“We’ve had a real adventure, this time, dad,” Frank told him. “We were out to the old Polucca place with some of the fellows.”
“That’s the haunted house, isn’t it? See any ghosts?”
The boys looked at one another. “No, we didn’t see any ghosts, exactly,” said Joe. “But—”
“You don’t mean to tell me you heard some!” Fenton Hardy threw back his head and laughed with delight.
“You may laugh; but some mighty queer things happened out there,” insisted Joe.
Whereupon the brothers told their father of the strange experiences at the deserted farmhouse. But Mr. Hardy refused to take them seriously.
“Some of your school chums playing a joke on you,” he said, dismissing the affair. “They’ll be laughing their heads off about it right now.”
“But how do you account for the tool boxes being robbed?”
“They just did that to make it a little more mysterious. Probably they will hand you back your tools at school on Monday, just to prove their story.”
This aspect of the situation had not occurred to the boys. They began to look a bit sheepish. If it had been the work of practical jokers it was only natural that they would seek something definite whereby to prove the fact that they had been at the farmhouse.