The Grub-And-Stakers House a Haunt (3 page)

be jiggered if the bugger didn’t come gallopin’ back.”

“My stars and garters!” said Zilla. “What did you do?”

“Ast ‘im to haul up an’ have a bite. Wasn’t nothin’ else I could do. That was the code o’ the prairies. Them as had, guv. So he says thanks an’ dismounted an’ hobbled ‘is horse an’ sauntered over. I threw a few more hunks o’

bacon in the fryin’ pan an’ when I looked up from the campfire, I was starin’ straight into the barrel of a cussed great big sixshooter.

” ‘Mister/ says the stranger, ‘whereat’s this gold you was mouthin’ off about last night in the saloon? ‘

” ‘Mister,’ I says right back to ‘im, ‘that’s my business an’ none o’ yours.’

” ‘Mister,’ he says, ‘I got six bullets in this here shootin’ iron that says it’s mine. You talk or I shoot.’

” ‘Mister,’ I says, ‘you might’s well go ahead an’ pull that trigger,’ I says, ‘cause I ain’t talkin.’ “

“That was awfully brave.” Personally, Zilla thought Hiram Jellyby had been awfully stupid, considering that the gold wasn’t even his in the first place. But that was a man for you every time. “Weren’t you scared?”

“Nah. I knew he didn’t mean to kill me, ‘cause then he wouldn’t know where to find the trunk. I figgered I could get the drop on ‘im one way or another once he started diggin’. But be danged an’ be jeezled if the bugger didn’t go ahead an’ whang a bullet straight past my left ear.”

“Don’t tell me you weren’t scared then?”

“You’re dern tootin’ I was, but I still wasn’t talkin’. So then the stranger goes to whang ‘is second bullet past my right ear an’ just as he pulls the trigger, a horsefly big as a buzzard buzzes along an’ takes a chomp out o’ my neck.

Without thinkin’, I jerked my head sideways, you know how you do. The bullet got me spang in the middle of the forehead an’ there I was, stretched out on the prairie dead as a doornail. By gorry, Zilla, how’s that for rememberin’?”

“Very impressive, Hiram, especially when you’re so out of practice.”

“Yep, I see it all like as if it was yesterday. Me on the ground with a couple of angels zoomin’ down to pray over me, or maybe they was horseflies. An’ him standin’ over me, cussin’ a blue streak ‘cause he’d done hisself out o’

findin’ the gold. Then seems like I was whishin’ down this long tunnel with a light at the end of it an’ a bunch o’ my dead relatives lined up waitin’ to shake hands an’ tell me how surprised they was to see me. They’d all figgered that wherever they went, I’d wind up in the opposite direction.

As for what’s been happenin’ between then an’ now, it ain’t come back to me yet. All I remember is standin’ in front o’ that Akashic Record, seein’ my name writ down in letters o’ golden fire an’ findin’ out I had unfinished business back where I’d shed my flesh an’ bones. So here I sit an’ here I stay till I’m avenged.”

“I’m not so sure about the staying, Hiram,” said Zilla.

“The strain of so much remembering must have thinned you out, you’re looking awfully foggy in the middle. Maybe you’d better go back to the woodshed and rest your ectoplasm for a while.”

She didn’t mean to sound inhospitable, but a jawcracking yawn that she couldn’t suppress was hint enough even for a deceased muleteer. With a nod of acquiescence, farewell, or possibly both, Hiram Jellyby drifted slowly backward, still in a sitting position, and seeped through the woodshed door into the darkness. Nemea, who’d been crouched under the kitchen lamp all this time eyeing the ghost with unconcealed dislike, now leaped into Zilla’s arms and huddled there. Together they went in through the parlor and upstairs to bed.

The camomile tea hadn’t lost its power to soothe. Zilla slept soundly for whatever remained of the night and on through the early morning hours. So, apparently, did Nemea. It was well after eight o’clock when they roused themselves, and then only because the telephone was ringing.

Zilla had correctly surmised before ever she’d picked up the phone that the caller would be Minerva Oakes.

What she hadn’t anticipated was her friend’s knowing chuckle.

“Fine one you are to talk, Zilla Trott, after all the lectures you’ve given me about taking in strangers. Who’ve you got staying with you, anyway? That cousin from Alberta back again? Or did you invite the Peeping torn in for a midnight cup of tea?”

