Mr. Seymour returned from the boat and reported that he had found nothing unusual aboard her. He had not experienced the feeling of being watched by some uncanny creature, which Fred had described so vividly. And Fred acknowledged that while Mr. Seymour was with him he had found the boat a different place, free from any unhealthy suggestion.

So Helen, Ben, and Ann were told that they might scramble about her as they pleased, provided, of course, that they were careful not to fall down the open hatches or slip over the sides where the rails had been broken.

Ann was disappointed in her father’s report although she knew that if he had found the boat unsafe she would have had no opportunity to investigate for herself. She tried to be sensible and forget that a mystery had ever been attached to the ship. But it was evident to her mind that there must have been something. As Jo said, “Where there’s so much smoke there must be some fire.” She had felt it so strongly last night—were those shivers caused by nothing at all?

Jo, at least, was not convinced by Mr. Seymour’s report. He refused to join the Seymour children in a hunt over the boat that afternoon and consequently Ann and Ben were forced to wait until they could get a ladder before they could get up the high steep side of the schooner. It meant that they were not to go on the boat for some time to come, for Mr. Seymour made no suggestions as to how they were to go about getting up to the deck and Mr. Bailey seemed not to understand their hints that one of his ladders would be useful if he were willing to lend it.

Each night Ann looked out of her window, hoping to see that light flickering over the deck. It had not appeared again and she did not say a word about it to Jo and Ben. She wanted to be sure that she really had seen it and not imagined it while excited by that first glimpse of the ship with its guardian demon. And so she watched faithfully every night before she climbed into her high bed.

In the meantime she put her energy into helping her mother with the housework, into hoeing the garden and hunting new thrills in the woods.

In the garden she did her stint shoulder to shoulder with Jo and Ben. Fred Bailey had given each of them a section of the vegetable garden for his own and had promised them a commission on all the vegetables sold. Ann had already planned what she would do with her money; she knew before any green had shown above the ground. She intended to put it into the bank as the beginning of her fund for the purchase of her western ranch.

Ben, of course, was going to spend his for paint and brushes.

Each of them had his own patch of potatoes, beans, and corn, a section of the main planting allotted to his special care. And they put the seeds in the ground themselves, with the experienced Jo as instructor. It was difficult to believe that those small hard kernels would grow into green plants.

One morning Ben reached the garden ahead of Ann and suddenly turned and shouted to her to hurry. “The beans are coming through! I suppose they’re beans, because that’s where we planted beans. Don’t they look funny!”

Funny they did look, great curling stems that thrust through the soil like crooked fingers, cracking and heaving the ground all around them. In the rows where the children had planted them the earth hummocked up and hundreds of plants were forcing their way up into the sunlight.

She knew they must be coming soon but the sight of them was a greater surprise than any Christmas Day Ann ever had known. To think that the little hard beans that she had dropped and covered with fine earth had been growing and putting out such curly twisted sprouts that had shot up overnight! The dear baby things! She knelt down to touch them but Jo’s voice stopped her. He had walked while she ran forward in reply to Ben’s call.

“I wouldn’t do that,” he suggested mildly. “The morning dew is on them and nobody touches beans while they’re wet. It turns them black when they get bigger.”

“But there are no beans yet,” Ann protested, looking up at Jo over her shoulder. “I don’t see how I could hurt them if I touched them delicately, just to find out whether they feel as strong as they look.”

“It doesn’t make any difference how young they are,” Jo answered. “It won’t seem to hurt them when you touch them, but when the beans form on the plants you have handled nobody will be able to eat them. They’ll be black and spotted; rusted, the farmers call it. Of course sometimes you can’t help beans rusting when there’s too much rain.”

“What makes them rust?” asked Ben. “You wouldn’t imagine that the grown-up plants would remember anything that happened to them when they were babies.”

“I don’t know why,” and Jo shook his head. “I wish I did know more about it. I don’t know any reasons, but there must be some. I only know that things happen, not why.”

“Well, I know this much,” said Ann decidedly. “When I go back to school this fall I shall find out, and then I’ll write to tell you, Jo.”

“That would be fine. I’d like that,” Jo said shyly. Ben had gone over to the rows of corn and potatoes, and he came back with a perplexed expression on his face. “Where are they?” he asked. “Do you suppose that some animal has eaten them? We shall have nothing but beans in our gardens, or can we plant more corn and potatoes?”

Jo threw back his head and laughed heartily.

“What did you expect?” he asked. “Did you think that everything came through at the same time? The potatoes ought to sprout within a day or two, but corn is slow. It often takes three weeks. The weather has hardly been hot enough to start it yet. You need hot weather to make corn grow. Beans are about the quickest things.”

