“Look!—what’s that?”
“Don’t!” I says. “Don’t take a person by surprise that way. I’m ’most ready to die, anyway, without you doing that.”
“Look, I tell you. It’s something coming out of the sycamores.”
“Don’t, Tom!”
“It’s terrible tall!”
“Oh, lordy-lordy! let’s—”
“Keep still—it’s a-coming this way.”
He was so excited he could hardly get breath enough to whisper. I had to look. I couldn’t help it. So now we was both on our knees with our chins on a fence rail and gazing—yes, and gasping too. It was coming down the road—coming in the shadder of the trees, and you couldn’t see it good; not till it was pretty close to us; then it stepped into a bright splotch of moonlight and we sunk right down in our tracks—it was Jake Dunlap’s ghost! That was what we said to ourselves.
It was Jake Dunlap’s ghost.