Bill's discomfort had become alarm.
"Why, what could happen?" he asked. "I don't understand you."
His companion whistled, looked up in the air, and kicked vigorously, but said nothing. Bill was not extraordinarily brave, but he had a fair amount both of spirit and sense; and having a shrewd suspicion that Bully Tom was trying to frighten him, he almost made up his mind to run off then and there. Curiosity, however, and a vague alarm which he could not throw off, made him stay for a little more information.
"I wish you'd out with it!" he exclaimed impatiently. "What could happen? No one ever comes along Yew-lane; and if they did, they wouldn't hurt me."
"I know no one ever comes near it when they can help it," was the reply; "so to be sure you couldn't get set upon; and a pious lad of your sort wouldn't mind no other kind. Not like ghosts or anything of that."
And Bully Tom looked round at his companion; a fact disagreeable from its rarity.
"I don't believe in ghosts," said Bill, stoutly.
"Of course you don't," sneered his tormentor; "you're too well educated. Some people does, though. I suppose them that has seen them does. Some people thinks that murdered men walk. P'raps some people thinks the man as was murdered in Yew-lane walks."
"What man?" gasped Bill, feeling very chilly down the spine.
"Him that was riding by the cross roads and dragged into Yew-lane, and his head cut off and never found, and his body buried in the churchyard," said Bully Tom, with a rush of superior information; "and all I know is, if I thought he walked in Yew-lane, or any other lane, I wouldn't go within five mile of it after dusk—that's all. But then I'm not book-larned."