The storm had abated, and we decided to start for Lovell at once. We gave the sheep a foddering of hay and then got the flock outdoors. Old Peg was very loath to leave the barn, and we had to drag her out by main strength. Addison went ahead and tramped a path in the deep snow. Finding that there was no help for it, Old Peg followed, and the flock trailed after her in a woolly file several hundred feet long. Flourishing my stick and shouting loudly, I urged on the rear of the procession.
In less than half an hour we met the old Squire with the team and two men from the Morey farm. The old gentleman had arrived there about six o'clock the night before and had been worried as to what had become of us. He must have passed the place where Old Peg had bolted up the road not long after we were there; but it was already so dark that he had not seen our snow-covered tracks.
"Well, well, boys, you must have had a hard time of it!" were his first words. "Where did you pass the night?"
"At the old Cronin farm, I guess," Addison replied.
"That lonesome place!" the old Squire exclaimed.
"It was slightly lonesome," Addison admitted dryly.
"Did you see a ghost?" one of the men asked with a grin.
"Not a white one," Addison replied. "But we saw something pretty big and black. There were owls in the chimney and foxes in the cellar—also a bear. I guess that's all the ghost there is. But there's a hay bill for somebody to pay; about three hundredweight, I think."
From there on, with the men to help us, we made better progress, and before noon we had delivered the flock to its new owner. The warm dinner that we ate at the Morey farm tasted mighty good to Addison and me.
We never saw Peg again; but before the winter had passed, the old Squire bought another small flock of sheep from a neighbor.