“You believe in God Almighty?” she said half-wonderingly, yet with gratitude in her tone. “You understand about God?”
“I’ve seen too many things not to try and deal fair with Him and not try to cheat Him,” he answered. “I see things lots of times that wasn’t ever born on the prairie or in any house. I’ve seen—I’ve seen enough,” he said abruptly, and stopped.
“What have you seen?” she asked eagerly. “Was it good or bad?”
“Both,” he answered quickly. “I was stalked once—stalked I was by night and often in the open day, by some sickly, loathsome thing, that even made me fight it with my hands—a thing I couldn’t see. I used to fire buckshot at it, enough to kill an army, till I near went mad. I was really and truly getting loony. Then I took to prayin’ to the best woman I ever knowed. I never had a mother, but she looked after me—my sister, Sara, it was. She brought me up, and then died and left me without anything to hang on to. I didn’t know all I’d lost till she was gone. But I guess she knew what I thought of her; for she come back—after I’d prayed till I couldn’t see. She come back into my room one night when the cursed ‘haunt’ was prowling round me, and as plain as I see you, I saw her. ‘Be at peace,’ she said, and I spoke to her, and said, ‘Sara-why, Sara’ and she smiled, and went away into nothing—like a bit o’ cloud in the sun.”
He stopped, and was looking straight before him as though he saw a vision.
“It went?” she asked breathlessly.
“It went like that—” He made a swift, outward gesture. “It went and it never came back; and she didn’t either—not ever. My idee is,” he added, “that there’s evil things that mebbe are the ghost-shapes of living men that want to do us harm; though, mebbe, too, they’re the ghost-shapes of men that’s dead, but that can’t get on Over There. So they try to get back to us here; and they can make life Hell while they’re stalking us.”
“I am sure you are right,” she said.
She was thinking of the loathsome thing which haunted her room last night. Was it the embodied second self of Jethro Fawe, doing the evil that Jethro Fawe, the visible corporeal man, wished to do? She shuddered, then bent her head and fixed her mind on Ingolby, whose house was not far away. She felt strangely, miserably alone this morning. She was in that fluttering state which follows a girl’s discovery that she is a woman, and the feeling dawns that she must complete herself by joining her own life with the life of another.
She showed no agitation, but her repression gave an almost statuesque character to her face and figure. The adventurous nature of her early life had given her a power to meet shock and danger with coolness, and though the news of Ingolby’s tragedy had seemed to freeze the vital forces in her, and all the world became blank for a moment, she had controlled herself and had set forth to go to him, come what might.