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That's why my friend Corson is smoking his pipe down stairs." Mother Borton gave me a pleased look and nodded. I hoped I had made her regret the cruel insinuation in her application of the proverb to me as the favorite of fortune. "I see," I said. "I was to be waylaid on the road here and killed." "Carried off, more likely. I don't say as it wouldn't end in killin' ye.
"Good night," I said, as I turned toward my room, and Dicky, with an answering word, took his way toward the Borton place. I had grown used to the silent terrors of my house. The weird fancies that clung around the gloomy halls and dark doorways still whispered their threatening tales of danger and death.
There was sound of rude song, and the clink of glass and bottle in the bar and dining-room, as I passed through the side hall. But the door was closed, and I saw nothing of the late revelers. In the upper hallway Mother Borton stood by an open door, silhouetted dark and threatening against the dim flickerings that came from the candle in the room behind her.
Mother Borton seized it, looked for a moment at the firm, delicate hand of the address, and drew out the sheet that it inclosed. "Read it, dearie," she said, handing it back after a scrutiny. "I can't tell anything but big print." I suspected that Mother Borton was trying to deceive me, but I repeated the words of the note: "Send six men to 8 o'clock boat.
"I'd like to have anybody tell me there ain't no sech things as ghosts," faltered Uncle Jimmy Borton, who had always said there wasn't. "Let go, there! Ouch!" The command and subsequent exclamation were the inevitable results of his unsuccessful attempt to mount with Elon Jones the same wheel. "What'd I tell you, Anderson?" exclaimed Isaac Porter. "Didn't I say it was ghosts?
It flashed over my mind that Mother Borton might herself be the mysterious employer. I had never yet seen a line of her handwriting, and the notes might have come from her. It was she who first had told me that my men were already paid, and a few hours later I had found the note from my employer assuring me that the demands were fully settled.
Mother Borton paid no attention to my question, and continued: "I knowed they was a-talking about you, an' they says they would cut your liver out if they found ye there." "And where is there?" I asked with growing interest. "That's what I was listening to find out," said Mother Borton. "I couldn't hear much of what they says, but I hears enough to git an idee." "Well?"
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