“I was just joking,” the younger Graham girl explained hurriedly.
“Why did you suggest a ghost even as a joke?” inquired Katherine. The utterance of the word ghost, together with the probability that there was a neighborhood story behind it, forced upon her imagination an irrational explanation of the strange occurrences of the last evening.
“Oh, I didn’t mean anything by it,” Olga reassured, but her words seemed to come with a slightly forced unnaturalness. “But there has been some talk about a ghost around here, you know.”
“Did anybody ever see it?” asked Hazel Edwards.
“Not that I know of,” avowed Olga. “Of course, I don’t believe in such things, but, then, you never can tell. It might be a half-witted person, and I’m sure I don’t know which I’d rather meet after dark—a ghost or a crazy man.”
“Is there a crazy man running loose around here?” Ernestine Johanson inquired with a shudder.
“There must be,” Olga declared with a suggestion of awe in her voice. “If it isn’t a ghost—and I don’t believe in such things—it must be somebody escaped from a lunatic asylum.”
“I saw something mysterious moving through the woods near our cottage one night,” Addie Graham interposed at this point. “Nobody else in the family would believe me when I told them about it. It looked like a man in a long white robe and long hair and a long white beard. It was moonlight and I was looking out of my bedroom window. Suddenly this strange being appeared near the edge of the timber. He was looking toward the house, and I suppose he saw me, for he picked up a stone and threw it at the window where I stood. It fell a few feet short of its mark, and then the ghost or the insane man—call him what you please—turned and ran away.”
“My sister told us about that next morning, and we all laughed at her,” said Olga, continuing the account. “I told her to go out and find the stone, and she went out and picked one up just about where she said the stone that was thrown at her fell.”
“Were there any other stones near there?” Marion Stanlock inquired.