“Oh, nobody’s body in particular,” Tom said. “I just meant—sort of—you know—like a story as you might say. Sort of the same as if an old ship were to rise up in the ocean. You believe in ghosts,” he added cheerily. “Now there might be such a thing as the ghost of a village, mightn’t there? A dead village? Why sure.”
The idea seemed not to impress the old man. But to Tom’s ready imagination there was something captivating in the thought of some old ship, a gallant bark of former days, rising out of the unknown depths of the ocean, and haunting the endless waste.
He did not indeed, believe in ghosts, yet after all if a village that is long since dead and gone, and withdrawn from the sight of men in its watery grave, occasionally creeps forth, a shrunken, soulless remnant of its former self, an all but intangible shadow of what was once life,—is not that a ghost? And may not one fancy this spectral, silent thing waiting in the concealment of its grave for the releasing drought, even as the shade of some departed human soul waits for the darkness in which it may steal forth? But Tom did not voice these spooky reflections, for the old man’s crisp voice recalled him front his musing.
“The reservoir, that were the murderer,” said old Dyker; “it murdered mother. Whoever done the other murder, it were not my boy. He run away but he were innocent.”
“Never seen him since, huh?” Tom asked kindly.
There was no answer, but Tom could see that the old withered hands trembled on the poor rustic cane. Probably they did not bespeak any new felt emotion, it was just the trembling of aged hands.
It seemed to Tom that his chance acquaintance had said these same things so many times that they had lost all emotional power over him. It was rather the poor little old man’s defiant attitude and a certain sturdiness about him, which somehow reached Tom’s heart. Trembling, dependent hands and a resolution of iron, that was what touched Tom.
“And you’ve just been wandering around the country ever since?” he asked. “Mostly here in the Catskills, I suppose? Sort of a—” Tramp was what he meant but he caught himself in time and said, “Sort of an outdoor bug, hey?”
But the little old man’s thoughts lingered on the main point of his interest. “Dead or alive, he were as innocent as you,” he said.
“Well,” said Tom cheerily, “I’m going to drink his health anyway. Here’s good luck to him wherever he is.” And he kneeled again and took another drink of the innocent, cool, refreshing water.