CARTER’S GHOST
On the broken porch of the abandoned house Amy stopped and waited for
her chum to overtake her. When she looked back she cried out again.
Forked lightning blazed against the lurid clouds. It was so sharp a
display of electricity that Amy shut her eyes.
Jessie, still laughing, plunged up the steps and bumped right into
the sagging door. It swung inward, creakingly. Amy peered over her
chum’s shoulder.
“O-oh!” she crooned. “Do—do you see anything?”
“Nothing alive. Not even a rat.”
“Ghosts aren’t alive.”
“Nothing moving, then,” and Jessie proceeded to march into the rather
dark kitchen. “Here’s a table and some benches. You know, Miss
Allister’s Sunday School class picnicked here last year.”
“Oh, I’ve been here a dozen times,” confessed Amy. “But always with a
crowd. You know, honey, you are no protection against ghosts.”
“Don’t be so ridiculous,” laughed Jessie. She had put down the things
she had brought up from the lakeside, and now turned back to look
out of the open door. “Oh, Amy! It’s coming!”
There was a crash of thunder and then the rain began drumming on the
roof of the porch. Jessie looked out. The clearing about the house
had darkened speedily. A sheet of rain came drifting across the lake
toward the hillock on which the house stood.
“Do shut the door, Jessie,” begged Amy Drew.
“How ridiculous!” Jessie said again. “You can’t shut the windows.
There!”
Another lightning flash blinded the girls and the thunder following
fairly deafened them for the moment. But Jessie did not leave her
post in the doorway. Something at the edge of the clearing—some rods
away, at the verge of the thick wood—had impressed itself on Jessie’s
sight just as the lightning flashed.
“Come away! Come away, Jess Norwood!” shrieked Amy.
“Come here,” commanded Jessie. “Look. Don’t be foolish. See that
thing moving down there by the woods? Is it a human being or an
animal?”
“Oh, Jessie! Maybe it is a ghost,” murmured Amy.
But her curiosity overcame her fears sufficiently for her to join
Jessie at the doorway. Through the falling rain the chums were sure
that something was moving down by the woods.
“It’s a dog,” said Amy, after a moment.
“It’s a child,” declared Jessie, with conviction. “I saw its face
then.”
“Perhaps it _is_ the Carter ghost,” breathed Amy. “I never heard
whether this haunt was a juvenile or an adult offender.”
“I guess you are not much afraid after all,” said her chum. “Yes, it
is a child. And it is getting most awfully wet.”
“Wait! Wait!” the girl from Roselawn cried. “Don’t run away from me.”
Whether the child heard and understood her or not, it gave evidence
of being greatly frightened. She covered her face with her hands and
sank down on the wet sod, while the rain beat upon her unmercifully.
There was no shelter here, and Jessie Norwood herself was getting
thoroughly wet.
In a calm moment that followed the child piped, without taking down
her hands.
“Are—are you the ha’nt?”
“What a question!” gasped Jessie, and seized the crouching figure by
the shoulder. “Do I feel like a ghost? Why, it’s Henrietta!”
The clawlike hands dropped from the freckled face. The little girl
stared.
“Goodness! I seen you before. You are the nice girl. You ain’t a
ghost.”
“But you are sopping wet. Come up to the house at once, child.”
“Ain’t—ain’t there ghosts there?”
“If there are they won’t hurt us,” said Jessie encouragingly. “Come
on, child. I am getting wet myself.”
But little Henrietta hung back stubbornly. “Mrs. Foley says ha’nts
carry off kids. Like my Bertha was carried off.”
“We have some nice lunch,” said Jessie, quickly. “You’ll forget all
about the silly ghosts when you are helping us eat that.”
This invitation and prospect overcame the fear of ghosts in
Henrietta’s mind. She began to trot willingly by Jessie’s side. But
already the rain had saturated the girl from Roselawn as well as the
child from Dogtown.
“Two more bedrabbled persons I never saw!” exclaimed Amy, when they
arrived upon the porch. “Do come in. There is wood here and we can
make a fire on the hearth. You can take off that skirt, Jess, and
get it dry. And this poor little thing—well, she looks as though she
ought to be peeled to the skin if we are ever to get _her_ dry.”
She hustled Henrietta into the house, but kindly. She even knelt down
beside her and began to unfasten the child’s dress after lighting the
fire that she had herself suggested. “Spooks” were evidently wiped
from Amy’s memory; but she flinched every time it lightened, as it
did occasionally for some time.
“Say!” said the wondering Henrietta hoarsely. “I’m just as dirty as I
was the other day. You don’t haf to touch me.”
