Every girl had brought a box of luncheon, and besides, somebody had
"toted" two huge pots for chocolate and the little individual cups they
all carried made sufficient drinking vessels. Mary O'Rourke, with the
help of Laura and another girl who knew something about wood-lore, built
a campfire, while two other girls climbed down to the road and followed
it across the brook on the stepping-stones and up the hill to the
nearest farmhouse for milk. There was a spring of clear water in the
hillside at the edge of the plateau.
The red sun dropped behind the forest-clad hills upon the distant shore
of Lake Luna. They could see the rippling water sparkle in the last rays
of the sun. A white sail was set in this background of red and purple
glory, like a single, flashing diamond. The birds were winging homeward
to their nests in the hills behind the girls' camp.
"What a quiet, soothing picture," sighed one of the seniors.
"It might be altogether too quiet up here after dark if there weren't
such a bunch of us," said Josephine Morse. "Ugh!"
"The haunted house, eh?" suggested Laura.
"Don't say a word! I bet there _are_ ghosts in it," declared another
girl, with a shiver.
"I'll guarantee there are rats in it," laughed Laura.
"You're so brave!" exclaimed Jess, with scorn. "But you wouldn't want to
go into that house even in the daytime."
"I don't like rats," admitted her chum.
"That's all right," put in Celia Prime. "But there really is a ghost
connected with the old Robinson house."
"There always is," laughed Laura.
"Mary will tell you about it," said the senior, gravely. "You have been
brought here for that purpose, you candidates. Wait until after supper."
"Oh!" squealed one of the Lockwood twins. "A real ghost story?"
"Just as real as any ghost story possibly can be," said Mary O'Rourke,
laughing. "Gather around the fire, you infants. Never mind the smoke--it
will keep away the mosquitoes. Here come Jennie and Belle with the milk,
and we can make the chocolate. The table is spread--and we've got to
hurry so as to get our share away from the black ants."
"Oh--o! Don't!" begged somebody. "Don't remind us of them. I feel them
crawling all over me _now_!"
"To say nothing of the spiders," laughed the wicked Mary.
"Oo--h! That's the only trouble with picnics. Somebody ought to go ahead
and sweep off the grass," declared Dorothy Lockwood.
"That would surely be 'adorning nature'--'painting the lily'--and all
that," laughed Mary.
The shadows were creeping up from the valley. The electric lights
flashed out all over the city and made a brilliant spectacle below them.
The night wind rustled the trees and the whip-poor-will began his
complaint from his pitch upon a dead branch.
A bell began to toll at intervals from somewhere far up the hillside.
Some wandering cow wore this bell, but it sounded ghostly.
"Listen!" commanded Mary O'Rourke, standing beyond the fire where she
could be seen and heard by all the candidates, at least, who were
grouped in one place. "And especially you infants who this night appear
before our solemn body for initiation into its ancient rites and
mysteries. Listen!
"Before it grew dark we could all see right down there beyond the
fording place in the brook, where the road crosses a ploughed field on
the other side. Not a year ago, this farmer from whom Bell bought the
milk, Mr. Sitz, was driving home just on the edge of the evening, with
his son and his father-in-law, in a spring wagon. He drove a pair of
young horses, and was giving them particular attention, so he says. But
as they came up the hill toward the brook he saw a light moving down the
road between them.
"In his opinion it was a lantern under a carriage. He saw the light
flash back and forth, low above the ground, as though a horse's legs
were between the lantern and those approaching it.
"'Here comes a carriage, Dad,' said his son.
"'It's a top-buggy, Israel,' declared the old gentleman on the other
side of Mr. Sitz.
"The young horses sprang forward nervously as they reached the ford. The
wagon splashed through the brook and out upon the hard road. The horses
had crowded over to the left hand, and Mr. Sitz knew that he was not
giving the coming carriage sufficient room to pass.
"But as he pulled his team back to the right hand side of the road he
glanced ahead again and saw that the light had disappeared. Black as the
night was he was confident there was no vehicle there--where he had
expected to see one.
