“Did you ever see any ghos’es down there Mammy?” asked John Jay with eager interest, yet cautiously lowering his voice and taking a step nearer.

“No,” admitted Mammy, “but oldah people than I have seen ’em.  All night long there’s great white gandahs flappin’ round through that thicket ’thout any heads on.  You know they’s an awful wicked man buried down there in the woods, an’ the sperrits of them he’s inju’ed ha’nts the thicket every night.  There isn’t anybody, that I know of, that ’ud go down there aftah dark for anything on this livin’ yearth.”

“Then who sees ’em?” asked John Jay, with a skeptical grin.

“Who sees ’em?” repeated Mammy wrathfully, angry because of the doubt implied by his question and his face.  “Who sees ’em?  They’ve been seen by generations of them as is dead and gone.  Who is you, I’d like to know, standin’ up there a-mockin’ at me so impident and a-askin’ ’Who sees ’em?’”

She turned to begin her dish washing, with a scornful air that seemed to say that he was beneath any further notice.  Still, no sooner had she piled the dishes up in the pan than she turned to him again, with her hands on her hips.

“Go down and ask Uncle Mose,” she said, still indignant.  “He can tell you tales that’ll send cole chills up an’ down yo’ spine.  He saw an awful thing in there once with his own eyes.  ’Twan’t a gandah, but somethin’ long an slim flyin’ low in the bushes—­he reckoned it was twenty feet long.  It had a little thin head like a snake, an’ yeahs that stuck up like rabbit’s.  It was all white, an’ had fo’ little short legs an’ two little short wings, an’ it was moah’n flesh an’ blood could stand, he say, to see that long, slim, white thing runnin’ an’ a-flyin’ at the same time through the bushes, low down neah the groun’.  You jus’ go ask him.”

John Jay swung his buckets irresolutely.  “I don’t believe I’ll go down there aftah berries,” he said.  “I don’t know what to do.  They isn’t any moah anywhere else.”

Mammy wished that she had not gone to such pains to convince him.  “Nothin’ evah comes around in the daytime,” she insisted, “an’ I reckon berries is mighty plentiful, too,” she added, persuasively.  “Nobody evah saw anything down there in the daylight, honey.  I’d go if I was you.”

John Jay stood on one foot.  He was afraid of the headless ganders, but he did want those berries.  He walked out through the door, hesitated, and stood on one foot again.  Then he went slowly down the hill.  Mammy, standing in the door with her apron flung over her head, watched him climb up on the fence and sit there to consider.  Finally, he dropped down to the other side, and started in the direction of the gander thicket.

It was a place that the negroes had been afraid of since her earliest recollection.  It was only a little stretch of woodland, where the neglected underbrush had grown into a tangled thicket.  No one remembered now what had given rise to the name, and no one living had ever seen the ghostly white ganders that were said to haunt the place at night.  Still, the story was handed down from one to another, and the place was shunned as much as possible.