"Do you want a fire? I can lay one in a minute."
He shook his head, not impatiently, but as one to whom brandied peaches and wood fires are matters of complete indifference.
"I've got to see about something in the stable first. Then I'll go to bed."
Taking down a lantern from a nail by the door, he went out, as was his nightly habit, to look at his grey mare Hannah. When he came in again and stumbled up the narrow staircase to his room, he found that Sarah had been before him and kindled a blaze from resinous pine on the two bricks in the fireplace. At the sound of his step, she entered with an armful of pine boughs, which she tossed to the flames.
"I reckon the cracklin' will make you feel mo' comfortable," she observed. "Thar ain't anything like a lightwood fire to drive away the misery."
"It does sound friendly," he responded.
For a moment she hesitated, groping apparently for some topic of conversation which would divert his mind from one subject that engrossed him.
"Archie's just come in," she remarked at last, "an' he walked up with old Uncle Toby, who said he'd seen a ha'nt in the dusk over at Poplar Spring. I don't see how Mrs. Gay an' Miss Kesiah can endure to live thar."
"Oh, they're just darkies' tales—nobody believes in them any more than in conjuring and witches."
"That's true, I reckon, but I shouldn't like to live over thar all the same. They say old Mr. Jonathan comes out of his grave and walks whenever one of 'em is to be buried or married."