Haunted Harbours Read Online Free PDF Page B

ball of tin straight into the old woman’s fireplace. The cheap powder he’d used smoked the kitchen out.
    â€œThere you go, good grandmother. It’s done and done. The witch will bother you no more.”
    The old woman laughed. “She never bothered me in the first place. So off with you then, you have my silver and my blessing. I’ll count it an experience and thank God for it tonight in my prayers. It’s reckoned fine good luck to help a beggar.”
    O’Hallorhan bristled at the word “beggar,” but he said nothing about it. He had eyes for the old woman’s apple pie. “It’s better luck to feed one, Granny. Why don’t you carve me off a slice of that hot apple pie, and a wee nugget of cheese if you have it?”
    The old woman’s humour hardened. “Be off with you. You’ve palmed my dime and fired that wee bit of metal you thought to pass for silver and you’ve fouled up my kitchen with your dirty cheap powder.” She grabbed her broom up from the floor. “Leave this house now, or I’ll put this broom to a better use than tripping up witches.”
    O’Hallorhan wouldn’t have it. “I’ll have that pie before I go. I can still smell the witch, and she needs another blast or two.”
    â€œYou’ll have the end of this broom, and you’ll be picking splinters for a fortnight,” the old woman said.
    O’Hallorhan looked her in the eye. “Well I’m walking that way,” he said, pointing towards Liverpool. “And there’s a lot of houses between here and midnight. It’d be a shame if word got around of how I smelled a witch in your house and you wouldn’t let me smoke it out.” He had her then. She knew the trouble that O’Hallorhan could start for her.
    â€œTake the pie and be done with it,” she told him.
    But O’Hallorhan would have nothing to do with that. In his eyes he had to earn the pie fair and square. So he loaded up his gun, but in his hurry and cheapness he slid in a plain lead shot, once again keeping the dime for the silver.
    He fired a blast up the chimney but it ricocheted off the chimney stone, and struck O’Hallorhan square in the heart, killing him stone dead. The old woman was sorry to see O’Hallorhan dead, but not sorry enough to forget about retrieving his pilfered silver.
    For years afterwards, the old woman would hear a whistle up the chimney flue, and even though most folks swore it was nothing more than a hole left by O’Hallorhan’s shot, the old woman swore it was the ghost of the old witch-hunter.
    â€œShut up, you old whistling crook,” she would yell, “or I’ll fire a whole barrel full of silver up that flue and finish you good and proper.”

6

THE
JORDAN FALLS
FORERUNNER

JORDAN FALLS

    Storytelling isn’t like writing. You’ve got to put a little more of yourself into it when you’re sitting there staring at your audience across the flicker of a campfire or into the glare of stage lights. So I hope you’ll forgive me if I talk a little of my own life now.
    I was raised in the woods of Northern Ontario, high in the shield country, about twenty miles north of Sudbury in a little town called Capreol. My mom and dad had married a little too early and went their separate ways, and my brother Dan and I were raised by our grandparents. Dan is still out there in Capreol, working for the CNR. My mom went back home to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, and Dad eventually moved out west to Blairmore, Alberta. Being a working man, Dad had little time to travel, and neither did I.
    I can count the number of days my father and I had any chance to speak with each other. He once travelled to Nova Scotia for two weeks to come see me. We talked as best we could, shared a beer or two, and tried to make up for the years that had been left behind.
    He was a lonely man, I think, but happy nonetheless. He’d found a