They rested at great farmhouses, bartering and selling as long as the light of the day lasted, and telling awful tales of the Indian wars and old Salem witchcraft days later in the evening.
Some of the drovers’ stories were awful indeed. One of them concerned the “Miller of Durham.” The said miller used to remain in his mill late in the evening alone. One night he was startled by the dripping of water inside of the mill-house. He turned from the hopper, and saw there a woman, with five bloody wounds, and wet garments, and wide eyes.
“Miller of Durham,” she said, “you must avenge me, or I will haunt the mill. You will find my body in the well in the abandoned coal-pit. Mattox killed me—he knows why.”
The miller knew Mattox, and he saw that the woman had a familiar look, and had probably been employed on the farm of the accused man, who was a prosperous farmer. He resolved to conceal the appearance of the accusing ghost. But the apparition followed him, and so made his life a terror that he went perforce to a magistrate and made confession. The woman’s body, with five wounds, was found in the well of the coal-pit, and Mattox was accused of the murder, tried, condemned, and executed. The story was a true one, but it was an old one. The events occurred in England on a moor.
The boy Mordecai listened to these inn tales at first with a clear conscience, and he felt secure, for he had been taught that innocence renders “apparitions” harmless; but after a time his moral condition changed, and his fears were aroused, and they grew into terrors.
For one day, as the lively cattle-owner was driving a bargain with a rich farmer under some great elms that rose like hills of greenery by the roadside, he declared that a certain cow had given fifteen quarts of milk a day during the summer, and had said, “There is the boy that milked her—the boy Mordecai, he of the Old Testament name. Speak up, Mordecai. You milked her, didn’t you, now?”
Mordecai stood silent. The cow had given some eight or ten quarts of milk a day.
“He can’t deny that he milked her,” said the bantering trader.
“And did she give fifteen quarts of milk regularly during the summer, boy?” asked the farmer.
“I did not measure the milk myself,” said the boy. “The boss did that.”