Zilla wasn’t a whit surprised that Minerva already knew she’d had unexpected company of the male persuasion last night. Hiram had sensed an alien presence outside, she remembered. He’d claimed it was a skunk, no doubt because he didn’t want her going out there and depriving him of an audience. She supposed she couldn’t blame him for that, considering how long it must have been since he’d had a chance to socialize with a live human being. Obviously some neighbor out walking the dog or going home from a meeting had noticed a light burning later than usual in Zilla Trott’s kitchen window, peeked in, and seen a strange man sitting with her at the table, ostensibly drinking tea.

In a way, Zilla found this reassuring. So she hadn’t been hallucinating at all, and neither had Nemea. Whoever the pecker was, he or she would have told somebody, who’d have told somebody else who’d have told Minerva and a few other people, who in turn would have told a few more. If there was anybody left who hadn’t been told, that person would darned soon find out because this was what invariably happened in Lobelia Falls. Of course the facts tended to get a little bent and twisted at various points along the line. Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing in her case, considering the circumstances.

Anyway, Zilla wasn’t about to explain over the phone, she essayed a chuckle. “Come on over and have some tea yourself; Nemea and I were just about to eat our breakfast.

We’re running late this morning.”

Breakfast with Zilla was apt to be a chancy business since her cuisine was so relentlessly healthful, but Minerva accepted anyway. She was dithering on the doormat almost before Zilla and Nemea had got their faces washed.

In her hand was a covered plate, and on the plate were four recently fried doughnuts.

“You must have been reading my mind,” said Zilla. “I was wondering last night whether I could talk you out of a doughnut or two.”

“You were? That’s a switch. Last time I offered you one, you leaped back as if I’d been trying to feed you rat poison. I just thought maybe your company would enjoy one with his sassafras tea and yogurt, or whatever you’ve got on the menu this morning. Isn’t he up yet?”

“I don’t know,” said Zilla. “I suppose I could look in the woodshed, but I’d just as soon not.”

“Why not?” Minerva demanded. “And why the woodshed?

What’s wrong with your spare bedroom?”

“Nothing. He could be up there, for all I know. He oozes.”

“What do you mean, he oozes? Zilla, are you feeling all right? I knew all that wheat germ would get to you sooner or later.”

“It’s not the wheat germ. I don’t know what it is, if you want the God’s honest truth. Not my cousin from Alberta, that’s for sure.”

“Zilla! You don’t mean you’re-“

“Having a red-hot love affair with the man who reads the gas meter? Not hardly. Look, Minerva, you’d better sit down. Have a doughnut. I might even have one myself.

Just let me see to the kettle.”

Once she’d got the teapot under control, Zilla felt a trifle more in command of herself. She was able to fill the cups without slopping up the saucers, and took that as a good sign.

“Now listen, Minerva. This is very hard to explain, and I don’t suppose you’re going to believe it when I tell you. The thing of it is, I’m being haunted.”

“By remorse? What for, Zilla? You’ve never done anything particularly awful that I can remember. Except maybe that time at the Preservation Society clambake when you beaned the county commissioner with a boiled lobster for wanting to take down all the trees along the turnpike. But he had it coming. You’re not repenting that lobster, are you?”

“Of course not. I did feel a twinge of remorse at the time because I never got to eat the lobster, but that’s nothing to grieve about. When I say I’m haunted, I mean I’m being haunted by a haunt. A ghost. A thing that goes bump in the night, only he hasn’t so far, at least not to notice. I don’t know where he came from or how he got here. He just sort of floated in last night while I was putting my soybeans to soak, and we got to talking.”

“About what?” Minerva sounded skeptical, and no wonder. Zilla shook her head.

“Wait’ll I finish my tea. I’m all at sixes and sevens this morning. He kept me up half the night till I sent him back to the woodshed, where he’s apparently been hanging around for quite some time. I’ve probably walked right on through him a dozen times or more and never noticed. He thins out, you know. Or rather I don’t suppose you do, but he does because I saw it happen last night. At first he looked as solid as you or I.”

“Then how did you know he was a ghost?”

“Because I tried to lam him with the poker,” Zilla confessed. “It split him straight down the middle and whacked me on the leg but he joined right back up and never turned a hair. And don’t look at me like that, Minerva, I’m neither drunk nor crazy. He was here, standing by the sink, and when I offered him a cup of tea he sat down in that chair where you’re sitting now. Took him a couple of stabs to get the hang of it, I have to admit. At first he just sank through the seat, but once he’d got his bearings, he made out fine. In fact he was still sitting when he oozed back through the woodshed door. In a sitting position, that is to say. The chair stayed where I’d put it, of course.”

