“Yes, sir,” responded the excited small boy, who, with two companions, had run himself quite out of breath all over town before he found the officer at Harkin’s blacksmith shop.

“Well, dang ’em!” said Mr. Crow impressively.

“We was skatin’ in the marsh when we heerd ’em plain as day,” said the other boy.  “You bet I’m nuvver goin’ nigh that house ag’in.”

“Sho!  Bud, they ain’t no sech thing as ghosts,” said Mr. Crow; “it’s tramps.”

“You know that house is ha’nted,” protested Bud.  “Wasn’t ole Mrs. Rank slew there by her son-in-law?  Wasn’t she chopped to pieces and buried there right in her own cellar?”

“Thunderation, boy, that was thirty year ago!”

“Well, nobody’s lived in the ha’nted house sence then, has they?  Didn’t Jim Smith 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.