The village of Leeds lies in the foothills of the Catskills, up from the Hudson River Valley a few miles. It was settled early, and by the time of the Revolution it had living in or near it a number of prosperous citizens, among whom the Salisbury family were perhaps the most prosperous. Surrounded by a thousand upland acres, they lived in a large stone house which had been built in 1705. Throughout much of the eighteenth century the owner of this property was an arbitrary, overbearing man named William Salisbury, who ruled his slaves and indentured servants with a will that insisted on obedience, unquestioning and immediate. Among the latter group was a young German girl named Anna Swartz, who was paying with service for her passage from the old country. She was a gay, laughter-loving girl who enjoyed merry parties and the new ways of dancing she found here, which were even better than the old village dances at home. There was little or no gaiety on the Salisbury farm, and about her only satisfactions came from the milch cows which she enjoyed bringing in from pasture with a little dog that had adopted her soon after her arrival at the farm. The hours she labored were long and tedious, and the relaxations were rare indeed. Not far from the center of Leeds, there lived a good-natured, good-for-nothing German family whose door was always ajar to whatever lighthearted person wanted to come in. It was not a place calculated to encourage sobriety, virtue, or industry, but the people who went there had a lot of fun. Salisbury learned that when she could sneak away, Anna was going there, and he made it vividly clear that she should go no more.

One night soon after this, word came up to him that the girl had sneaked off the farm and headed for Leeds. This was the last of a series of petty irritations; there was a streak of insubordination in the girl that needed disciplining. Such a spirit and such actions could lead to trouble, and William Salisbury had had enough. He strode to the barns and ordered a horse saddled while he went into the harness room to pick up a ten- or twelve-foot rope. He jumped on the horse and streaked to the village. He pulled up short at the house of laughter and dismounted. For a moment he stood in the doorway, liking what he saw even less than he had expected. He called Anna by name and she came to him, half in fear, half in anger.

The group in the house came to the door, and in the light which flooded past them into the dooryard, they saw this man, whose every motion betrayed his anger, tying one end of his rope around Anna's waist, the other to the girth of his saddle. He worked silently, speaking neither to the girl nor her companions. He did not even glance up as he slipped his foot into the stirrup and swung up into the saddle. He would humiliate this girl, and teach her and her hoyden friends that he meant to be obeyed.

The horse was still walking as they left the yard, but Salisbury touched its flank lightly with his heel until it had struck up a leisurely jog trot. Soon the girl was panting, running as fast as her weary legs would carry her. Then, in the darkness she stumbled on a rock in the road; as she fell, the sudden tugging on the firth frightened the hose. First a leap. and then his hooves pounding down the country road. Anna screamed, and her body was hurled bumping and bouncing at the end of the rope. Salisbury tried to stop the horse, but in one of its wild leaps he was thrown into the ditch. He sat up, bruised and shaken, to see two spots of light, bobbing and weaving in the darkness, the white rump of the horse and the body of the girl.

Salisbury was by nature and instinct on the side of the law, and he reported the accident to the proper authorities. He was tried and convicted of murder and ordered to be hung, but the sentence was not to be carried out until he was ninety-nine years old. Until that time he was to wear a halter about his neck as a perpetual reminder of his ordered fate. A lenient judge permitted the rope to become a silken cord in time, but his was a lonely life, isolated from his friends and neighbors. The people began to avoid the road by his farm after dark if they could, because too many had seen the white horse and bounding white form racing through too many nights to be comfortable. Long after they all had died, her favorite milch cow mooed and the little dog moaned as the horse and girl passed by. Strangest of all was the womanly figure that appeared on a rock near where Anna died. It would sit and sing wildly, cry out and laugh hysterically as it gazed at the lighted candle on each finger. Salisbury grew to be an old man before his time, but he lived on, reporting to the courthouse each year, just as he had been ordered to do. The year he was ninety-nine he went as usual, but the judge who tried him, all the jurors and the witnesses, everybody was long since in his grave. There was no one in the year 1800 who felt called upon to carry out the sentence, so the old man went back to his farm, the long years fulfilled, and yet death did not come. When he had lived a full century he died, and after that, when the horse ran in the moonlight there was a rider astride, and so it has been for a century and a half.