XVI
ALL ABOUT GHOSTS
When Mistah Mule heard the tiny, squeaky voice, he didn’t know, at first, who had spoken. He looked all around for some moments before he spied two beady bright eyes peeping up at him from beneath a plantain leaf.
“Sakes alive!” Mistah Mule exclaimed then. “I thought they was ghostses ’round here.”
“No!” said the small person who eyed him steadily. “I am not one of those things. I am Master Meadow Mouse.”
“I hearn a voice but I didn’t see nobody,” Mistah Mule explained. “That’s the way with ghostses. An’ if you sees ’em, you doesn’t hear ’em.” He shivered slightly as he spoke, although the weather was by no means cold.
“Have you ever seen one?” Master Meadow Mouse asked him.
“N—no! Can’t say as I has,” answered Mistah Mule. “But my mammy, ’way down South, she tell me all ’bout ’em.”
“I never heard of such things as ‘ghostses’ before,” said Master Meadow Mouse. “But now I think I must have heard one about a minute ago. I was asleep over there under that bush. And there was the queerest sound. That’s what brought me here. I came to find out what it was.”
“Was it a dreadful, hollow noise?” Mistah Mule asked him.
“Yes! Yes!”
“Sound like somebody tormented?”
“Yes! Yes!”
Mr. Mule nodded wisely. “It certainly was a ghost,” he declared. “Queer I didn’t notice it. I been right here quite a while. Kin you make a noise like it?”
“I’ll try,” Master Meadow Mouse replied. And he gave a funny, squeaky hee-haw!
“My goodness!” cried Mistah Mule. “That was my own self you done hear! I was laughin’.”
“You were laughing?” Master Meadow Mouse exclaimed, as if he couldn’t quite believe there was anybody, anywhere, that laughed in such a terrible fashion.
“Uh—huh!” said Mistah Mule. “I done laugh at ole Jim Crow.”
“You must mean old Mr. Crow,” Master Meadow Mouse observed.
“Uh—huh!” said Mistah Mule once more.
Master Meadow Mouse knew that he meant “Yes!”