Chapter XXIII
The Dumb Supper
It was the thirty-first of October, All Souls’ eve, that mystic point of contact between the worlds when quick and dead are fabled to walk the ways of earth together, to meet eye to eye, and hold converse. A web of mountain legend clings dimly about this season.
The spirit of it—weird, elfin—was abroad, the air was full of it as, alone out in the gusty darkness of the autumn night, at eleven o’clock, Judith walked swiftly toward the Lusk place. Wrapped in a little packet she carried bread and salt, and a length of candle. She went across fields, and thus cut down the distance till it was possible to walk it in fifteen minutes.
As she approached the house, Speaker, a barely grown hound-pup, came rollicking out to meet her, leaping about her shoulder-high, frisking back toward the porch and waiting for her, all the while barking joyously.
“My Lord!” said Pendrilla’s sleepy small voice when Judith tapped on their window in the wing of the building where the girls roomed. “Ef that thar fool hound-pup ain’t loose! I hope he don’t wake up Grandpap. Cain’t you make him hush, Judith?”
Judith stooped and caressed the dog for a moment, quieting him. The girls presently appeared in the doorway fully dressed and, as it seemed, with their packets made, in addition to which Cliantha carried an old lantern unlighted in her hand.
“I’ll light it as soon as we get out in the road,” she announced whisperingly.
When they would have secured the dog that he might not follow them, they found that he, wise for his age, had disappeared.
“I bet he’s run down the road apiece; he’ll be a-hidin’ in the bushes waitin’ for us,” Cliantha opined pessimistically. But there was nothing to be done about it, and they set out, to be intercepted in just such manner as she foretold.