Poor Mattie! Her example had trained his only virtue to her own detriment. There was not a word about the New Captain’s leaving any of his money to her, nor even a stick of furniture. I read further.
“It is my wish that Mattie ‘Charles T. Smith’ sit in the room with my body for a week after I die, thereby fulfilling a last solemn trust.”
“Why did he say that?” I gasped.
Caleb Snow was sitting in the upper doorway, with his legs hanging out, whittling at a piece of wood.
“Well, you see, he died once before and come to life again, and this time he didn’t want to disappoint nobody.”
“What?”
“He simply stretched out dead one day, like he had heart-failure, and after Mattie had got the old crape out of the chest and tacked it on the door, and the undertaker was there going about his business, the New Captain come to again. It was the coffin turned the trick. He wouldn’t let ’em put him into it. He had an awful hate towards coffins after that. Said coffin-makers was a low form of life. He took up some foreign religion and read books to prove it by. Claimed undertakers would be caterpillars in their next life, crawling on their bellies and never coming out of their own cocoons. I bet he don’t stay in his, neither!”
“Nonsense,” said I; “those things don’t happen twice.”
“If things happen once that hadn’t ought to happen at all, they got a right to happen twice,” said Caleb doggedly, “or three or four times, for that matter!”
“But he was cataleptic.”