Mrs. Parker shook her head.
“No, that ain’t it. There ain’t a violin in the country, and, besides, it’s too near; it’s like it came from here”—Mrs. Parker looked up at the bunkhouse door—“and none of Ethel’s plays.”
I said nothing. I remembered too well hearing the strains of the violin as they used to float out through the silent night while old Bohm played to himself up there in the bunkhouse, hour after hour. I was troubled as the echoes of the past grew louder.
“And then,” Mrs. Parker resumed, “there was that passage. I told you about that, didn’t I?”
“No. Passage! What passage?” I turned to her in the moonlight which showed a puzzled frown between her eyes.
“Why, the passage old Dad Patten found. I thought I’d told you about that, but maybe it was the year that you and Mr. Brook was away.” She paused a moment. “The third year after Ethel and John came here, John, he raised such a big crop of potatoes the cellar was plumb full, so he had Dad tear out some of the old bins under the bunk house to make some larger ones. Tom Lane was helpin’ him, and, of course, Tom was drunk. They’d tore out one or two, but when they come to the third, they found a deep hole behind it about four foot square. They stuck a spade into it, but it seemed to go back so far Dad he thought he’d investigate, so he begun to crawl into it to see how far it went. He was well in when Tom begun to laugh and act like he was goin’ to wall him up, so Dad backed out, for he said that he was afraid Tom was just drunk enough to do it. Dad said, though, that he went in the whole length of his body and stretched his arm out as far as he could, but didn’t touch nothin’, so he knew it went on further, and he said that it seemed to lead off in the direction of the old root cellar.”
“Root cellar,” I repeated, too perturbed to say anything else.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Parker, “but, you know, Dad, he’d never heard any of them stories about the root cellar; Dad’s too deaf to hear anything, so he didn’t think nothin’ about it except that it was some kind of an old dugout, and they went on and built the new bins, and about two months after John had got all his potatoes in Dad happened to say something about it. I was so beat I like to died, and when I told Dad what folks said about the old root cellar and Bohm, he turned as white as a sheet. You couldn’t get him up to the bunk house now if you was to drag him.”
“You don’t believe——” I began, then stopped as Mrs. Parker rose and put her hand on my shoulder.
“Childy, I don’t know whether I believe them tales or not. I’ve scarcely been off this place since you went away ten years ago and I’ve seen and heard some mighty strange things. There’s lots of things in life we can’t explain—we just have to accept ’em, and that’s the way I’ve had to do here. Maybe there’s spirits and maybe there ain’t, but there’s some facts there’s no gettin’ ’round”—Mrs. Morton’s very words again—“but Dad’s findin’ that passage sure made me believe ’em more than I ever did before, and I do believe that some terrible things have been done right here on this dear old place, and that somewhere old Bohm’s spirit’s mighty restless.”