| “ Oh? Is that true? ” He glanced up, blinking curiously - sounding very genuine.
“ oh, it’s true enough, i’ll suspicion. ”
his eyebrows shot up a little ways, and he looked off. his voice was very cool, and, in view of the subject matter, a bit too undemonstrative, maybe.
then again, it might have been that this had all been done deliberately, as he seemed about to go on about it at some length anyway.
“ jan tregeagle, i b’lieve he was called. ” he sniffed affectedly, the continued.
“ he’d been dead some twenty years when it happened. as i recall, there’d been a dispute over some land. ”
he stopped here, but——it’d only been to clear his throat.
“ defendant had said something along the lines of ‘if tregeagle ever saw it, i wish to god he would come and declare it!’——and he just materialized in the witness box. ”
well——god hadn’t. he stumbled over his tongue, and made to clarify this quickly.
“ erm, tregeagle, i mean——and then he testified. ” he shrugged his shoulders, again in a way that seemed deliberately undemonstrative.
always went over better that way, in his experience.
“ in any case, the court couldn’t send him back to hell in good conscience after that, so——they assigned him some series of impossible tasks. ”
he sipped his drink, then looked sidelong at jeremy.
“ scooping all the water out of dozmary pool with a seashell or some such. ”
his eyebrows had lifted themselves up a tiny bit higher.
“ don’t know about you, but i reckon i should’ve better preferred hell. ”
