“Well, no; not to say just wrong; only sort o’ spookerish.” Then, in a tone that the men at the drill might not hear: “There was somebody here again last night—humans ’r ghosts. I had a fit o’ the jumps a while back that everlastin’ly swiped my appetite for breakfast.”
“How was that?” asked Tregarvon, looking up from his inspection of the yellow car’s motor; and Carfax said: “It must have been something pretty fierce, Billy, if it crippled your pneumogastric nerve.”
“It was this way,” Rucker explained. “Last night, after we got the derrick rigged again, I starts and runs the engine for a little while, just to make sure everything is in workin’ order. When I shuts down, I banks the fire under the boiler so it’ll keep overnight. ’Long about sunrise this mornin’ I hikes over to stir her up for business, and when I yanks the fire-box door open, it’s me for throwin’ that fit o’ the jumps. There was the yallerist, cockiest-lookin’ skull you ever see, settin’ on top o’ the banked fire, ready to pull a grin on me when I opens the door.”
“A skull?—a human skull?” exclaimed Tregarvon incredulously.
“Yep; a yaller one; all teeth and eye-holes, and with a sort of greasy black smoke comin’ out o’ the place where its nose ought to ’a’ been.”
“How did it get there?” Carfax asked the question and then answered it himself by adding: “But, of course, you don’t know.”
Rucker was wiping his face with a piece of cotton waste—the machinist’s handkerchief. The autumn morning was cool and bracing on the mountain top, yet the perspiration stood in fine little beads on his forehead.
“No, I don’t know; and if you was to search me all day, you’d never get it out o’ me where it come from, ’r who put it there,” he said. “I ain’t what you’d call jumpy, but after it was all over, I didn’t want no breakfast.”
“What did you do with it?” Tregarvon asked.
“Me? I jammed it back into the coals with the clinker hook, and put the blower on, quick! Says I, ‘All right, my bucko! You make me throw a fit, and I’ll make you make steam!’”