He lighted another match and reached for his ax. Just then Mark let out a sound that ’most made me jump into the pit. It was the dolefulest, sufferingest, miserablest moan you ever heard. The hair around the back of my neck curled right up tight, and I hain’t ever been able to git the kink quite out of it. Scairt! Whew! Say, I’ve been scairt a couple of times, but I hain’t never seen anything that was a patch on what I felt then. I was just going to scramble up and scoot when Mark grabbed me.
“Set still,” he whispered. “That was me.”
“Oh!” says I. “Well, don’t do it ag’in, or you won’t have me in the audience. I calc’late I heard about all I kin digest.”
“You’ll hear worse,” says he.
We listened. Jason wasn’t making a sound. Jest standing still and letting his knees rattle together, I calc’late. Perty soon he spoke.
“Who’s that?” he says, faint-like.
Mark he let out another one of them moans, but this was a better one than the first. It fair made your blood curdle up into hunks.
“Ooo-oo!” says Jason, just like that.
Mark stuck out his fish-pole slow and cautious with that clammy hand on the end of it, and then, all of a sudden, there was a thin little ray of light that shot out and touched that hand so’s you could see it plain, but you couldn’t see anything else. It jest looked like a hand a-floating in the air, sort of pale and fleshy and horrible—and it moved straight toward Jason. Mark he let loose another moan.
“Jason Barnes!” says Mark, in a hollow, awful kind of voice. “Jason Barnes!”