"Ain't it terrible?" he said.
"It is terrible," said I.
"Ah!" he cried. "But I don't mean what you mean; I mean ain't it terrible to think o' that?" and he pointed to the cupboard, "to think o' comin' to that—bein' picked clean like that—little bits o' you runnin' about all over them almighty hills inside the rats' bellies and your bones piled away to turn yellow in a spidery cupboard."
I stepped back from his grinning face.
"But how do these bones come there?" I said.
"It's the rats," he replied, "them mountain rats always pile away the bones o' everything they eat—make a reg'lar cache o' them; what for I dunno; but they do; that's all."
I stood then looking about the place, thinking of the end of that "number three," all the horror of his last hours in my mind; and as I was thus employed, with absent mien, suddenly Canlan laid his hand on my arm.
"What you lookin' that queer, strained ways for?" he whispered, putting his face within an inch of mine, so that I stepped back from the near presence of him. "That was a mighty queer look in your eyes right now. Say; do you know what you would make? You'd make an easy mark for me to mesmerise. You 'd make a fine medium, you would."
I looked at him more shrewdly now, thinking he was assuredly losing his last hold on reason; but he flung back a step from me.
"O! You think me mad?" he cried, and verily he looked mad then. "Eh? Not me. You don't think I can mesmerise you? I've mesmerised heaps—men too, let alone women," and he grinned in a very disgusting fashion. "Say! If we could only see a jack-rabbit from the door o' this shack, I 'd let you see what I could do. I 'd give you an example o' my powers. I can bring a jack-rabbit to me, supposin' he's lopin' along a hillside and sees me. I jest looks at him and wills him to stop—and he stops. And then I wills him to come to me—and he comes. Mind once I was tellin' the boys at the Molly Magee about bein' able to do it and they put up the bets I could n't—thought I was jest bluffin' 'em, and I went right out o' the bunkhouse a little ways and fetched a chipmunk clean off a rock where he was settin' lookin' at us,—there were n't no jack-rabbits there,—fetched him right into my hand. And then a queer, mad feelin' come over me—I can't just tell you about it—I don't just exactly understand it myself. I closes my hand on that chipmunk and jest crushed him dead atween my fingers. And suthin' seemed kind o' relieved here then, in the front o' my head, right here. The boys never forgot that. They kind o' lay away off from me after that—did n't like it. Yes, I could mesmerise you."