in their stalls, dried up the cows, made sear the Indian corn growing in the fields. Accompanied, as it usually was, by the howling of dogs and the hooting of owls, there could be no surer forerunner of disaster. Where the pines line the seashore it flitted from one desolate, grass grown dune to another, watchful upon those wild nights when merchant ships, driving their prows into the sand, burst asunder and distributed their freight of costly goods and human souls upon the relentless waves.
Upon such occasions Leeds’ devil was seen in the companionship of a beautiful, golden haired woman in white, or yet of some fierce eyed, cutlass bearing, disembodied spirit of a pirate who two centuries ago had barn wrecked upon the shore of Cape May county as, plying from the Spanish main, his galleon had gone to destruction. Again this same son of satan shared his haunts with a headless seaman whom the Barnegat people say Captain Kidd decapitated and whose stiffened trunk that very pirate king left standing as a sentinel of his buried ill gotten gold.
At other times Leeds’ devil, like a bird of prey, hovered over a silent, star bespangled pond in some silent recess of the cedar swamps, blasting with its foul breath the lives of hundreds of fishes, found floating, next day upon the surface, tainted and unfit for food. Again the dreaded fiend half ran, half flew through the shadowy vistas of the pines, while before it to their coverts hurried panther and deer, rabbits, squirrels and wild song birds.
