CHAPTER X
Another Voice?
Everybody piled out of the car to look and exclaim over what had happened. The fire, apparently, had swept down from the national forest, making a path of destruction as far as the vault and no farther. The vault itself had not been touched. It was built into the hillside, and the laurel and ivy growing up and around the statue were as green as ever.
“Even the fire was afraid of that statue,” Honey said with a shiver. “Judy! Judy! Did you hear it—speak?”
“What? The statue?”
“More likely it was a ghost,” declared Horace. “Those children did knock loud enough to wake the dead.”
“Stop it!” Judy scolded him. “Can’t you see you’re frightening them?”
She had overcome her first impulse to laugh at the children’s mistake. Now she wanted to cry for sympathy. They had been so eager to meet their uncle. Now only the blackened ruins of his home were left. Not even a chimney remained standing.
Mrs. Riker was shocked into silence at first. But soon she was trying to tell the children how she remembered the house. She hadn’t seen it for many years, she said. Perhaps it hadn’t been as large as she had pictured it in her imagination. Her main concern now was for the man they had come to visit.
“Can it be he’s dead?” she wondered.