“These good folk are curious. It’s no affair of mine, but half a minute ago there came a yell out of the old cabin yonder fit to wake the dead.”
“Well?” I said, again, with a mighty assumption of coolness I hardly felt.
“Oh, don’t suppose I care. It only seemed to me that some day, perhaps, you’ll have the place stoned about your ears, if you don’t let a little more light in.”
A murmur went up from the half-dozen rustics and brainless idlers.
“We don’t warnt no drownding ghosteses in Winton,” said a voice.
I went straight up to them.
“Don’t you?” I said. “Then you’d best keep out of reach of them that can make you that and something worse. I suppose some of you have cried out with the lumbago before now?”
“That warn’t no lumbago cry, master.”
“Wasn’t it, now? Have you ever had it?”
“No—I harsn’t.”