Freckles says he doesn't know what he says in his sleep when those spells take him, nor even whether he talks in his sleep or not, but he guesses if he does talk in his sleep what he says would be talk about his dreams, but he can't remember what his dreams are, so he doesn't know whether what he says is true or not.
“Uh-huh!” says his father. “Harold, do you own a gun?”
“No, sir,” says Harold. Which is true, for he only owns a third interest in a gun. Tom Mulligan and Stevie Stevenson own the rest of it, and they are keeping it hid in the rafters of Tom Mulligan's barn till they can save money enough to get it fixed so it will shoot.
“You haven't killed anybody in these spells of yours, have you, Harold?” asks his father.
“How would you know if you had?” asks his father.
Freckles says there would be blood on him next morning, wouldn't there?
“Not,” says his father, “if you stood at a distance and killed them with a gun.”
Freckles knows he hasn't ever really had any of these spells he says he has had, but from his looks I should judge he was scared, too, by the way his father was acting.
“Pa,” he says, “has any one been found dead?”
“The body hasn't been found yet,” says his father, “but from what I heard you say, early this morning in your sleep, I should judge one will be found.”
I thinks to myself maybe Freckles does do things in his sleep after all, and from the looks of his face he thinks so, too. He is looking scared.
“Pa,” he says, “who did I kill? What did I say?”
“You said: 'Little Eva's dying! Little Eva's dying!'” said his father. “I heard you say it over and over again in your sleep.”
Freckles, he gets red in the face again, and stares at his feet, and his pa stands and grins at him for a minute or two. And then his pa says: “Get into your weekday clothes and wash your face and neck to match your ears, and come on down to breakfast. When you get ready to tell what's on your mind, all right; but don't try to tell lies to your dad.”
But he looked mighty gloomy. And when his father went out of the room he got his fountain pen and sucked some blood out of his loose tooth and tried to spit it into his fountain pen. From which I judged he was still of a notion to write that letter and was pretty low in his mind. But he couldn't spit it into the pen, right. And he cried a little, and then saw me watching him crying and slapped at me with a hairbrush; and then he petted me and I let him pet me, for a dog, if he is any sort of dog at all, will always stand by his boy in trouble as well as gladness, and overlook things. A boy hasn't got much sense, anyhow; and a boy without a dog to keep him steered right must have a pretty tough time in the world.