midnight
`` O , in the night ; Fanny had run out door for to get out of his reach , and ` tween you and me , she says a man with a white dress on led her back , and she found her mother dead on the floor . O ! we 're havin ' o n't dreadful now days ; spirits walking the airth , never no good comes of sich things . '' The murder and the reputed ghost , whom several of the inhabitants testified to having seen at the midnight hour , was the absorbing topic of conversation in the immediate neighborhood where the tragedy was enacted . For several days succeeding the affair Hank Glutter 's saloon was the general rendezvous of the wonder-loving country people round about . All appeared to enjoy the tippling vastly more than Hank himself . It was not the thought of the needy wife sighing for the hard earned shilling , with which to provide for the many little forms that must go half clad , and the little feet uncovered during the approaching winter , for want of those bits of metal ringing out so sadly as they fell into his drawer , that clouded his unusually complacent smile ; neither was it the remembrance of the cruel part he had acted in Little Wolf 's abduction that shook his sin-stained soul .