The two white overseers upon the estate came to inquire into this mysterious proceeding. Upon being told the circumstance, they laughed at it, and said it was the porters’ nonsense; that if they would put the coffin down, they (the overseers) would take it up and prove it was no jumby running them. This proposition was joyfully agreed to, and the coffin shifted to the shoulders of the overseers. Once more the procession formed, and they started for the grave; but this time it was worse than ever; the jumby obliged the white men to run with their burden, until they nearly fainted with fatigue, and caused them most lustily to call out for the former bearers to relieve them.
Again the porters commenced their melancholy office of carrying to the grave a corpse that would not be buried. The same ground was again passed over, but no effort of theirs could lead them to gain the intended place of burial. At length, forced on by the jumby, they made up to a negro house, the door of which was shut; and before they could ask for admittance, the coffin was impelled through it, breaking it into pieces, and was dashing forwards against the face of a man, the only inmate, who, frightened and horrified at the encounter, was endeavouring to effect his escape. This at length he accomplished, but not before he bore upon his head and face the marks of a jumby’s revenge. The open door gained, he fled as if ten thousand demons were hanging upon his steps, while the corpse, satisfied at having pointed out its murderer, bowed itself upon the bearers’ shoulders, and then allowed them to carry it quietly to its last resting-place.
Time flew on, and no tidings of the murderer were heard, until about six months had elapsed, when a party of negroes went into a copse to cut wood. They had almost penetrated through its tangled mazes, when they thought they saw something lying under the brushwood; and upon a nearer approach, discovered it to be the man who had fled from the attack of the jumby. He was in a dying condition, and according to the old women who related the circumstance, “He face ’top most like one buckra, all _whitey whitey_, from de jumby licking he so;” a great compliment to us whites! But to return to our story. The negroes picked him up, and carried him home, where he lived long enough to confess, that a quarrel having arisen between himself and the deceased woman, he procured “something” from an Obeah man, which he put into some soup, and which caused her death.