“Oh, dear me!” cried Amy. “This child is never going to forgive me
for that. Won’t you like me a little, Henrietta?”
“Not as much as that other one,” said the freckle-faced girl frankly.
Jessie, who was taking off her own outer garments to hang before the
now roaring fire, only laughed at that.
“Tell us,” she said, “why you think your cousin was carried off?”
“That lady she lived with was awful mad when she came to Foleys
looking for Bertha. She said she’d put Bertha where she wouldn’t run
away again for one while. That’s what she said.”
“Oh, my dear!” exclaimed Amy suddenly. “Do you suppose—Child! did the
woman come to your house——”
“Foley’s house. I ain’t got a house,” declared Henrietta.
“Well, to Mrs. Foley’s house in a big maroon automobile?” finished
Amy.
“No’m. Didn’t come in a car at all. She came on foot, she did. She
said Bertha was a silly to run away when nothing was going to hurt
her. But she looked mad enough to hurt her,” concluded the observant
Henrietta.
“Oh!” exclaimed Amy again. “Was she dark and thin and—and waspish
looking?”
“Who was?” asked the child, staring.
“The woman who asked for Bertha,”, explained Jessie, quite as eagerly
as her chum.
“She wasn’t no wasp,” drawled Henrietta, with indescribable scorn.
“She was big around, like a barrel. She was fat, and red, and ugly.
I don’t like that woman. And I guess Bertha had a right to run away
from her.”
Jessie and Amy looked at each other and nodded. They had both decided
that the girl, Bertha, was the one they had seen carried off in the
big French car.
“And you don’t know what Bertha was afraid of?” asked Jessie.
“I dunno. She just wrote me—I can read writing—that she was coming to
see me at Foley’s. And she never come.”
“Of course you did not hear anything about her when you searched up
and down the boulevard the other day?” Amy asked.
“There wouldn’t many of ’em answer questions,” said the child
gloomily. “Some of ’em shooed me out of their yards before I could
ask.”
Amy had undressed the child now down to one scant undergarment. She
looked from her bony little body to Jessie, and Amy’s eyes actually
filled with tears.
“Aren’t you hungry, honey?” she asked the waif.
“Ain’t I hungry?” scoffed Henrietta. “Ain’t I always hungry? Mrs.
Foley says I’m empty as a drum. She can’t fill me up. That’s how I
came over here to-day.”
“Because she didn’t give you enough to eat?” demanded Amy, in rising
wrath.
“Aw, she’d give it me if she had it. But the kids got to be fed
first, ain’t they? And when you’ve got six of ’em and a man that
drinks——”
“It is quite understandable, dear,” Jessie said, with more composure
than her chum could display at the moment. “So you came over here——”
“To pick strawberries. Got a pail half full down there somewhere. The
thunder scared me. Then I saw youse two up here and I thought you was
the Carter ha’nt sure enough.”
“Let’s have some lunch,” cried Amy quickly.
She got up and began to bustle about. She opened the two boxes they
had brought and set the vacuum bottle of hot cocoa on the bench.
There were two cups and she insisted upon giving one of them to
Henrietta.
“I don’t believe I could drink a drop or eat a morsel,” she said to
Jessie, when the latter remonstrated. “I feel as if I was in the
famine section of Armenia or Russia or China. That poor little
thing!”
She insisted upon giving Henrietta the bulk of her own lunch and all
the tidbits she could find in Jessie’s lunchbox. The freckle-faced
girl began systematically to fill up the hollow with which she was
accredited. It was evident that the good food made Henrietta quite
forget the so-called ha’nts.
The rain continued to fall torrentially; the thunder muttered almost
continually, but in the distance; again and again the lightning
flashed.
Jessie Norwood fed the fire on the hearth until the warmth of it
could be felt to the farther end of the big old kitchen. She and
Henrietta were fast becoming dried, and their outer clothing could
soon be put on again.
“I wonder if Momsy was scared when the storm broke,” ruminated
Jessie. “She thinks the aerial may attract lightning.”
“Nothing like that,” declared Amy cheerfully. “But I wish we had a
radio sending set here and could talk to her——”
“Ow! What’s that?”
Even Henrietta stopped eating, looked upward at the dusty ceiling,
and listened for a repetition of the sound. It came in a moment—a
sudden thump—then the thrashing about of something on the bare
boards of the floor of the loft over the kitchen.
“O-oh!” squealed Amy, jumping up from the table.
“What _can_ it be?” demanded Jessie Norwood, and her face expressed
fear likewise.
Henrietta took another enormous bite of sandwich; from behind that
barrier she said in a muffled tone:
“Guess it’s the Carter ha’nt after all!”