she ever tell you what it was?” Again he turned imploringly to his sister.
She snickered hoarsely, a strange high-husky and derisive falsetto laugh, at the same time prodding him stiffly in the ribs with her big fingers:
“Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi,” she laughed. “More spooky business, hey? You don’t know the half of it. She’ll be telling you next you were only the fourteenth.”
“H’m!” the older woman said, with a little scornful smile of her pursed lips. “Now I could tell him more than that! The fourteenth! Pshaw!” she said contemptuously—“I could tell him—”
“O God!” he groaned miserably. “I knew it!… I don’t want to hear it.”
“K, k, k, k, k,” the younger woman snickered derisively, prodding him in the ribs again.
“No, sir,” the older woman went on strongly—“and that’s not all either!—Now, boy, I want to tell you something that you didn’t know,” and as she spoke she turned the strange and worn stare of her serious brown eyes on him, and levelled a half-clasped hand, fingers pointing, a gesture loose, casual, and instinctive and powerful as a man’s.—“There’s a lot I could tell you that you never heard. Long years after you were born, child—why, at the time I took you children to the Saint Louis Fair—” here her face grew stern and sad, she pursed her lips strongly and shook her head with a short convulsive movement—“oh, when I think of it—to think what I went through—oh, awful, awful, you know,” she whispered ominously.
“Now, Mama, for God’s sake, I don’t want to hear it!” he fairly shouted, beside himself with exasperation and foreboding. “God-damn it, can we have no peace—even when I go away!” he cried bitterly, and illogically. “Always these damned gloomy hints and revelations—this Pentland spooky stuff,” he yelled—“this damned I-could-if-I-wanted-to-tell-you air of mystery, horror, and damnation!” he shouted incoherently. “Who cares? What does it matter?” he cried, adding desperately, “I don’t want to hear about it—No one cares.”
“Why, child, now, I was only saying—” she began hastily and diplomatically.
“All right, all right, all right,” he muttered. “I don’t care—”
“But, as I say, now,” she resumed.
“I don’t care!” he shouted. “Peace, peace, peace, peace, peace,” he muttered in
