“What’s that?” said I, “a wasp?”
“A warsp!” he cried in a sort of furious fright. “Who ever see a pink warsp wi’ a mouth like a purse and blue inside?”
He stood by me, shaking and perspiring, and suddenly seized me with a tremulous hand.
“They shudn’t a’ sent me down there,” he whispered; “it give me the horrors, it did, to see that they’d burried him quick, and that for fower year he’d been struggling and wrenching to get out.”
“I’m afraid that the devil’s got you indeed, my friend.”
“It’s all along o’ thart. He come and he looked down upon me there in the pit.”
“Who did? The devil?”
“Him or thart Chis’ll doctor. It’s all one. I swat cold, I tell ye. I see his face make a ugly fiddle-pattern on the sky. My mate, he’d gone to dinner and the yard was nigh empty. ‘Look’ee here,’ I whispered up to him. ‘He were burried quick, as they burried that boy over in St. John’s, yonder, that you murdered.’”
CHAPTER XLI.
ACROSS THE WATER.
For an instant the blood in my arteries seemed to stop, so that I gasped when I tried to speak.