“Now, Nat, let us come to business at once,” said Jonas setting his rifle down by the side of a tree and pushing back his sleeve. “Where is the money that you have come here to dig up?”
CHAPTER XII.
Two Brave Hunters.
“Ghosts,” said Jonas Keeler, leaning his back against the side of the barn and crossing his legs. “I didn’t know that there was any around here, although we used to hear and see plenty of them down in Pike County where I lived when I was a boy.”
“Where did you go to find them, pap?” asked Caleb, who seemed to be deeply interested in what his father had to say.
“We didn’t go anywhere to see them. They generally came to us, and they came, too, just when we didn’t want to see them. We used to find them in grave-yards; and now and then they would come into our barns and houses. What did they do to you, Peleg? You need not be afraid to speak of them here, because there ain’t no ghosts about.”
“They didn’t do anything to me,” answered Peleg, “cause why, I got afraid and dug out.”
Peleg had been looking for a place to sit down, and when nothing else offered he sat down on the floor of the barn and drew his feet under him. His story was a long one and immensely thrilling. He said that he and Nat did not hear anything out of the ordinary until they came to Manchester, and then the storekeeper put them on their guard. He told about the queer things he had heard while going through the bushes, and then he came to the strange words Nat had used—“Here I am and there I am” until Jonas began to look wild. But when he came to the tree on the hillside which dropped its boughs when Nat called upon him, Jonas’s face, which had thus far betrayed the deepest interest, suddenly gave away to a smile, and he finally threw his head back against the barn and broke out into a violent laugh.
“Now I will tell you what’s the fact; it is the truth and nothing else,” stammered Peleg, who was lost in wonder. “I saw it with my own eyes.”
“No doubt you did,” said Jonas, wiping his eyes to get rid of the tears that held to them. “But don’t you know that that was the sign of falling weather? If you don’t, you have lived in this country a good while for nothing.”
“That’s what I tell him,” said Mr. Graves. “He has got so interested in the ghosts that he is willing to believe he sees ghosts in everything.”