[Illustration: "'SPEC A BODY HAS A RIGHT TO STEAL OWN TRUNK."--_Page 285._]
"Ha! ha! ha! ki, missee, you don't know dat gemman? You nebber seed dat gemman 'fore? You tink him a star? Look at um. You tink he look so he hurt you? He wouldn't hurt a child, much more a woman. I know dat gemman. Ki, I mighty glad to see him. 'Spose tell him all about um? Spec he say a body has a right to steal he own trunk, and run away from such a house as dat."
"Such a house as that, Peter; is that not a good house?"
"Well, spec him house good enough, but spec he folks dat lib dare, not 'zactly straight up and down like dog hind leg."
"Why, Peter, what do you mean? Is not that Mr. Ingram, whose name I see on the door, and whom I know as apparently a gentleman of wealth and leisure, for I have often seen him associating with gentlemen about the hotels; is he not the gentleman of the house?"
"Gentlum! Lord, sir, he is dat woman's man, her pimp, she gives him all dem fine clothes and gold rings, and he gets fellows to come an see her gals."
"Mercy on me! The outside of the platter is made clean, while the inside is full of dead men's bones."
"Dat's just what Agnes says; she says, she find dead men's bones in the ashes, and buttons, and bits of burnt woman's clothes in a pile in the cellar, and she seed woman's ghost dare, and she won't stay in dat house no how can fix um, and dat's what it mean 'bout I got dis trunk; did you see how I get him, massa?"
"Yes, I did, and I want to know something about why you 'get him' at this time of night out of that cellar. The ghost story won't do; if she was afraid of ghosts she would not go down into that cellar at night any more than she would go down to her grave. It won't do."
"Oh, sir, the ghost goes upstairs every night, to stay in the room where she was seduced. None of the girls in the house will stay in that room. They gave it to me when first I went there. I did not know it was haunted then, but I found out afterwards that it was, for she told me so, and how she was shut up in the coal cellar, and starved, and suffocated to death, and then cut up, and part of her body burned, and part buried in lime and ashes, and how, if I would look in one corner of the cellar, I would find some of her bones, and I did; and then I determined to run away, and that is why I am hero."