The lad nodded. “I’ll say there is!” he replied in a voice that suggested mystery. “There’s an old haunted house on the Poor Farm Road, but I wouldn’t go near it if I were you. I sure wouldn’t.”
Then, as some other boys were impatiently calling him to hurry up, he left the girls to ponder on what they had heard. “I’m crazy to see it,” Betsy said. “We can stand far off and just look at it.”
The five girls walked rapidly through the small country village, stopping only a moment at the general store to purchase five striped bags of chocolate creams. They asked the direction they would have to take to reach the Poorhouse road. The man behind the counter looked his surprise.
“You wasn’t figgerin’ on goin’ to the poorhouse, was you? If so, you’d better hire the station rig to tote you there. It’s nigh five miles and the goin’s pretty bad.”
“Oh, no, indeed! We weren’t going that far.” Barbara turned in the door to reply.
“But thar’s nothin’ else on that road but Captain Burgess’ old place whar thar’s nobody livin’. Leastwise, no one you’d care to meet up with you a mere parcel of girls from the seminary, like as not.”
But the garrulous old man’s curiosity was not to be satisfied, for with a polite little nod, Barbara joined the others who were waiting on the well-shoveled path in front of the store.
The village was a small one. In ten minutes their brisk walking had taken them to the last house. Beyond that the road lay a smooth unbroken blanket of snow. Evidently the poorhouse was not often visited.
The girls stopped and looked ahead. “Is it worth the effort?” Margaret glanced up at her adopted sister. “We’ll have to wade up to our knees in snow, and we don’t know how far away that old house may be. I can’t see anything from here but a woods, and that’s at least a quarter of a mile, shouldn’t you think?”
Virginia nodded. “Fully.”