Page:Resurrection Rock (1920).pdf/357

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
THE SECRET OF THE TALL TREES
345

He is standing beside you in third row next to the end. He is patting you on the shoulder. You can't feel it; but he thinks he is hitting you hard. He touches the rosette on your coat.

"Somebody is laughing. Don't joke—it is serious. He—"

It was the girls near Barney who giggled; the man with the rosette recognized nothing at all to suggest a joke. Barney was able to see his face when, once, he turned about with fixed, wide-open eyes to look up into the good, pleasant, hazel eyes of the brownish gray-haired spirit patting him on the shoulder. Seeing nothing, the man turned back to the medium and sat absolutely still and attentive while the voice went on.

"You ought to be ashamed of yourselves," a woman next to the girls rebuked them into silence; then she whispered to her companion, and Barney was just able to overhear, "That's Mr. William Woolston; she's describing his only brother—the surgeon who died of typhus in Serbia. They were bound up in each other."

Only after recalling his instructions did Barney shift his gaze from the set, serious countenance of the man with the rosette and observe the Cullens. Old Lucas was leaning forward a little, watching with halfsquinted, skeptical eyes the face of Woolston. Barney was sure, from his expression, that Lucas Cullen knew William Woolston and had known also the brother whom the voice described.

"Does he want to say anything to me?" William Woolston asked in a compressed tone.

"He says," reported the Voice, "he does not want you to bother about bringing him back; he lies with