Bluenose Ghosts by Helen Creighton Page B

were all close relatives of Mr. Doyle, people completely trustworthy and fine in every respect. I tried to picture the island in a storm with the wind shaking the low scrub and the rain beating furiously against the rocks. The night would be dark then and there were men in the world of a very different calibre from my good friends the Doyles. I shuddered and thought with pity of a ghost destined to stay in such a lonely exposed spot as this for as many years as the pirate captain chose to consign him. Or was this a woman ghost, since it was a woman Mr. Doyle had seen? Poor unfortunate soul.
    The children scampered happily like mountain goats, jumping from rock to rock, caring little for such thoughts. I shook my mind free and looked instead upon Mr. Doyle as he stood tall and straight for all his eighty-two years. The wind caressed his white hair, almost with tenderness as he waited patiently for the children to finish their fun. As he turned his kindly blue eyes towards me to make some further remark I breathed a prayer of thankfulness that my visit to Goose Island had been made under such auspices, that there were people in the world, like the Doyles, and that I had been privileged to know them.
    Let us turn now to the Micmacs whose stories follow a not dissimilar pattern.This was told by Louis Pictou’s wife Evangeline as she twined the ash sheens into the basket she was making.
    â€œYears ago there used to be people who buried treasure. My father had built a house in back of my grandmother’s. There was a little porch and three doors to open before you could get into the bedroom. I was just a child and I slept in a corner of the bedroom that we all shared. This night the others were laying there talking and about twelve o’clock the door opened and in came a soldier with his head off. He says to my father, ‘Andrew, I’m tired keeping the money for you. I’m not going to keep it any longer. My time for guarding it is up.’ Daddy says, ‘How am I going to find it?’ The headless soldier he says, ‘You follow southwest and you go twelve o’clock at noon and you got to take your wife and you got to take your daughter and when you get there, there’ll be something strike you and where you fall, that’s where you are to start digging.’
    â€œSo we went and he fell and there he started digging. He came to the pot that held the treasure and was just bending down to get it out of the hole when my mother said, ‘Oh Andrew, look at the little monkeys on the fence,’ and daddy went to look and the pot went down in the ground. So he said, ‘I’ll try tomorrow,’ and he did, and he had the pot up in his hand. They claim you must either take money out or put money in before it is yours and he thought maybe if he took it out it might hurt me or my mother. He decided we were getting along all right as we were and, rather than run the risk of something happening, he let it go back in the ground. Every so often since then something comes back and tells him to go and get that money.”
    There are several interesting features about Evangeline’s story. For instance the lack of a head did not prevent the ghost from speaking. A suggested explanation for this is given in the chapter on Headless Ghosts. Then there is the appearance of monkeys. In so many cases the diggers keep faithfully to the ban against speaking but, at the moment of finding their treasure and succeeding in their quest, they are startled by something so surprising that they speak without thinking. This happens over and over again in these tales, but this is the only instance I have of monkeys making an appearance. These animals would indeed be startling because monkeys are not indigenous to our Province and certainly would never be seen in our woods unless they had got loose from a travelling circus, a most unlikely event. Where the story varies from the usual pattern is in the treasure