“She can’t ever be found,” growled a prompt rebel. “I heard the driver tell. She was picked right up and lugged off. There ain’t any of us got wings.”
“Oh, you’ve got to admit that there are ha’nts!” persisted Tommy, with fine relish for his favorite topic. “And they pick up people. I see one, in the shape of a tree, pick up an ox once and break his neck.”
“D—n you for drooling idiots!” raved Wade, beside himself. It was the first outlet for the storm of his feelings.
He ordered them to get lanterns and start on the search—he strode among them with brandished fists and whirling arms, and they dodged from in front of him, staring in amazement.
“My Gawd,” mourned Tommy, “this camp has had the spell put on it for sure! The ha’nt has driv’ the boss out of his head, and will have him next. And if it can drive a college man out of his head, what chance has the rest of us got?”
Panic was writ large in the faces of the simple woodsmen, and fear glittered in their eyes. A single queer circumstance would merely have set them to wondering; but these unexplainable events, following each other so rapidly and taking ominous shade from the glass that lugubrious Tommy Eye held over them, shook them out of self-poise. It needed but one voice to cry, “The place is accursed!” to precipitate a rout, and old Christopher Straight had the woodsman’s keen scent for trouble of this sort.
“A moment! A moment, Mr. Wade!” he called. He patted the young man’s elbow and urged him towards the door. “I want to speak to you. Keep quiet, my men, and go in to your supper.”
As he passed the cook-house door he sharply ordered the cook to sound the delayed call—the cook being then engaged in discussing, with chopping-boss and cookee, a certain “side-hill lounger,” a ha’nt that wrought vast mischief of old along Ripogenus gorge.
“Mr. Wade,” advised the old man, when they were apart from the camp, “I’m sorry to see you get so stirred up over the Skeet girl, for I don’t believe she appreciates your kindness. I have this matter pretty well settled in my own mind. I don’t know just why Miss Nina is up here, nor why she has brought that girl back—or tried to. It is plain, though, that the girl has deceived her.”
“I don’t understand,” quavered Wade, struggling between his own knowledge and old Christopher’s apparent certainty.