ut was flung back full force into
Billie's lap, thereby squeezing out a startled "Umph!" from the sufferer.

"Say, you needn't take it out on me," cried Billie indignantly. "I didn't
put your foot to sleep."

"She's no nurse girl," murmured Laura.

The girls laughed and forgot their discomfort.

After a long time of jostling and squeezing they rounded a turn of the
road and Billie cried out.

"There it is!" she said, standing up in the jolting vehicle. "Over there
through the trees! Oh, girls! doesn't it look gloomy?"

CHAPTER XIV

WEIRD TALES

"Aye, and it is gloomy."

Startled, the girls looked around for the voice, then realized that it
was their driver who had spoken. He had been silent all the way from the
station, and they had all but forgotten him.

"What made you say that?" asked Billie, rather wonderingly. For although
the man had only repeated her own words, the tone in which he said them
made them appear twice as ominous.

"It's a gloomy place," he said once more, with a shake of his head. "Aye,
and there be some folks around here as says it is haunted."

"Do--do they really think so?" stammered Violet Farrington, beginning to
wish herself back in North Bend.

"Aye, they think so," he answered, in the same monotonous voice. "And
there be some times that I don't blame 'em for what they thinks."

"Do you think it's haunted?" asked Billie, with the hint of a laugh in
her voice. Even here, in this forsaken place, with dusk coming on and the
prospect of spending a night in a house people called haunted, Billie's
sense of humor did not altogether leave her. "Do you?" she repeated, the
laughter still more marked in her voice.

The driver twisted around in his seat to see her before he answered.

"It's all very well for you to laugh now," he answered. "But maybe you
won't feel so much like laughin' in the morning."

In spite of herself, Billie shivered a little, and the other girls looked
frightened.

"If I was you," the driver went on with his unasked advice, "I'd turn
right back an' spend the night in Roland. There's a boardin' house--"

"Nonsense, we're not going to turn back," spoke up Mrs. Gilligan, a
trifle sharply, for she could see that the driver's evil prophecies were
getting on the girls' nerves. "If there are any ghosts in that
house--which of course there ain't--they'd just better show their faces
around me, that's all. I'll give 'em such a taste of my rolling pin that
the