“Does it?” asked Jasper, all interest.
Alf would not answer him, but went on directing his conversation to me. “Put ’em back on meat and they come around all right. The ‘town home’ over on the back street is full of crazy people the only thing that’s the matter with is too much herring. Scientifically speaking, it overkeys up the brain.”
Having explained, he relapsed into silence, allowing us to sift the evidence.
“But did this Brown boy see a ghost while Mattie was alive?”
“I don’t know as he did, but if he did he wouldn’t have been likely to circulate it around. He ain’t so foolish as all that!”
“Poor Mattie! Every one was afraid of her.”
“Not of her exactly, but if you was to say of her power, I’d partly agree. Suppose, as happened, a boy was to come out from swimming under her wharf, by mistake—Lord knows he wouldn’t ’a’ come up there on purpose—and she was to look at him through a knot-hole in the floor—just look, mind you, and not say a word—and he was to go home and die of a chill, what would you think?”
“I’d think he caught cold in his bathing-suit.”
“Bathing-suit!” Alf scorned the word, as if the probability that the boy did not have one on refuted my suggestion.
“But,” I insisted, “she was drowned, in the end, naturally enough, like anybody else.”