“Oh, yes! A black man who struck at you. You never have had a black man strike at you in real life, have you?” He turned to me with a faint flicker of interest.
“Never. We threshed all that out before, you know. I never even saw that particular nigger except at Braythe.”
“You will see him, perhaps, if you are fool enough to go to British Central Africa,” he jerked out.
“Perhaps,” I answered. But I was more interested in Lithway’s adventure. “Do you see your ghost now?” I had been itching to ask, and it seemed to me that he had given me a fair opening.
Lithway passed his hand across his brows. “I don’t know. I’m not quite sure. Sometimes I think so. But I couldn’t swear to it.”
“Has she grown dimmer, then—more hazy? You used to speak of her as if she were a real woman coming to a tryst: flesh and blood, at the least.”
He looked at me a little oddly. “I’m not awfully well. My eyes play me tricks sometimes.... When you got off the train to-night, I could have sworn you had a white scar on your forehead. As soon as we got out here and I had a good look at you, I saw you hadn’t, of course.” Then he went back. “I don’t believe I really do see her now. I think it may be an hallucination when occasionally I think I do. Yes, I’m pretty sure that, when I think I do, it’s pure hallucination. I don’t like it; I wish she’d either go or stay.”
“My dear fellow, you speak as if she had ever, in her palmiest days, been anything but an hallucination. Did you get to the point of believing that the girl you say used to hang over the staircase was real?”
“She was more real than the one that sometimes I see there now. Oh, yes, she was real! What I see now—when I see it at all—is just the ghost of her.”
“The ghost of a ghost!” I ejaculated. “It’s as bad as Wender’s rattlesnake.”