“Gee, what a lot you know!” said Ben admiringly. “I didn’t know there was so much to learn about a real garden. I thought that a farmer put his seeds in the ground and they came up, and then after a while he picked his vegetables and sold them.”

“Lots of people think that,” said Jo in a stiff tone of voice as he began to hoe his morning row. “That is why so many city people make jokes about farmers, and think they don’t know anything. Most farmers know very little about the city, but they understand their job of getting food for the city people to eat. I should like to see some of those sneering city fellows plow an acre of ground under the hot sun. A man walks pretty near thirty miles doing such a stretch, and he has to hold his plow nearly a foot in the ground while he does his walking, so as to turn over a six or twelve inch furrow. It takes a pretty good man to do that.”

“I never laughed at farmers, Jo,” Ann protested mildly. “It is only that I never knew anything about farming.”

“That’s all right,” answered Jo, smiling at her. “I wasn’t thinking about any of you folks. I was calling to mind some of these summer tourists who come through camping by the wayside. We don’t get pestered by them because we’re too far from the main highway, but the farmers nearer the village go well-nigh crazy trying to protect their gardens and fruit from stealing. Why, last summer Les Perkins had all of his pears just ready for picking and shipping to Boston. It took him three years to grow those pears for a perfect crop all free from worms and spots. He had sort of hoped to make something of them at last. He got to his trees one day in time to see a dozen city folks piling into a first-class car, all loaded up with pears. Not only that, but they had shaken the trees and the fruit was all stripped off. What they hadn’t stolen was too bruised to sell.”

“They ought to have been arrested for that!” Ann exclaimed breathlessly.

“Yes.” Jo laughed half-heartedly. “Catch ’em if you can. I caught one of them stealing Pete Simonds’ raspberries. He had a bunch of kids with him. I heard him tell ’em to pick the ripe ones and throw the green ones away. They were stripping the bushes. I told them to get out, but the man only laughed and said that all berries were common property.”

“What did you do then?” asked Ben eagerly.

Jo was rather shamefaced. “Well, I shouldn’t have done it. But the way the man said it made me mad, so I hauled off and gave him a punch in the jaw. He looked so funny, the way he sprawled with raspberries all over him! He was a good-sized feller, and he got up on his feet and came after me ugly, but he saw Pete coming on the run and I can tell you he legged it for his car with all the kids streaming after him. He knew just as well as I did that he was stealing.”

“Well,” said Ben slowly, “if any one stole my beans I’d punch him in the jaw, too. After a farmer has planted seeds on his own land the crop is his exactly as much as the vegetables in my mother’s kitchen are hers after she has brought them home from the market.”

“There ought to be policemen to watch city people,” said Ann. “They ought to be made afraid to steal, if they are not the kind of persons who would be ashamed to take what isn’t theirs.”

“There don’t seem to be many of that last kind,” said Jo.

“It makes me feel rather queer,” said Ann. “I don’t like to think that you have learned to have such a bad opinion of people who live in the city.”

“Tell us some more about farming, Jo,” begged Ben. “What happens to beans after they have sprouted and begun to be plants?” He looked fondly at his row with their yellow-green stems.

“Oh, we’ll have plenty of work from now on,” began Jo. “We’ll have to hunt for cutworms right away. See—here is one now.” He uncovered a small gray worm about an inch long and crushed it with his hoe.

“Let’s see!” said Ben excitedly, and he and Ann began to examine their own allotments.

“They work at night and dig in under the soil when the sun comes out,” Jo explained. “They bite the young plant off just where it goes into the ground. Whenever you find a plant lying on the ground you know that a cutworm has eaten it off and he is hiding under the dirt a few inches away. You’ll have to dig each one up and kill it before he does any more damage. He would come back again and again and finally eat off the whole row.”

“I’ve found one!” Ben cried. “I hate them! Why do they have to come?” he asked as he stamped on it.

“I guess they have to eat like the rest of us,” answered Jo. “But if we didn’t watch there would be more cutworms than beans in the world. They sure were invented to pester us farmers.”

“They are almost as bad as the tourists,” and Ann laughed.

“Well, in a way we don’t mind them so much as we do tourists. We expect the cutworms.” “I don’t believe the tourists would enjoy being cut in two,” said Ann.

So the days went happily by, full of new experiences for the Seymours. Whenever the short rains came the children sat before the open fire in the living room, or, as Jo called it, the parlor, while Mrs. Seymour read to them, or while Jo told stories of the country near Pine Ledge; for Jo was always included in the circle.

