“How soon can you get Mattie ‘Charles T. Smith’ out?” I asked nervously.
The judge’s lower jaw went up with a snap.
“I don’t know,” he said, tapping the arms of his chair with his hammerhead fingers, “as I can ever get her out.”
“You mean as long as she lives?”
“As long as she lives, certainly—and after that, maybe never.”
He got up and spit over the porch-rail.
As he did so I picked up the book that he had knocked to the floor—“Brewster’s Natural Magic,” edited in London in 1838. It was full of diagrams of necromancy and open at a chapter on phantom ships. I showed the title to Ruth surreptitiously. She nodded.
“They are all that way up here,” she said.
But the shrewd old judge had heard her.
“I’ll let you read that book,” he said, “if you can understand it.”