They had good pocket knives and soon cut off a quantity—more, Arden suggested, than they could carry even with the help of Mr. Pangborn, when Terry, glancing off toward a little clearing, suddenly cried:
“Look!”
There was something in the tone of her voice that startled Arden. But she managed to ask, as she whirled quickly around:
“What is it?”
“A figure in red!” whispered Terry, pointing. “There—through the trees—someone in red—moving. Oh, perhaps it’s the ghost of Patience Howe! She is always seen wearing a red cloak, you know!”
Arden dropped the holly branches from her hand as she looked toward where Terry pointed.
Something was moving! Red, in all that deep, dark clump of evergreens!
CHAPTER XIX
Santa Claus
Terry and Arden drew closer together, instinctively, for mutual protection. It was uncanny to see this strange, scarlet figure capering about in the little clearing, seen through a screen of fir trees and against a background of gleaming white snow.
“The ghost of Patience Howe,” murmured Arden, recalling the story Granny had told—recalling what the men had said about seeing an apparently dead woman, in a red cloak, on a bed in the old Hall. And that figure had mysteriously vanished.