Ann never grew tired of watching the sea. While the others watched the fire she often sat by the window, listening, of course, but with her eyes fixed on the ocean. How the waves shone in the sun, and how they tumbled and grew dark when the squalls rushed over them! At such times she wondered about what had happened on the schooner cast up on the shore, lying on its side almost at her very feet. Fred believed what he had felt while he was on her, and Jo so evidently had a horror of everything connected with the wreck; there was her father’s testimony that nothing was wrong there. And as a climax to that, there was what her own eyes had seen, the moving light.

Mr. Seymour was working hard and getting a great deal done. His sketches grew rapidly under his hands. Already he had a number of canvases leaning against the walls of the living room and he had asked Jo if he might paint his portrait.

Then one day a heavy northeaster broke and gave promise of lasting two days at the very least. It was a good time for indoor work and Jo was called into service as a model. He did not know the story of Robin Hood, so Mrs. Seymour read it aloud while he sat for Mr. Seymour. The others had heard it many times, but they were never tired of those adventures in the glade and the good greenwood and they listened as eagerly as did Jo.

Then came clear days that were the best of all, for after their gardens had been hoed, Maude, the cow, milked and put to pasture, and the chickens watered and fed, they followed Jo’s lead into the dense pine woods, where they held forth as Robin Hood and his band.

Jo was, of course, Robin Hood, for he knew all the trails through the merry greenwood and could find clear fresh springs no matter in which direction they tramped. Ben was Allan-a-Dale, although he couldn’t sing very well. In fact, after he had proved to know only one tune and had sung that one a great many times, the entire band requested him to stop it.

“Allan-a-Dale was a minstrel and he was supposed to sing,” Ben protested.

But Helen, who was taking the part of Ellen, had a good reason for wishing that Ben would be quiet and she did not hesitate to tell him. “I want to watch the birds, and you scare them away. Can’t you just pretend to sing? It would be very much nicer.”

As the band contained only one woman besides Ellen, Ann finally consented to be Maid Marian, although she much preferred to be Friar Tuck.

“You’re a girl,” Ben said decidedly. “And a girl can’t be Friar Tuck.”

“What difference does that make?” protested Ann. “I can swing a stave as well as you do; better.”

“I know you can,” said Jo. “But Maid Marian is far more important than Friar Tuck. Robin Hood couldn’t have done a thing without her. She went everywhere the band did and thought things out for them, but Friar Tuck didn’t do much except eat and drink.”

“It is such a nice name,” mourned Ann. But Maid Marian she decided to be.

The band discovered a place high up in the wood that was exactly suited to be their glade. It was a wide bare spot covered with pine needles, and along its edges a few walnut trees were scattered, one of which the boys could climb easily. This was the lookout tree, and after Ann learned how to get up it they mounted guard in turn. From its branches one could see far away across the green forest to the village, a cluster of white dots. On the other side the watcher looked over the home meadow and the house to the sea beyond. From such a high perch the expanse of water seemed much greater and the house and meadow very small in contrast.

“What ho, what ho,” Ben called the first time Ann settled herself among the branches. “Sister Ann, do you see anybody coming?” “Pooh!” exclaimed little Helen contemptuously. “That’s Bluebeard! That’s not Robin Hood.”

“So it is,” admitted Ben. “What ho, what ho, Maid Marian, doth an enemy draw nigh?”

“I see only one,” Ann answered as a small blue figure that was Fred Bailey crossed the meadow far away, “but he holds at a distance and is seemingly unaware of our hiding place.”

No band is complete without its longbows and staves. Jo quickly filled this lack. He made staves by cutting branches from the straight alder bushes that grew in the brook, peeling them until they were white and shining. They whipped lithely in the air with a clear whistling sound. Jo gathered them up every evening and kept them in the running water of the brook, so that they would not dry out and become brittle.

At first he was puzzled as to how he could make longbows that were strong as well as limber, but soon he thought of the young willows. These he cut and bent into a regular bow-shape without destroying the springiness of the wood. And for bowstrings they used old fishing line.

There was no problem concerning life in the greenwood that Jo could not solve; the making of proper arrows, for instance. He built a small fire after scraping away the dry pine needles and sprinkling the ground with fresh moist earth, and cut some thin lead into strips. These he fastened to the points of the short arrows he had made, so that the tips would have weight to carry them straight to the mark. Of course each member of the band took great care not to shoot his fellow members and only one person was allowed to practice at a time, so that the arrows would be easy to locate after they had been shot.

At first the band made forays into the wood in pairs, Jo and Ann, then Ben and Helen, so that the glade might not be left unprotected. Under this arrangement Jo was always worried when it was his turn to stay in the shelter. He knew that Ben was unfamiliar with big woods and might get lost. So the band was called for conference and it was decided that the entire band should foray together. Meeting enemies in full strength they stood a better chance of beating them, and before starting out they carefully concealed all the trails to the glade and knew that no enemy could uncover them.

