Read Out of the Mist for Free Online

the guys are
daring each other to do a ghost walk here, tomorrow night, and I
thought I’d get here first and scare them! What are you doing here? Aren’t
you afraid of a graveyard?”
    “ Of course not,” scoffed
Marjory. “Why, I come here all the time!”
    “ Who were you talking to?”
Ned asked again.
    “ Henry.” Marjory pointed
to the stone. “I tell him I’m sorry for him because he has no
head.”
    “ No head?” Ned came closer
and studied the grave marker. He read, “‘But where my head lies,
none can guess.’ Say, that’s weird! How come he doesn’t have a
head?”
    “ It’s a mystery,” Marjory
replied. “At least, I don’t know.”
    “ Say, that would be scary.
To see a skeleton without a head.” Ned thought for a moment, then
his eyes lit up. “That would make a good costume for Hallowe’en!
But I wonder what his story is.”
    Marjory showed Ned around
the cemetery, pointing out stones she was familiar with. But both
of them kept returning to Henry Ainsworth’s plot, the man without a
head. Marjory patted the gravestone. “Don’t worry, Henry, we’re
your friends even if you don’t have a head!” Then she jumped back.
“Something moved!” she exclaimed. “Under my feet!”
    Ned stared at the turf covering the grave.
He said in a low tone, “Did you hear that rumbling sound?
Something’s under there.”
    “ Of course,” Marjory
replied, with a nervous laugh. “Henry’s there!”
    “ Do you think he heard
us?”
    “ He might be sensitive
about having no head.” Marjory took care not to step on the grass
over the grave again.
    “ If only we could find out
where it was, we could get it back for him,” Ned suggested. “I
could ask my grandfather about it. He knows a lot of early
history.”
    Was there a movement atop the grave? Both
children stared at the grass. “I thought it rippled a little,” said
Marjory.
    “ Probably just the wind,”
Ned offered, but he was quiet as they turned to go home.
    “ If you find out anything
from your grandfather, tell me in school tomorrow,” said
Marjory.
    The next morning, Marjory hurried over to
Ned, who was standing in line in front of the school, waiting for
the doors to open.
    “ Did you find out about…
you know?” she whispered, so the other kids wouldn’t
hear.
    “ Gramp told me the whole
story! It’s wild!” Ned’s eyes gleamed with excitement.
    “ Tell me.”
    “ I can’t right now. The
bell’s going to ring. I’ll tell you at lunch.”
    At lunch, she managed to
snag a spot in the window alcove in the corner of the classroom.
Ned sauntered over to join her, trying to appear casual. But as
soon as he sat down and opened his lunch box, Marjory cried out,
“Tell! Tell!”
    “ It was Indians! In the
Seven Years War! Henry was cutting wood. He and five other men.
Some Indians rushed out of the forest and Henry was
killed!”
    “ But why no
head?”
    “ Gramp thinks the Mi’kmaq
may have taken it away. He said the French rewarded the Indians for
every Englishman they killed or captured. They scalped some others,
and took one man prisoner. They must have cut off Henry’s head to
show the French in order to get the reward.”
    “ Ugh!” Marjory made a
face.
    “ Well, the English did the
same thing Gramp said. They paid a bounty for every Indian scalp
the English took.”
    “ I wouldn’t want to carry
around an old head.”
    “ Maybe they dropped it on
the way home,” Ned speculated. Ned and Marjory looked at each
other, and then down at their lunch boxes. Neither felt much like
eating anymore. Ned had an image of a head carried by its hair,
blood dripping from its neck. In Marjory’s mind, she saw the lost
head, flung down on the hill above the harbour, and rolling,
rolling down to the shore with a ghastly smile on its
face.
    When lunch was over, the teacher, Miss
Primrose, smiled at her restless class. “Come on, get your coats
on. We’re going on a field trip!” she announced. “The
Parent-Teacher