"Well, give me some stamps, Mr. Johnson. If you take my advice you
won't pay quite so much attention to idle gossip."
I drove home, thinking. Lennox, or someone, had been chattering;
that was clear. How far I had no means at present of knowing, for I
was not going to pursue any further conversation with Johnson, ready
as he was. A doctor who gives himself to gossip is no better than an
old hen. I felt a sharp contempt for Lennox that overrode whatever
interest I might once have had for him. If he had got himself into
any tangle down here he deserved it thoroughly.
A light covered wagon, such as hucksters use, was outside the gate
when I got back, and a man, who had evidently been bargaining with
Mrs. Searle at the back door, came round and climbed into it. I had
to pull the mare up to one side to give him room to drive off, and as
I waited I happened to notice him rather closely, the more so as he
gave me a civil but obvious scrutiny himself as he climbed over the
wagon-wheel. He was a man of about forty, in a tightly buttoned coat
of greasy black oilskin and a peaked cap, which might have belonged
earlier in its career to a seafaring man, pulled down over his
forehead. His face, with unpleasantly close-set eyes, was scarred by
smallpox, and apart from the repugnance which this disfigurement
always inspires more or less, I think I have seldom seen a
countenance which impressed me more disagreeably. He was a man whom
I would have ordered off my own premises anywhere at first sight, and
I replied with a curt nod to his over-subservient greeting.
I left the mare in the yard and went into the parlor. Mrs. Searle
had evidently been interrupted in her morning tidying, and she came
back, duster in hand, as I stood there. I had enough experience to
know her for a woman who did not give herself to gossip, though she
probably knew all that was afoot, by the curious intuitive sense so
highly developed in all women of her class. With her I would be
perfectly safe in any inquiries I chose to make.
She apologized for her intrusion and set about completing her tour of
the furniture, with noiseless briskness.
"I see you've been down to the village, sir," she said after a
moment. "I was going to ask whether you'd order some more coal up
for tomorrow, from Harkness's. It's most finished."
"I'll send Pete this afternoon. He can walk in. By the way, Mrs.
Searle, what was this story about Jake Menning? I just heard
something of it in the village today."
"Jake Menning..." She paused in her dusting, setting back a vase
carefully on the mantelshelf. "I suppose you'd have heard of it,
sir. He was killed last March, goin' down Dutchman's Hill. There
isn't much water now, but it's generally deep there, long after the
spring rains. Some did say it was done a-purpose, but the most of
'em thinks he jest had a fit an' fell in. Doctor Lennox found him,
about six o'clock in the mornin', driving back from a night call. He
was lyin' jest at the foot of the hollow, where them planks begin,
with his face in the water. It wasn't deep enough to drown anyone
ordinarily, an' that's why they thought it was a seizure.
"There was two half-brothers, Jake an' Aaron, both livin' over near
the Bend. Aaron's took the whole business over now. Jake was always
kind o' queer; they called him crazy sometimes, round the village.
They was as like as two peas, which was queer, seein' they was on'y
half related, so to speak. Down to the smallpox scars an' all.
They'd both took the smallpox, but Jake took it worse, and they said
that was what affected his brain some. You couldn't tell 'em apart,
on'y for Aaron's stutterin'.
"Aaron was the best of the two. He's a good chapel member, and he's
done a lot better in the business since Jakey's out of it. I heard
they used to quarrel a lot in Jake's lifetime. Aaron's savin', and a
bit close with his money too, and I recon he kep' Jake under some.
He was an awful ill-lookin' man, Jake Menning--not that I like to say
wrong of the dead, but I know a bad-lookin' man when I see one, an'
Jake was that, for all his craziness. There weren't anyone liked him
much, so they said he was harmless as a child, and right smart in
business, an' now they ain't content with his being dead but they
must get to startin' nonsense about his walking---excuse me
mentionin' any such silly talk to you, sir!"
"Walking?" I stared.
"What they call it, sir," she explained apologetically. "You see,"
she went on, taking up her duster again, "Dutchman's Hill always did
have a bad name, account of a pedlar bein' drowned there years ago,
and now with this other business they try to make out the place is
haunted again.. They don't seem to know rightly whether it's Crazy
Jake or the pedlar I told you of, but there's quite a lot of folks
now won't go nigh the place after dark, no more'n if it had the
plague."
"So that's what all this nonsense has been about!" I said, a light
beginning to dawn on me. "I suppose Pete is right in it all?"
"Pete is like all the niggers, sir. They ain't happy unless they've
got some sort of a ha'nt to tell about. Not that the other folks
here is any better, an' I will say that of 'em. I never met such a
gossipin' set in my life till I come here!"
Mrs. Searle herself was originally from New England, and eight years'
residence here had not altered her original opinion of the people.
For this reason, if for none other, I knew that she kept herself very
sternly aloof from the minor scandal-making of the place.
"I suppose there was an inquest on this man?"
"Oh, yes, sir. They brought it in accidental causes, an' Doctor
Lennox seemed to think the man died of heart-failure, an' he must
have been dead before he fell in. Anyway it wasn't drownin', simple.
I don't know. It was Aaron had heart-weakness in the family, as I
heard, so it was queer Jake bein' the one took off that way!"