"The pound be smoked!" was the polite answer vouchsafed by Roy. "Thee'll go mad with th' white donkey one of these days."
"There can't be any outlet to it, but one," observed Mrs. Chuff, the blacksmith's wife, giving her opinion in a loud key. "He must ha' seen Rachel Frost's ghost."
"Have you been and seen that to-night, Mr. Roy?" cried Susan Peckaby.
"Maybe I have, and maybe I haven't," was Roy's satisfactory reply, "All I say is, I've seen something that I'd rather not have seen; something that 'ud have sent all you women into fits. 'Twarn't unlike Rachel, and 'twere clothed in white. I'll just go and take a look at Dan, Mother Duff. No fear o' my disturbing him."
Mother Duff, absorbed with her visitors, allowed him to go on without further impediment. The first thing Roy did upon getting upstairs, was to shut the chamber door; the next, to arouse and question the suffering Dan. Roy succeeded in getting from him the particulars already related, and a little more; insomuch that Dan mentioned the name which the dead man had borne in life.
Roy sat and stared at him after the revelation, keeping silence. It may have been that he was digesting the wonder; it may have been that he was deliberating upon his answer.
"Look you here, Dan Duff," said he, by and by, holding the shaking boy by the shoulder. "You just breathe that name again to living mortal, and see if you don't get hung up by the neck for it. 'Twas nothing but Rachel's ghost. Them ghosts takes the form of anything that it pleases, 'em to take; whether it's a dead man's, or whether it's a woman's, what do they care? There's no ghost but Rachel's 'ud be a-hovering over that pond. Where be your senses gone, not to know that?"
Poor Dan's senses appeared to be wandering somewhere yet; they certainly were not in him. He shook and moaned, and finally fell into the same sort of stupor as before. Roy could make nothing further of him, and he went down.
"Well," said he to the assemblage, "I've got it out of him. The minute he saw me, he stretched his arm out—'Mr. Roy,' says he, 'I'm sick to unburden myself to somebody'; and he up and told. He's fell off again now, like one senseless, and I question if he'd remember telling me."
"And what was it? And what was it?" questioned the chorus. "Rachel's ghost?"