At length his growing petulance and inward stewing broke forth into audible grumbling. Nothing pleased him, even the discovery of a narrow path winding through the overgrown swamp, which, since it led in the general direction they were going, Cavvy promptly followed.
“An old cow path, I’ll bet,” growled Ritter, tenderly caressing a long scratch across one check. “It won’t take us anywhere. Whoever heard of walnut trees growing in this kind of a beastly hole. We’re just wasting—”
He broke off, jaw sagging, and stared over the shoulder of Champ Ferris, who walked ahead of him. The woods had ended abruptly in a cluttered, overgrown clearing. Across this the path wavered diagonally through dead, rustling grass and weeds nearly waist high to a house surrounded by eight or ten magnificent black walnut trees.
At the sight of them Cavvy’s eyes gleamed triumphantly. “By jingo!” he exclaimed. “What beauties!”
McBride and Ferris echoed his enthusiasm, and there was a hurried forward movement. Then, inexplicably, they paused. In that first moment there had been eyes for nothing save the objects of their search. But now, as their glances wandered from the great trees and took in the other details of the clearing, there came suddenly over each one of them an impression of loneliness and desolation and decay which was almost chilling.
The house was large and rambling, but bore a hundred signs of neglect and disuse. The paint had scaled from its surface leaving it a dark, streaked gray. In the moss-covered, sagging roof were rotting holes. Shutters covered the windows or hung crazily by a single rusted hinge. A pillar of the porch in front had fallen and lay buried in the tall grass.
At one side of the house lay a stagnant pool covered with a thin film of ice, and a quantity of green slime. Beyond it loomed the gaunt outlines of a great barn. The roof had been almost stripped of shingles, and the beams and rafters stood out against the cold gray sky like the bleached ribs of some long-wrecked ship. Farther still they could glimpse stretches of what had once been pasture land, but which now was smothered in a thick tangle of brier and bay and juniper. The view was limited on every side by thick, encompassing woods.
“Whew!” breathed Champ Ferris. “What a hole! It gives you a regular chill.”
“We’re going to have a job finding the owner,” said McBride disconsolately. “Don’t look as if anybody’d lived here in a thousand years.”
Cavvy’s face was puzzled. “But the path,” he reminded them. “Why hasn’t that grown up like the rest if it isn’t used?”