th try to sleep there oncet on a bet, an' didn't he hear sech
awful noises 'at he liked to went crazy?" insisted Bud.

[Illustration: The haunted house]

"I _do_ recollect that Jim run two mile past his own house before he
could stop, he was in sech a hurry to git away from the place. But Jim
didn't _see_ anything. Besides, that was twenty year ago. Ghosts don't
hang aroun' a place when there ain't nothin' to ha'nt. Her son-in-law
was hung, an' she ain't got no one else to pester. I tell you it's
tramps."

"Well, we just thought we'd tell you, Mr. Crow," said the first boy.

In a few minutes it was known throughout the business centre of
Tinkletown that tramps were making their home in the haunted house down
the river, and that Anderson Crow was to ride forth on his bicycle to
rout them out. The haunted house was three miles from town and in the
most desolate section of the bottomland. It was approachable only
through the treacherous swamp on one side or by means of the river on
the other. Not until after the murder of its owner and builder, old
Johanna Rank, was there an explanation offered for the existence of a
home in such an unwholesome locality.

Federal authorities discovered that she and her son-in-law, Dave Wolfe,
were at the head of a great counterfeiting gang, and that they had been
working up there in security for years, turning out spurious coins by
the hundred. One night Dave up and killed his mother-in-law, and was
hanged for his good deed before he could be punished for his bad ones.
For thirty years the weather-beaten, ramshackle old cabin in the swamp
had been unoccupied except by birds, lizards, and other denizens of the
solitude--always, of course, including the ghost of old Mrs. Rank.

Inasmuch as Dave chopped her into small bits and buried them in the
cellar, while her own daughter held the lantern, it was not beyond the
range of possibility that certain atoms of the unlamented Johanna were
never unearthed by the searchers. It was generally believed in the
community that Mrs. Rank's spirit came back every little while to nose
around in the dirt of the cellar in quest of such portions of her person
as had not been respectably interred in the village graveyard.

Mysterious noises had been heard about the place at the dead hour of
night, and ghostly lights had flitted past the cellar windows. All
Tinkletown agreed that the place was haunted and kept at a most
respectful distance. The three smal