Jackson put his planchette on the table, and sat down before it with a sigh; the Canuck remained standing, and on foot he was scarcely a head higher than the seated Yankees.  “Well,” Jackson said, “I suppose he knows all about it now,” meaning the dead farm-hand.

“Yes,” Westover suggested, “if he knows anything.”

“Know anything!” Whitwell shouted.  “Why, man, don’t you believe he’s as much alive as ever he was?”

“I hope so,” said Westover, submissively.

“Don’t you know it?”

“Not as I know other things.  In fact, I don’t know it,” said Westover, and he was painfully aware of having shocked his hearers by the agnosticism so common among men in towns that he had confessed it quite simply and unconsciously.  He perceived that faith in the soul and life everlasting was as quick as ever in the hills, whatever grotesque or unwonted form it wore.  Jackson sat with closed eyes and his head fallen back; Whitwell stared at the painter, with open mouth; the little Canuck began to walk up and down impatiently; Westover felt a reproach, almost an abhorrence, in all of them.

Whitwell asked:  “Why, don’t you think there’s any proof of it?”

“Proof?  Oh Yes.  There’s testimony enough to carry conviction to the stubbornest mind on any other point.  But it’s very strange about all that.  It doesn’t convince anybody but the witnesses.  If a man tells me he’s seen a disembodied spirit, I can’t believe him.  I must see the disembodied spirit myself.”

“That’s something so,” said Whitwell, with a relenting laugh.

“If one came back from the dead, to tell us of a life beyond the grave, we should want the assurance that he’d really been dead, and not merely dreaming.”

Whitwell laughed again, in the delight the philosophic mind finds even in the reasoning that hates it.

The Canuck felt perhaps the simpler joy that the average man has in any strange notion that he is able to grasp.  He stopped in his walk and said:  “Yes, and if you was dead and went to heaven, and stayed so long you smelt, like Lazarus, and you come back and tol’ ’em what you saw, nobody goin’ believe you.”

“Well, I guess you’re right there, Jombateeste,” said Whitwell, with pleasure in the Canuck’s point.  After a moment he suggested to Westover:  “Then I s’pose, if you feel the way you do, you don’t care much about plantchette?”

“Oh yes, I do,” said the painter.  “We never know when we may be upon the point of revelation.  I wouldn’t miss any chance.”

Whether Whitwell felt an ironic slant in the words or not, he paused a moment before he said:  “Want to start her up, Jackson?”

Jackson brought to the floor the forefeet of his chair, which he had tilted from it in leaning back, and without other answer put his hand on the planchette.  It began to fly over the large sheet of paper spread upon the table, in curves and angles and eccentrics.