"'What's come o' that carriage, Father?' he asked the old man.
"'Why--why it went by, didn't it?' returned his father-in-law.
"'I didn't see it,' declared the son.
"'It did not pass us on the high side,' Mr. Sitz declared.
"'Must have turned into the ploughed field,' suggested the boy again.
"Mr. Sitz stopped his horses and gave the lines to his son to hold. He
climbed down with his own lantern and searched for wheel tracks in the
field beside the road. He was positive no vehicle had passed his wagon
on the right hand side of the road. He could find no marks of the wheels
anywhere in the soft ground. But as he turned back to climb into his
wagon again he saw a light flash up for an instant in the windows of
that front room yonder--in the haunted house," said Mary, with emphasis
and pointing dramatically.
"Mr. Sitz will tell you about it, if you ask him. He will also tell you
what the mysterious carriage and the mysterious light in the haunted
house meant."
"Oh, dear!" murmured Jess in Laura's ear. "Doesn't she make you feel
creepy?"
"Not yet," whispered Laura. "Lots of people have seen intermittent
lights on marshy ground, and the flare of light in the window of the old
house was the reflection of his own lantern, perhaps."
"Silence!" commanded Mary, sternly. "No comments. Besides, those who try
to explain ghost stories have a thankless job on their hands," and she
laughed. "We all are like the old woman who declared she didn't believe
in ghosts, but she was awfully afraid of them!
"This is the weird tale: Years ago an old man named Robinson and his
unmarried sister lived in that house. They were the last of their
family, and both were miserly. For that reason they had never married,
for fear the other would get the larger share of the property here on
the side of the mountain. And they had money, too.
"Sarah Robinson," pursued Mary, "was of that breed of misers who delight
in handling their gold, and worshipping it. She could not enjoy figures
in a bank-book as she enjoyed handling the actual money. But John
Robinson was of a more practical turn, and he banked his money as he
made it.
"One day a man who had borrowed of John paid him a large sum of
money--took up a mortgage, in fact. It was wild spring weather and the
stream yonder was running full. But although it rained so hard John
Robinson would not risk his money in the house over night.
"His sister and he quarreled about it. She said he was a fool to go to
town to bank his money on such a day. She would have been glad to sit up
all night and watch it--and every night, too. But John harnessed his
decrepit mare to his ramshackle buggy, and started for town.
"'You put the lamp in the east window for me when it comes dark, and
I'll get back all right,' he told her.
"Sarah scolded all the time until he was gone. She even said she hoped
he'd be drowned in the river--he and his money together. Oh! she was
quite a savage old creature, they say.
"Along towards evening a dreadful tempest burst up in the hills--a
regular cloudburst. A thunderous torrent overflowed the banks of that
pretty brook yonder. It became dark and they say old Sarah did not set
the lamp in the window as she usually did when John was away from home.
"In the midst of the storm and darkness she must have seen his lantern
jogging along the road, under the hind axle of his carriage, just as Mr.
Sitz saw it," continued Mary, in a solemn voice. "But the old woman
would not light her lamp. The old man came down to the brook in the
pitch darkness, missed the ford, drove into the deeper water below the
crossing, and was swept away, horse, carriage and all, by the flood!"
"Oh--oh!" was the murmured chorus.
"How awful!" cried one girl.
"What an old witch!" exclaimed Jess Morse.
"But Sarah ran to set her light in the window--when it was too late,"
pursued Mary, the story teller. "And every night for years thereafter,
while she lived alone here in the old house, Sarah Robinson put her lamp
in the window just after dark. And they say _she often puts it in the
window now!_ But usually the ghost light is preceded by the light and
carriage on the road beyond the ford."
"I declare! I thought I saw a light flare up in the old house just
then!" cried one of the girls on the outskirts of the sitting crowd of
listeners.
"Very likely," returned Mary O'Rourke, in a sepulchral voice; "for it is
on a night like this that the ghost of Sarah Robinson is supposed to
walk."