There was a doubting laugh.
“You’ll be telling me next that there’s a ghost, too.”
“Sure thing,” says I cheerfully. “That was what we heard.”
“Cuckoo!”
I then told my chum the complete story of the old house as the tale had been handed down to me—how old Peg-leg Weir and his band had preyed on the early river packets, from one of which they had taken a big treasure in gold that was being brought up stream from St. Louis. Then had come the death of the pirate chief, at the hands of an angry posse, after which the band had been scattered.
The pirate’s treasure, I wound up, never had been lifted, but lay exactly where its rascally owner had hidden it. There were secret rooms under the queer house, I said, and hidden doors in the stone walls. It also was reported that there was a hidden tunnel through which the pirate and his band had carried their stolen gold from the river into the secret cellars.
“But tell me,” says Poppy, sort of pulling the story to pieces in his mind, “if this is all true, how does it come that the old house wasn’t long ago torn down? For that would have proved or disproved the story of the hidden rooms.”
“People were scared of the ghost.”
“Bunk!”
“On rainy nights,” says I, “is when it usually comes out. For it was on a rainy night that old Peg-leg Weir was drowned.”