Tom paused in thought. He was not open-minded enough to eliminate a formal accusation from his mind. Who was this poor, little queer old man that his word should be accepted against the weight of an official accusation? And moreover, if the grandson were a fugitive as the old man had said, was not that fact in itself a cause for suspicion against him?
“How old would your grandson be now?” Tom asked.
“Maybe thirty,” the old man said. “He were only a lad when they hatched up the conspiracy against him. I ain’t seed him since. Abney Borden said he seed him once, passed him right by one night near the reservoir, an’ the lad didn’ speak to him. More like it were on’y his ghost, I says. Maybe just his ghost looking for the old house; that’s what I think. Lots of ghosts of the old West Hurley folks comes back lookin’ fer their old homes.”
“Humph,” said Tom as he scrutinized his queer acquaintance musingly. He had about decided that the little old man was not altogether sane. “But the old village, I mean where it was, is under water, isn’t it?” he asked.
“In dry spells they come, them ghosts,” the old man said.
“Eh, huh,” said Tom as if this were an interesting item in the manners and customs of spooks. “They don’t expect the whole reservoir is going to be dried up, do they?”
“The old village is part on the slope of the shore,” the old man said. “When the water gets low in a drought you can see summat of the old place, ends of streets, ruins and such like.”
The old man’s rather disconcerting manner of looking straight ahead of him while he talked, and uttering each observation with a kind of mechanical air of absolute certainty, had the effect of rather squelching Tom. And so in this instance he felt properly rebuked for underrating the intelligence of spooks.
“That’s interesting,” he said; “an old ruined village coming to light now and then. Sort of reminds you of a body floating to the surface, huh?”
“Whose body?” the old man asked crisply.