“It’s coming after all,” she thought, and sat down again.
After a silence of about five minutes the man spoke again. “It measures the time just like any clock,” he explained, “only, as the minutes are ticked off, they are thrown into a little compartment at the side,—this thing,” he said, holding up a little metal box. He lapsed into silence again and after an interval resumed where he had left off. “This compartment,” he said, “holds just an hour, and when it is full a bell rings and the compartment opens automatically, throwing the block of time, carefully wrapped to prevent leakage of seconds, out into this basket.” He took off his hat, brought out his handkerchief, polished a bit of glass with it, put it carefully back into the crown and replaced the hat on his head.
It suddenly came over Sahwah that her ingenious host was not quite right in his mind, so rising abruptly she hastened out of the room. The man took no notice of her departure. She locked the door carefully after her, and went out by the window whence she had entered the house, pulling it shut from the outside. She did not undertake to cross the marsh again, but made a wide detour around it. When she was once more in the fallow field she looked back, but the house was invisible among the trees and bushes which surrounded it. As she sped past the rows of standing corn on her way home, Abner Smalley, bending low among them, saw her and straightened up with a suspicious look in his eyes. He glanced in the direction from which she had come. On one side was the empty field bordered by the marsh and the woody copse, and on the other was the path from the river which went in the direction of Onoway House. He breathed a sigh of relief. The girl had come from the direction of Onoway House, of course. The next day he put his bull to graze in the empty field before the copse. Then, in different places along the rail fence which enclosed this field he put signs reading: BEWARE THE BULL. HE IS UGLY.
When the girls came back from town Sahwah told her discovery. “Nyoda,” said Gladys, suddenly, “do you suppose it could have been this man who threw the pepper at you?”
“Perhaps,” said Nyoda, and all the girls shuddered at the thought. Before Sahwah’s discovery they had agreed among themselves to say nothing about the ghost episode to anyone outside the family, so that the perpetrator of the joke, if he were one of the farmer boys living near, would not have the satisfaction of knowing that they were wrought up about it. In the meantime they would send Tom to get acquainted with all the boys on the road and try to find out something about it from them.
Calvin Smalley was over that evening and something was said about Sahwah’s adventure of the afternoon. “Calvin,” said Nyoda, directly, “who is the old man who lives in that house?”
Calvin looked very much distressed, and frightened too, it must be admitted. Then he laughed, although to Nyoda his laugh seemed a trifle forced, and said in his usual straightforward manner, “The man in the old house among the trees? That is my great uncle Peter, grandfather’s brother. He was something of an inventer and invented a time clock, but the patent was stolen by another and he never got the credit for inventing it. He worried about it until his mind became unbalanced. For years he has worked around with wheels and things, making strange contrivances for clocks. He is perfectly harmless and wouldn’t hurt a fly. He will not live in a house with people and he will not leave the cottage he lives in even for an hour, he is so afraid something will happen to his machine while he is away. We don’t like to have people know that he is there because they would say we ought to send him away, but Uncle Abner won’t do that because Uncle Peter hates to be with folks and he might not be allowed to play with his machine in an institution the way he can here. So as long as he is happy what is the difference? But you know how country people talk. So would it be asking a great deal to request you not to say anything about this to anyone, not even the Landsdownes? If Uncle Abner ever found out you knew he would be very angry, and would sure think I told you. I don’t see how you ever got in, anyway; the door is usually kept locked, and to all appearances the house is empty.” Sahwah looked decidedly uncomfortable as she met the eyes of several of the girls, but no one mentioned the manner in which she had gained entrance. Inasmuch as she had pried into this secret she felt it was no more than right to promise to keep it.
“All right, we won’t say anything,” she said, reassuringly. All the others gave an equally solemn promise, and were glad that Ophelia had heard none of the talk about the matter, for she had been over at the Landsdowne’s since before Sahwah told her adventure. Little pitchers have wide mouths as well as big ears.
The girls all looked at each other when Calvin asserted that his Uncle Peter never left the house even for an hour. Clearly then, he had not been the ghost.
Migwan had bad dreams that night. Just before going to bed she had been reading a volume of Poe, which is not the most sleep producing literature known. She dreamed that she was lying awake in her bed, looking at a big square of moonlight on the floor, when suddenly a black shadow fell across it, and the figure of a monkey appeared on the windowsill, stood there a moment and then jumped into the room. Shuddering with fright she woke up, and could hardly rid herself of the impression of the dream, it had seemed so real. There was a big square of moonlight on the floor. “I must have seen it in my sleep,” she thought, “it’s exactly like the one in my dream.” She lay wondering if it were possible to see things with your eyes closed, when all of a sudden her heart began to thump madly. Into the moonlight there was creeping a black shadow. It remained still for a few seconds, a grotesque-shaped thing with a long tail, and then something came hurtling through the window and landed on the floor beside the bed. Migwan gave a scream that roused the house. Hinpoha, starting up wildly, jumped from bed and landed squarely on the black specter on the floor. The form struggled and squirmed and sent forth a long wailing ME-OW-W-W.