“Of course, stupid! Years and years ago. And finally, when he died, folks found that he wasn’t a deserter at all, but a general or a major or something, and they found a prize that the government had given him, some sort of a medal for bravery in battle. Wasn’t that sad?”
“Well,” replied Laurie, doubtfully, “I suppose it was. I suppose the government would have shown better judgment if they’d given him a bag of nuts. Of course, he couldn’t eat that medal!”
“You’re horrid! Anyway, it just shows that you mustn’t judge folks by—by outward appearances, doesn’t it?”
“Rather! I’ve always said that, too. Take George, for example. Just to look at him, you’d never think he had any sense at all; but at times—”
“Lay off of George,” interrupted that young gentleman, threateningly. “If folks judged you by the way you talk, you’d be inside a nice high wall!”
Why the talk should have drifted from there to the subject of ghosts and uncanny happenings isn’t apparent, but it did. In the midst of it, Lee gave a tremendous snore that scared both the girls horribly, and sat up suddenly, blinking. “Hello!” he muttered. Then he yawned and grinned foolishly. “Guess I must have dropped off,” he said apologetically.
“You didn’t,” said George. “If you had you’d have waked up quicker! Cut out the chatter; Polly’s telling a spook yarn.”
Lee gathered up a handful of beech-nuts and was silent except for the sound he made in cracking the shells.
“It isn’t much of a story,” disclaimed Polly, “but it—it was funny. It began just after Mama and I came here. I mean, that was the first time. One night, after we had gone to bed, Mama called me. ‘I think there’s some one downstairs, Polly,’ she whispered. We both listened, and, sure enough, we could hear a sort of tapping sound. It wasn’t like footsteps, exactly; more—more hollow, as if it came from a long way off. But it sounded right underneath. We listened a minute or two, and then it stopped and didn’t begin again; and presently we lighted a candle and went downstairs, and nobody was there and everything was quite all right. So we thought that perhaps what we’d heard was some one walking along the street.
“We didn’t hear it again for nearly two weeks, and then it lasted longer—maybe two minutes. It got louder; and stopped, and began again, and died away; and we sat there and listened, and I thought of ghosts and everything except robbers, because it didn’t sound like any one in the store. It was more as if it was some one in the cellar.”