"--and said that she'd been murdered, and buried in the Red Barn. Well, her mother told her dream, and the peopled laughed at her. But the ghost came to her a second time the next night, and a third time the next, and then the mother wouldn't be denied. They went to the Red Barn, and there they found Maria, done up in a sack, and buried under the floor. Every word of it is true. Now," said Seth, graciously and condescendingly, as though he were about to present Sally with a large piece of plum-cake, "I'll tell you something that I wouldn't tell to everybody. I saw that man hung."
Sally gazed at him with eyes dilated to their fullest extent. Seth Dumbrick, gratified at this exhibition of interest, moistened his thumb.
"I was there, and saw him hung. Corder his name was, and it's--ah, it's twenty odd year ago. I was a young man then, and I went to all the executions."
"Why?" inquired Sally, without any special reason for asking; adding as an afterthought, "Was they nice?"
Seth Dumbrick rasped his bristly chin again with his horny hands.
"Can't exactly say why," he honestly answered. "They wasn't particularly nice. I've seen seven men in a string. I can see 'em now, all of a row."
Staring into space upon this gloomy imagining, Seth Dumbrick paused a sufficient time to see the black cap; drawn over the faces of the doomed men, and the ropes adjusted. Which being done, and the men disposed of, he resumed the former topic.
"Then there were other dreams. Here's one. Two men work in a brewery. One kills the other, and heaves the body into the fire under the boiling vat, where it's burned into smoke and ashes. No one knows what's been done, and the story runs that the murdered man is drowned. The murderer goes to another town, and lives there. Now, then. A matter of seven years afterwards the murderer comes back again, and gets work in the same brewery. The first night of his return he goes to bed, and begins to speak in his sleep. Another man's abed in the same room with him, and that man is awake. 'Yes,' says the murderer in his sleep, it's just seven year ago since I did it.' The other man in a kind of careless way, says, 'What did you do seven year ago?' Upon that, the murderer gets out of bed, and crawls about the room. Then stops still all of a sudden. Then stands straight up. Then draws an imaginary knife. Then stabs an imaginary man. Stabs him once, twice, three times. Then stops and listens. Then creeps back to bed. All this the workman that's awake sees, because the moon is shining into the room, and it's all so plain that he can't hardly mistake what it means; but to make sure, he says, 'What was his name?' and the murderer mentions the name of the man who was supposed to be drowned seven years ago. 'Did you kill him?' he asks. 'I did,' says the murderer. 'What did you do with the body?' he asks again. 'I put it,' says the murderer in his sleep, 'into the fire under the vat.' That was enough. The next day he was taken in custody, and was so worked upon that he confessed, and was hung."
Seth Dumbrick related this story so dramatically that Sally thought it as good as a play, quite as good as the Murder at the Red Barn, which she had seen at the penny show.
"Did you see him hung?" she inquired.