“Miss Pyncheon!” screamed the child, rapping on the window-pane, “I want an elephant!”
There being no answer to several repetitions of the summons, Ned began to grow impatient; and his little pot of passion quickly boiling over, he picked up a stone, with a naughty purpose to fling it through the window; at the same time blubbering and sputtering with wrath. A man—one of two who happened to be passing by—caught the urchin’s arm.
“What’s the trouble, old gentleman?” he asked.
“I want old Hepzibah, or Phœbe, or any of them!” answered Ned, sobbing. “They won’t open the door; and I can’t get my elephant!”
“Go to school, you little scamp!” said the man. “There’s another cent-shop round the corner. ’Tis very strange, Dixey,” added he to his companion, “what’s become of all these Pyncheon’s! Smith, the livery-stable keeper, tells me Judge Pyncheon put his horse up yesterday, to stand till after dinner, and has not taken him away yet. And one of the Judge’s hired men has been in, this morning, to make inquiry about him. He’s a kind of person, they say, that seldom breaks his habits, or stays out o’ nights.”
“Oh, he’ll turn up safe enough!” said Dixey. “And as for Old Maid Pyncheon, take my word for it, she has run in debt, and gone off from her creditors. I foretold, you remember, the first morning she set up shop, that her devilish scowl would frighten away customers. They couldn’t stand it!”
“I never thought she’d make it go,” remarked his friend. “This business of cent-shops is overdone among the women-folks. My wife tried it, and lost five dollars on her outlay!”
“Poor business!” said Dixey, shaking his head. “Poor business!”
In the course of the morning, there were various other attempts to open a communication with the supposed inhabitants of this silent and impenetrable mansion. The man of root-beer came, in his neatly painted wagon, with a couple of dozen full bottles, to be exchanged for empty ones; the baker, with a lot of crackers which Hepzibah had ordered for her retail custom; the butcher, with a nice titbit which he fancied she would be eager to secure for Clifford. Had any observer of these proceedings been aware of the fearful secret hidden within the house, it would have affected him with a singular shape and modification of horror, to see the current of human life making this small eddy hereabouts,—whirling sticks, straws and all such trifles, round and round, right over the black depth where a dead corpse lay unseen!