"Let me see." Helen and Kit both tried to look at the same time. The bookplate was pasted in each, but it was a hard one to decipher. It looked like some cryptogram with its intertwined letter forms, and they gave it up for the night.
"Well, there was certainly fresh water in that tin," Kit said positively, "and that shows the haunted house is inhabited by something tangible, I mean something besides the owl. Let's go to bed very calmly and sleep. I'm sure we've laid the ghost."
It did seem as though they had, for the remainder of the night was peaceful and safe except for the owl crying out lonesomely at intervals until about four o'clock, when the dawn came. Rolled in their blankets, the girls slept soundly until the sunlight threw broad golden beams into their quarters.
There was no rope on the windlass at the well, so Ingeborg proposed that they go down to the river and wash there. It was lots of fun. They found that the dark and fearsome object they had heaved bricks at the night before was only a big gray rock half sunken in the ground.
Along the river margin turtles sunned themselves in rows on the half-submerged logs, and a muskrat scuttled clumsily for cover at sight of the invaders.
"I wish we could go right in," said Jean, looking up and down the winding course of the river as she parted the alders; "but it isn't really safe when you don't know the water. This looks full of unexpected holes and snags. Where does it run to?"
"Down past the two mills, and rises away up in the Quinnebaug Hills," Piney told her, kneeling on a flat rock and splashing herself well. "Did you see that black snake hustle out of the way then? They're awful cowards. Yes, Jean, this comes from Judge Ellis's place about two miles beyond here, three and a half by road."
"Judge Ellis? Billie's grandfather?"
"You talk just as if you knew him, Kit."
"Well, I feel as if I do, and when I do I'm going to take him right under my wing and be a mother to him," said Kit defiantly.