"What was he like? Was it a 'he' or a lady 'haunt'? How perfectly romantic and delightful! Tell, tell, quick!"
Alfaretta's face assumed a look of great solemnity and a shiver of real fear ran over her. These new people might laugh at the Skyrie ghost, but to her it was no laughing matter. Indeed, she had such a dread of the subject that it had been the one her loquacious tongue had abjured, leaving it to the newcomer, Jim Barlow, to introduce it. But now—Well! If they wanted to hear about the dreadful thing it might be wise to gratify them.
"He's a—'he.' Everybody says that who's seen 'him,'" began the narrator, still in an unnaturally subdued tone.
"Good enough!" ejaculated Mr. Chester, gayly, entering into the spirit of fun he saw shining on Dorothy's face, and glad indeed that his impressionable child did not take this statement seriously. "Good enough! He'll be company for me, for I greatly miss men companions."
"I guess you won't like him for no companion, Mr. Chester. Why, the very place he stays the most is in—that very—room you—come out of to your breakfast—where you stay, too!" cried Alfaretta, impressively. "But other times he lives in the gold mine."
Father John looked back at Dorothy and merrily quoted a verse—slightly altered to fit the occasion:
"I never saw a Skyrie Ghost,
I never hope to see one;
But I can tell you, anyhow
I'd rather see than be one."
Dorothy as merrily and promptly joined in this remodeled ditty of the "Purple Cow," but they were destined never to complete it; because, absorbed in her own relation and astonished at their light treatment of it, Alfaretta ceased to observe the smoothness or roughness of their path and inadvertently propelled the wheel-chair into a wide, open ditch, whose edge was veiled by a luxurious growth of weeds.
An instant later the wheels were uppermost, the two girls had been projected upon them, and poor father John buried beneath the whole.