CHAPTER IV IN THE GOOD GREENWOOD
Mr. Seymour returned from the boat and reported that he had found nothing unusual aboard her. He had not experienced the feeling of being watched by some uncanny creature, which Fred had described so vividly. And Fred acknowledged that while Mr. Seymour was with him he had found the boat a different place, free from any unhealthy suggestion.
So Helen, Ben, and Ann were told that they might scramble about her as they pleased, provided, of course, that they were careful not to fall down the open hatches or slip over the sides where the rails had been broken.
Ann was disappointed in her father’s report although she knew that if he had found the boat unsafe she would have had no opportunity to investigate for herself. She tried to be sensible and forget that a mystery had ever been attached to the ship. But it was evident to her mind that there must have been something. As Jo said, “Where there’s so much smoke there must be some fire.” She had felt it so strongly last night—were those shivers caused by nothing at all?
Jo, at least, was not convinced by Mr. Seymour’s report. He refused to join the Seymour children in a hunt over the boat that afternoon and consequently Ann and Ben were forced to wait until they could get a ladder before they could get up the high steep side of the schooner. It meant that they were not to go on the boat for some time to come, for Mr. Seymour made no suggestions as to how they were to go about getting up to the deck and Mr. Bailey seemed not to understand their hints that one of his ladders would be useful if he were willing to lend it.
Each night Ann looked out of her window, hoping to see that light flickering over the deck. It had not appeared again and she did not say a word about it to Jo and Ben. She wanted to be sure that she really had seen it and not imagined it while excited by that first glimpse of the ship with its guardian demon. And so she watched faithfully every night before she climbed into her high bed.
In the meantime she put her energy into helping her mother with the housework, into hoeing the garden and hunting new thrills in the woods.
In the garden she did her stint shoulder to shoulder with Jo and Ben. Fred Bailey had given each of them a section of the vegetable garden for his own and had promised them a commission on all the vegetables sold. Ann had already planned what she would do with her money; she knew before any green had shown above the ground. She intended to put it into the bank as the beginning of her fund for the purchase of her western ranch.
Ben, of course, was going to spend his for paint and brushes.
Each of them had his own patch of potatoes, beans, and corn, a section of the main planting allotted to his special care. And they put the seeds in the ground themselves, with the experienced Jo as instructor. It was difficult to believe that those small hard kernels would grow into green plants.