"Where didst thou lay my bones?" said Frants, as if he had become suddenly insane. "Why was I not placed in my coffin? Why did I not enter a Christian burjing-ground?"
"Your bones are safe enough," replied the pallid, terrible-looking dreamer. "No one will harm them under my pear-tree."
"But whom didst thou bury under my name, when, as a self-murderer, thou didst fasten on me the stain of guilt in death?" asked Frants, astonished and frightened at the sound of his own voice, for it seemed to him as if a spirit from the other world were speaking through his lips.
"It was the beggar," replied the wretched somnambulist, with a frightful contortion of his fiendish face, a sort of triumphant grin. "It was only the foreign beggar, to whom you gave your old grey cloak but whom I I drove from my door that Christmas-eve."
"Where he lies, shalt thou rot—by his side shalt thou meet me on the great day of doom!" cried Frants, who hardly knew what he was saying. He had scarcely uttered these words when he heard a fearful sound—something between a shriek and a groan—and he stood alone with his light and his hatchet, for the howling figure had disappeared.
"Was it a dream?" gasped Frants, "or am I mad? Away, away from this scene of murder! But I know now where I shall find that which I seek."
He returned to Johanna, who was sitting quietly by the still sleeping child, and was reading the Holy Scriptures. Frants did not tell her what had taken place, and she was afraid to ask; he persuaded her to retire to rest, while he himself sat up all night to examine farther the papers in the old Bible. The next day he carried them to a magistrate, and the whole case was brought before a court of justice for legal inquiry and judgment.
"Was I not right when I said that a coffin would come out of that house before the end of the year?" exclaimed the baker's wife at the comer of the street to her daughter, when, some time after, a richly-ornamented coffin was borne out of Frants' house. The funeral procession, headed by Frants himself, was composed of all the joiners and most respectable artisans in the town, dressed in black.
"It is the coffin of old Mr. Flok," said the baker's daughter; "he is now going to be really buried, they say. I wonder if it be true that his bones were found under a tree in Mr. Stork's garden?"
"Quite true," responded a fishwoman, setting down her creel while she looked at the funeral procession. "Young Mr. Frants had everything proved before the judge, and that avaricious old Stork will have to give up his ill-gotten goods."
"Ay, and his ill-conducted life too, perhaps," said the man who kept the little tavern near, "if all be true that folks say—he murdered the worthy Mr. Flok."
"I always thought that fellow would be hanged some day or other; he tried to cheat me whenever he could," added the baker's wife.
"But they must catch him first," said another; "nothing has been seen of him these last three or four days."
