“I don’t suppose you ever met the former owner of this camp, did you?” Brent asked Peters.
“Naw, I never seen nothin’ o’ the McClinticks’,” he replied, as though it was something he sincerely regretted. “I’ve always been sorry the old man had the Lodge locked up so tight too, fer I mighta been able ter do him a favor—I don’t know!” he sighed mournfully.
“Yes?” I queried, “Explain all that!”
“Aw, it mightn’t hev amounted ter anything,” he said. “But, yet it might. They wuz away frum here ’bout five months at thet time. That wuz after the son wuz killed.
“Now everybuddy in these parts knew thet the old man put the place up fer sale ’roun’ February. ’N everybuddy in New York must ’a’ known it too fer I heerd as how he had it advertised in all the big papers. So thet means all his best friends knew it anyways.
“Ter make a long story short,” he went on, relighting his pipe, “the fust night we wuz here and hed got rid o’ the lynx cub fer a spell, my buddy shakes me ’n wakes me up, ’n he sez, ‘Sh-shush, listen, c’n yer hear thet telephone ringin’ ’r are ye deaf?’
“I gits up ’n sure ’nuff, there wuz a telephone bell a-ringin’ like Squaw Harry and it’s in the Lodge. It rang fer nigh onto half an hour I guess. But we cudn’t git in ter do a thing about it.
“Ez I told yer afore, all Mr. McClintick’s friends knew he wuzn’t comin’ here no more. ’N I told my buddy thet it must ’a been the ghost of the dead son ’n nobody else! Sure as I live!” He said it with finality.
“And what makes you think it was a ghost?” I asked, a trifle impatient with the man’s stubborn superstition about small things.
“Wa’al, becuz after we left here ’n got ter Harkness we run inter Minnie Schultz ’n she told us a thing or two about it.”