“If you say so, Zilla. Whose ghost was he, did he happen to mention?”

“Oh, yes. He couldn’t think of it just at first, then he remembered. He’s quite smart at remembering, though he doesn’t seem to have had much practice. His name used to be Hiram Jellyby and he drove a four-mule team for some supply house over in Scottsbeck. I suppose it’s gone by now. He knew about Lobelia Falls, he had some dealings with the Hunniker brothers who used to live up on the Enchanted Mountain before they went back to the south.

He claims they raised pigs and rye, ran a still, and lived on pork and moonshine. They were among our early settlers, as I don’t have to tell you. Eighteen sixty-three or thereabouts, wasn’t that when they came?”

“I think so. Dodging the draft during some trouble down in the States, as I recall. Where did this Hiram Jellyby take his supplies?”

“To a Mounted Police barracks, he didn’t say where.

Somewhere north of here, I gathered.”

“That would have had to be late eighteen seventythree or after,” said Minerva. “The Northwest Mounted Police, as it was then, didn’t get started till August first of that year.”

“It could have been almost any time within the next ten or fifteen years then, because the Hunnikers didn’t pull out till eighteen eighty-eight, I think it was. There might have been records over at Scottsbeck by then. I can ask Hiram next time I see him, assuming that I do.”

“You sound pretty calm at the prospect. Weren’t you scared last night, Zilla? Did you actually sit here with a mule skinner’s ghost and swap gossip the way we’re doing now?”

“That’s just what we did, and no, I wasn’t. Hiram’s a sociable cuss, in his way. Takes a little getting used to, of course. I set a cup of camomile tea in front of him and he-well, he didn’t exactly drink it, but somehow or other that cup got emptied. And don’t tell me I was seeing things.

Nemea was right here on the table under the lamp, she watched him like a hawk the whole time. She didn’t like him a bit.”

Minerva nodded. “That’s understandable. I doubt if I’d have liked him either. What did he come back for?”

“Revenge, he says. He’d just found out he’d been murdered.

He claims the killer had on a black frock coat and purple gaiters.”

“Do tell. You don’t suppose it could have been one of those English high-church bishops?””

“I hadn’t thought of a bishop,” Zilla confessed. “My guess is it was a dance-hall girl wearing purple tights and a man’s coat. Not to run down my own sex, as I never have and never would, I don’t have to tell you that, but some of those women must have been mighty hard cases.”

“Had to be, I suppose, in their line of work. Did the murder happen in a saloon?”

“Not exactly. Hiram’s story is that his mules had been digging for water and turned up a trunkful of gold pieces.

Instead of taking the gold along to the Mountie barracks as he ought to have done, Hiram reburied the trunk, meaning to pick it up on his return trip. But he got drunk in a saloon up there before he started back and must have spilled the beans because this bishop, or whoever it was, followed him on horseback. Hiram says ol’ Purple-Legs was firing past his ears, trying to scare him into telling where the gold was, when a horsefly bit him on the neck.

He jerked away just at the wrong instant, and the bullet hit him in the head.”

“So where’s the murder?” snorted Minerva. “Sounds to me as if it was Hiram’s own darned fault. Or the horsefly’s fault, if you want to get picky. You’d better tell old Hiram to manifest himself a fly swatter and go work off his spleen at Jim Thompson’s horse farm. You’ll be getting yourself a bad name if you keep on hanging around all night with a mule skinner’s ghost.”

smirk as a rule, but she was smirking now. “I should worry about my name. How many widows my age get the chance of having their reputations ruined for consorting with strange men in their nightgowns? Too bad Hiram fades so easily, or I’d take him out and parade him down Queen Street. Not that he’s much for looks, but what the heck?

Who’s that at the door?”

“Better not open it,” Minerva cautioned. “You might let in another ghost.”

“You still don’t believe me, do you? Oh, nice, it’s Dittany and Osbert, with the babies. Yes, Ethel, you can come in. Just don’t go pestering Nemea, you know what she did to you last time. Osbert, I’m not sure that double carriage will go through the door.”

“No matter, Zilla, we’ll just pick up the kids and lug them in. Unless you’d rather come outdoors?”

“And have every ear in the neighborhood wagging out the windows?” Dittany Monk, nee Henbit, was petite, full of beans, and not one to waste any time getting to the point. “We knew you’d be yelling for Osbert as soon as you got a breathing space, so we thought we might as well buzz along and save you a holler.”