“There, boy, that just agrees with what I’ve heerd. Only three nights ago I lay awake and listened to the most distracting cries you ever heerd. Seemed jess like a child crying when it began, and then it sounded like a grown person, to end off with a terrible scream, as if it were a ghost.”
“How do you know, Aunt Vinnie, that ghosts have such screams?” asked Joe, who was inclined to discredit the story.
“They say,” spoke up Chick, “that an awful murder was done here once. A man living here all alone was killed by another man working for him, and it was supposed that this man died here himself, for he was never seen afterward.”
“Oh, nonsense, Chick,” said Mrs. Bayne, “you must not believe all you are told.”
“What everybody says must be so,” persisted Chick. “Ruddy has heard as much as I have, only he darsn’t tell of it.”
“I had darst to speak of it,” retorted the latter. “And I heard Bill Wythe say that he had been past here in the night when the house would be all lighted from cellar to garret and nobody was living here then, either.”
“He just told you that to frighten you, Ruddy,” said Joe. “I have not seen anything strange since we came here.”
“I have,” affirmed Ruddy. “Just Thursday night——”
“You didn’t hear that Thursday night,” interrupted Chick.
“I did.”