I proceeded to
pare my finger-nails.
"'There,' I said, as I put the parings into her hand. 'Just to
show you what I think of it. There's bait and to spare. Go on and
anaana me if you can.'
"I have said it was brave. It was. I was only fifteen, and I had
lived all my days in the thick of the mystery stuff, while my
scepticism, very recently acquired, was only skin-deep. I could be
a sceptic out in the open in the sunshine. But I was afraid of the
dark. And in that twilight room, the bones of the dead all about
me in the big jars, why, the old lady had me scared stiff. As we
say to-day, she had my goat. Only I was brave and didn't let on.
And I put my bluff across, for my mother flung the parings into my
face and burst into tears. Tears in an elderly woman weighing
three hundred and twenty pounds are scarcely impressive, and I
hardened the brassiness of my bluff.
"She shifted her attack, and proceeded to talk with the dead. Nay,
more, she summoned them there, and, though I was all ripe to see
but couldn't, Ahuna saw the father of Kaaukuu in the corner and lay
down on the floor and yammered.
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