The sight of Miss Gentry astride a broomstick seemed far likelier to Jinny. In the first place, no window of the farmhouse was visible from theirs; in the second, how could Elijah Skindle be living there?
“What would Mr. Skindle be doing at Frog Farm?” she said.
“So long as he ain’t taken Annie there!” he answered. “Oi shouldn’t wonder ef the whole place comes tumblin’ down like they fir-trees. For the more Oi set thinkin’ on it, the more Oi see as it’s to punish that competitioning pirate that the flood’s been sent.”
“Don’t talk like that, Gran’fer. I expect you’ve been dozing.”
“Oi tell you Oi seen him and his broomstick,” he cried angrily. “And when he couldn’t catch nawthen, he tied his han’kercher on it and signalled with it, too.”
She did remember now that Elijah and Will had become thicker than their respective relations to Blanche seemed to warrant, and she had shrewdly divined that Will wanted to flaunt his indifference to his rejection, and Elijah to pose as the magnanimous conqueror. It was not impossible, therefore, that the horse-doctor, summoned to Snowdrop or Cherry-blossom on the Saturday afternoon, had been caught by the torrential rain and the gale and persuaded to stay the night in that spare bedroom once occupied by Mr. Flippance. But more probably it was only another of the old man’s illusions. “Why, there wasn’t even any smoke from the chimney,” she reminded him.
“Mebbe there was too much water in it,” he chuckled.
Jinny’s blood ran cold, but not on account of the Flynts. She was still too obsessed with the vision of Will arriving on a horse to imagine him or his parents immured by the waters. No, the feeling that stole over her was that Elijah Skindle was not living at the farm, but that while the occupants had evacuated it, he had been drowned outside it—swept away with his trap—and that her grandfather had seen yet another ghost.
“If anybody was signalling,” she pointed out, “the engineers and the wherrymen would have seen him.”
“They can’t see through a brick wall,” he retorted crushingly. “Frog Farm ain’t got no eyes on the Brad. Depend on’t, ’tis the Lord’s finger.”