“This,” replied the girl, “is your land.”
“No!” Florence exclaimed. “It can’t be.”
“But yes, it is your farm.” The girl smiled a happy smile. “This is the number you drew.”
“Ours!” Florence whispered hoarsely. “An abandoned cabin, a clearing, a lake! All ours! And to think, we nearly missed it!” Then, quite wild with joy, she surprised the shy Indian girl by catching her up in her arms and kissing her on the cheek.
At that very moment, as if it were part of some strange drama, there sounded from the edge of the clearing a loud: “Get up! Go ’long there!” and a traveling rig as strange as their own burst from the edge of the timber.
A moment later, a little man on a high-wheeled, wobbly cart, shouted, “Whoa, January!” to his shaggy horse, then sat for a full moment staring at the three girls.
“You’re some of them new settlers?” he said at last.
Florence nodded. She was too much surprised to do more. The man, whose whiskers had grown for months all untrimmed and whose hair fell to his shoulders, looked as if he might have stepped from an illustration of Rip Van Winkle.
“This your place?” he asked. Again the girl nodded.
“Well,” his eyes swept the horizon, “you’re lucky maybe—and then again maybe not. There’s the clearin’ an’ the cabin, but maybe the cabin’s haunted.