“I—I—ker-r-choo! I kain’t stop it—KER-R-CHOO-O-O!”
“He sprinkled pepper on his head instead of the sandwich,” grinned Poppy.
“Laws-a-me! That isn’t anything surprising for him. One time he put a bunion plaster on his jaw and cleaned his toes with the tooth brush.”
Having lived through the eruption, the old man was staring now, as though the sneezing and its cause had jarred loose some corner of his memory.
“Pepper,” came in a mumbling, unsteady voice. “Pepper. Admiral Pepper. That’s it.”
Admiral Pepper! What crazy thing was he talking about? It was our turn to stare now.
Suddenly there was a faint tap! ... tap! ... tap! ... on the outside kitchen door. And scared out of her wits, Mrs. Doane ran screaming into another room.
“Who is it?” says the leader, tiptoeing to the door, his right ear shoved out ahead to catch every possible sound.
Tap! ... tap! ... tap!... That was the only answer.
Well, I don’t mind telling you that this was another moment in my life when I didn’t have to overwork my imagination to believe in ghosts. I guess not. The thing that was doing the tapping, I told myself, was a ghost, probably a long, lean, hungry-looking ghost with two or three hideous heads, and nothing else but.