Going in the house, we sure made a wreck of the grub that Ma had waiting for us. Boy, did potatoes and gravy ever taste so good! Um-yum! Nor did Poppy and I shovel in any more hash than old blunderbuss. He seemed hollow from cellar to garret. Either his wife had been ladling out too much religion to him and not enough soup, or there hadn’t been enough soup to go around.
Supper over, we went out to the barn with our flashlight, which was working again by spells, to see how the gander was faring, and finding it asleep we circled through the grounds to settle our big supper.
Another queer fancy of the rich man who had built this place was the fine lawn that he had kept inside of the stone wall, though beyond the wall, as I have earlier described, was the contrast of a forsaken desert. Hundreds of loads of black dirt had been hauled here to make a bed for the grass, and in the owner’s lifetime there had been big patches of flowers and a swell layout of bushes. I guess you call it landscape gardening, or something like that. The grass now was long, with a lot of dead stuff in it, but even so it wasn’t a bad lawn. Nor had the bushes gotten ragged in the year that the house had been closed.
“Jerry,” says Poppy, as we mogged around, “did you hear what Ma said about the death-chamber door?”
“No,” says I quickly. “What about it?”
“It didn’t slam to-night at ten o’clock as usual.”
“The ‘ghost’ is scared of us, huh?” I laughed.
“We weren’t here.”
“I know, but we had planned on being here. And probably the ‘ghost’ knew about it.”
“Pa’s in bed sick.”