CHAPTER XIV
WEIRD TALES
"Aye, and it is gloomy."
Startled, the girls looked around for the voice, then realized that it was their driver who had spoken. He had been silent all the way from the station, and they had all but forgotten him.
"What made you say that?" asked Billie, rather wonderingly. For although the man had only repeated her own words, the tone in which he said them made them appear twice as ominous.
"It's a gloomy place," he said once more, with a shake of his head. "Aye, and there be some folks around here as says it is haunted."
"Do—do they really think so?" stammered Violet Farrington, beginning to wish herself back in North Bend.
"Aye, they think so," he answered, in the same monotonous voice. "And there be some times that I don't blame 'em for what they thinks."
"Do you think it's haunted?" asked Billie, with the hint of a laugh in her voice. Even here, in this forsaken place, with dusk coming on and the prospect of spending a night in a house people called haunted, Billie's sense of humor did not altogether leave her. "Do you?" she repeated, the laughter still more marked in her voice.
The driver twisted around in his seat to see her before he answered.