Working hard to keep his tears back, he replied: “Johnny was our little boy who died when he was three days and two hours old, and with him died the best part of me. I’d lotted so much on what we’d do as he grew up. He’d been three-and-twenty if he’d lived, a young man like you, but I allus think of him as a little shaver beginnin’ to walk and me a leadin’ him, and many’s the time I’ve thought I heard his little feet and have put my hand down, so—and taken his’n in mine,—a soft baby hand,—and called him sonny,—and I—I——”
Here he stopped, while the tears rolled down his cheeks, and Craig felt his own eyes grow moist with sympathy for this child man, who, after a moment, recovered himself and continued: “You must excuse my cryin’. I can’t help it when I think of Johnny and all he’d of been to me if he hadn’t died. I tell you what, I b’lieve I’d been a good deal more of a man if he’d of lived.”
Craig had no doubt of it, and was trying to think of something to say when their attention was attracted to Mark Hilton, who was walking up the street.
“Look at him,” Mr. Taylor said. “Don’t he carry himself like a king! Sometimes I think Johnny might have looked like him, only not so well, maybe, and I don’t b’lieve he would have been better to me than Mark. Do you b’lieve in hereditary?—b’lieve that bad blood trickles along down from mother to son, and son to mother, and busts out somewhere when you least expect it?”
“Yes,” Craig said, “I believe in heredity and environment, too.”
“Envyrimen’? What’s that?” Uncle Zach asked, and Craig replied: “As connected with heredity, it means surroundings,—education,—influence,—circumstances.”
“Jest so,” Uncle Zach interrupted. “You mean the way one is brung up will offset bad blood. Mebby, but I don’t b’lieve in hereditary. No, sir! There’s Mark now,—the best and honestest feller that was ever born,—right every way. His great-grandmother was hung, with three more men, and my grandmother went to the hangin’, more’s the pity,—but there warn’t so many excitin’ things in them days as there is now, with a circus and caravan every summer, and a hangin’ was a godsend, especially as there was a woman in it,—a high-stepper, too. You see ’twas this way: You know about the haunted house half a mile from town, a little off the main road at the end of the lane?”
Craig had passed the house two or three times on his way to the woods beyond, and had looked curiously at its grey, weather-beaten walls and slanting roof, from which the shingles had fallen in places. Once he went close to it and looked through a window, from which every pane of glass was gone, into a large, square room, with a big fire place in it, and had wondered if it were there the young wife had sat that stormy night and heard her name called, while outside in the darkness the awful tragedy was enacted. From the wide hearth some bricks were loosened, and, while he stood there, a monstrous rat leaped out, and, followed by three or four smaller rats, went scurrying across the floor, the patter of their feet, as they disappeared behind the wainscoting and jumped into the cellar below, making a weird kind of sound which timid people might mistake for something supernatural. Craig himself had experienced a creepy kind of feeling as he left the old ruin and went next to look into the well, which had been a part of the tragedy. An old bucket was still swinging on a pole after the fashion of years ago, and he let it down into the deep well and drew it up full of water, which he fancied had a reddish tinge of blood. Hastily pouring it back, he heard it fall with a splash into the depth below, and hurried from the place. He had not been near the house since, and had never heard the full particulars of the story, which, now that Mark was connected with it, had an added interest, and he asked Uncle Zach to tell it.
Getting out of his chair, Mr. Taylor walked briskly across the piazza, saying, “It’s very excitin’ and harrerin’ in some places, and I must get braced up before I tackle it.” After a few turns, he declared himself sufficiently braced, and, resuming his seat, began a story which I heard in my childhood, and which in many of its details is true.