“Yes. And she knowed you’d do something bad, I reckon. Yes. And now I do remember all about it. I do.”
“Oh, you do?”
“Yes, I do that. You came up to where me and my Ducky Darling was sitting under the trees by the roadside, and I was piecing my sensible quilt, and she was playing on her music box, and you killed me.”
“Killed you!” exclaimed the young man in amazement.
“Yes, you did. And you need not stretch out great big eyes at me, as if it wasn’t true, neither, for you did. You did kill me stone dead, all in a minute, before I could holler. I did hear Ducky Darling holler, and then I went stone dead, and so near heaven that I did hear the angels playing on cymbals through my whole head. And then I knowed nothing till I come to life this minute, right here,” Owlet said, quite simply.
“Now, don’t you know that you are talking the beastliest nonsense that ever was heard? If anybody had killed you stone dead how could you come to life again? Tell me that,” Hanson said.
“I know it sounds like nonsense,” Owlet frankly admitted, “and if anybody had told me such a strange thing, and wanted me to believe it, why, you know, I should have told them they were not possessed of common sense. But for all that, I know it is the truth. And if anybody but you had called it nonsense I should not have blamed them; but you know it is the truth. You did kill me stone dead—dead! dead! dead!—dead as a doornail!”
“Well, then, how the devil did you contrive to come to life again?” laughed Hanson.
“It wasn’t the devil, and I didn’t contrive nothing; and I don’t know, unless maybe I didn’t get quite loose out of my body, for you know I only heard the angels playing on the cymbals. I did not go among them; and maybe the shaking of the train shook me down again into my body, and so I come to life. But I don’t know. It makes my head ache to think,” said the child, putting both hands up to her forehead.
“Then don’t think. It won’t pay,” Hanson advised.