“Well, you see we did just as you said to, and took the ghost out of the window and went out to the woods early this morning so as not to let the paper lady see us.”
“Oh!” cried Miss Frayne, “am I the paper lady? I begin to see daylight. Are these boys the ghost perpetrators, and were you in on the put-up job?”
“You’re a good guesser,” I replied.
“And why wasn’t I taken into your confidence?”
“For two reasons. First, because your friend Rob said you’d get better results for copy––more inspirations and thrills, if you weren’t behind the scenes on the ghost business,––and then we didn’t want to tell you about the presence of the Polydores lest inadvertently you betray the fact to my wife. Now, proceed, Ptolemy.”
“After we were in the woods, I heard an automobile coming down the lane, and I went up near the edge of the woods and peeked out behind a tree, and pretty soon I saw father and mother come over the hill and go in our haunted house, so I came up there and hid under the window and heard mother say: ‘What an ideal place to write this is. It looks as if I might really get a chance to write unmo––’
“‘––lested,’” I finished for him.
“I guess so,” he allowed. “Well, she began writing, so I didn’t go in, but when father came outside I went up to him and told him you and mudder were at the hotel and that we were all with you. He told me they came up here to write an article for some big magazine about the ghost. He hired an automobile down at Windy Creek to bring them up to the house and the man was going to come back for them tomorrow morning. I didn’t let on the ghost was a fake, because I thought he’d be so disappointed to have all his trouble for nothing, and he’d be mad at me for swiping his skull. I told him a paper lady was coming and then I went back to the woods. He went down with me to see the boys, and he said he would come back and have lunch with us. Mother doesn’t ever stop to eat at noon when she is writing.