“Who are you?” whispered Letitia to the boy.
“I am Josephus Peabody, but I was always called Joe till I came here,” the boy whispered back.
Letitia pondered. The name sounded very familiar to her, just as the boy's face had looked. Then suddenly she remembered. “When I was a little girl,” she whispered, “not more than seven—I am going on ten now—I knew a little boy named Joe Peabody, and he was visiting his grandmother, Mrs. Joe Peabody. She lives about half a mile from my Aunt Peggy's around the corner of the road. It is a big white house next to the graveyard.”
“That was me,” said the boy. “At least,” he added in rather a dazed and hopeless tone, “I suppose it was, and I guess I remember you too. You had curls, and we went coasting down that long hill near Grandmother's together.”
“Seems to me we did,” said Letitia, and her own tone was dazed and hopeless.
“Since I have been here,” whispered the boy, “I haven't been exactly sure who I was and that is the truth. The folks where I am staying are real good. They go to meeting all day Sunday and they don't work Saturday nights, but I can't understand it. We have to make all the things I have seen already made, for one thing.”
Letitia nodded in the dark.
“That is the way here,” said she.
“And Mr. Cephas Holbrook has just the name that my great-great-great-uncle on my mother's side had,” said the boy, in a whisper so puzzled that it was fairly agonized. “Grandmother has told me about him. He had a battle with six Injuns and killed them all himself, and this Mr. Cephas Holbrook has done just that same thing. And he killed ten wolves and nailed their heads to the meeting-house. Say,” the boy continued confidentially, “those were the heads I meant, you know.”
“Of course I know,” whispered Letitia. “I wouldn't speak to you if you had done such awful things.”