“I’ll vote you out of the business, if you show insubordination, Mr. Tod,” cried Bywater. “We’ll pay out Miss Charley in some way, but it shan’t be by beating him.”
“Couldn’t we lock him up in the cloisters, as we locked up Ketch, and that lot; and leave him there all night?” proposed Berkeley.
“But there’d be getting the keys?” debated Mark Galloway.
“As if we couldn’t get the keys if we wanted them!” scoffingly retorted Bywater. “We did old Ketch the other time, and we could do him again. That would not serve the young one out, locking him up in the cloisters.”
“Wouldn’t it, though!” said Tod Yorke. “He’d be dead of fright before morning, he’s so mortally afraid of ghosts.”
“Afraid of what?” cried Bywater.
“Of ghosts. He’s a regular coward about them. He dare not go to bed in the dark for fear of their coming to him. He’d rather have five and twenty pages of Virgil to do, than he’d be left alone after nightfall.”
The notion so tickled Bywater, that he laughed till he was hoarse. Bywater could not understand being afraid of “ghosts.” Had Bywater met a whole army of ghosts, the encounter would only have afforded him pleasure.
“There never was a ghost seen yet, as long as any one can remember,” cried he, when he came out of his laughter. “I’d sooner believe in Gulliver’s travels, than I’d believe in ghosts. What a donkey you are, Tod Yorke!”
“It’s Charley Channing that’s the donkey; not me,” cried Tod, fiercely. “I tell you, if we locked him up here for a night, we should find him dead in the morning, when we came to let him out. Let’s do it.”