Canada -- Fiction; Frontier and pioneer life -- Prairie Provinces -- Fiction
This reminded Dinky-Dunk of the three medical students who had tried to
frighten their landlady's daughter by smuggling an arm from the
dissecting room and hiding it under the girl's pillow. Dinky-Dunk even
solemnly avowed that the three men were college chums of his. They
waited to hear the girl's scream, but as there was nothing but silence
they finally stole into the room. And there they saw the girl sitting on
the floor, holding the arm in her hands. As she sat there she was
mumbling to herself and eating one end of it! Of course the poor thing
had gone stark staring mad.
Olie groaned audibly at this and wiped his forehead with his
coat-sleeve. But before he could get away Terry started to tell of the
four-bottle Irish sea captain who was sober only when at sea and one
night in port stumbled up to bed three sheets in the wind. When he had
navigated into what he thought was his own room he was astounded to find
a man already in bed there, and even drunker than he was himself, too
drunk, in fact, to move. And even the candles had been left burning.
But the old captain climbed over next to the wall, clothes and all, and
would have been fast asleep in two minutes if two stout old ladies
hadn't come in and started to cry and say a prayer or two at the side of
the bed. Thereupon the old captain, muddled as he was, quietly but
inquisitively reached over and touched the man beside him. _And that man
was cold as ice!_ The captain gave one howl and made for the door. But
the old ladies went first, and they all rolled down the stairs one after
the other and the three of them up and ran like the wind. "And niver
wanst did they stop," declared the brogue-mouthing Terry, "till they
lept flat against the sea-wall!"
Olie, who had moved away to the far end of the table, got up at this
point and went to the door and looked out. He sighed lugubriously as he
stared into the darkness of the night. The outer gloom, apparently, was
too much for him, as he came slowly and reluctantly back to his chair at
the far end of the table and it was plain to see that he was as
frightened as a five-year-old child. The men, I suppose, would have
badgered him until midnight, for Terry had begun a story of a negro
who'd been sent to rob a grave and found the dead man not quite dead.
But I declared that we'd had enough of horrors and declined to hear
anything more about either ghosts or deaders. I was, in fact, getting
just a wee bit creepy along the nerve-ends myself. And Babe whimpered a
little in his cradle and brought us all suddenly back from the Wendigo
Age to the time of the kerosene lamp. "Fra' witches and warlocks," I
solemnly intoned, "fra' wurricoos and evil speerits, and fra' a' ferly
things that wheep and gang bump in the nicht, Guid Lord deliver us!" And
that incantation, I feel sure, cleared the air for both my own
sprite-threatened offspring and for the simple-minded Olie himself,
although Dinky-Dunk explained that my Scotch was rather worse than the
stories.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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