“To-day I shall get me a fine buck,” Ben said as he swung his longbow over his shoulder and seized his stave. “I hanker much for fresh meat.”

“I’ll show you where the deer come to drink,” Robin Hood offered. “Methinks if Allan be a good shot he can easily bring down a couple for our goodly dinner. I saw tracks by the river a month or so ago.”

“Really?” exclaimed Ben. “Gee! I’d like to see a deer!”

The trip to the river was all downhill and they scrambled through the prickly barberries and juniper like true outlaws, courageously ignoring the thorns that pricked and tore. Great ledges of gray rock, covered with lichens and holding small hemlocks and spruces in their cracks, opposed their way and they were obliged to climb up the rocks on one side and slide down over the steep slope beyond. Helen had the most trouble because her legs were shorter, but after Jo and Ann had pulled her down once or twice she lost her fear. With the aid of her stave she sat down on the top of the rock and coasted, landing upright on her feet in the soft underbrush at the bottom. It wasn’t very good for her bloomers, but they were made of stout cloth and managed to hold together.

As they drew near to the wide pool where the river spread out over the low land Jo motioned for them to step quietly. He took the lead and crept slowly foot by foot, crouching low in the underbrush. Finally they came on a narrow trail through which they could just pass with the bushes touching their shoulders. Ann noticed how Jo avoided touching the branches so that they should not move any more than necessary and she tried to imitate him. It was not easy. He twisted his shoulders this way and that, all the time moving forward slowly. Ben went along with his hands on his knees, bent forward, while Helen was so short that she had no difficulty at all.

At last Jo looked back over his shoulder, put his finger on his lips and beckoned for them to come beside him. He pointed to a mark in the soft ground before him. It was the imprint of a small cloven hoof and even Ann’s inexperienced eye could see that it was fresh.

“He’s been down here this morning,” Jo whispered. “I wish we had been around—he’s a big fellow all right.”

“Isn’t he here now?” whispered Ann. “How do you know that he isn’t?”

“We’ll find out,” Jo answered. “He may be sleeping under the bushes, but they don’t stay in this neighborhood generally; too many people in the daytime, passing, and deer are nervous, nowadays. They like it best back on the hills where there is more protection.”

As he spoke he turned at right angles from the trail and plunged silently into the undergrowth. The bushes closed about him and it was all Ann could do to follow. Suddenly he stopped.

He did not so much as whisper. Silently he motioned for them to come forward quickly.

They looked to where his finger pointed.

Under a group of pines a few feet away a huge buck deer lay asleep, with the sun through the trees splotching his dark coat and turning it into shimmering velvet. His horns were short and looked like dull leather; Jo told them afterward that was because he had not yet made his full year’s growth.

As the band watched he leaped from the ground, fully awake in the instant that he scented danger. He leaped almost as if his feet had not touched the earth and he bounded lightly into a jungle of thorns and scrub oak. And with that one beautiful jump he vanished.

“Well, Allan,” Jo turned toward Ben’s wide-eyed face with a laugh. “Why didn’t you shoot him?”

“Shoot him— Try to kill him? I couldn’t kill anything as lovely as that, ever. I want to draw him, paint him, just as he jumped in the sun, with the light on his skin and the green all around. Oh,” he cried excitedly, “do you suppose that father could see a deer so that he could show me how to make a picture that was halfway good?”

“If Mr. Seymour would really like to see one, we can come out some morning at dawn and if we are quiet perhaps we can see a deer as he comes down to drink. It is great fun to lie in the bushes when they don’t know any one is watching; they walk about and drink.”

“We’ll go home and ask him now,” said Ann with determination. “It is just too wonderful, and I know he’ll want to come, perhaps to-morrow.”

“And I want to tell mother about it,” said Helen.

“All right,” agreed Jo. “We’ll follow the river out to the road. That will be easier than going back over those high ledges.”

The trail led down to a smooth swamp pond filled with such clear water that the children could see the long grass moving at the bottom. A short distance from the edge little heaps of leaves, straw, and twigs rose here and there above the surface of the water. Jo said they were houses that the muskrats had built to live in last winter.

“They build just before the cold weather sets in,” he said. “It is great sport to come every day and see how the houses grow. Sometimes the muskrats don’t bother very much with building, and the winters that follow are open and warm, generally. But when old Mr. Muskrat builds high, wide, and handsome, look out for thick ice and deep heavy snow.”

“How curious!” said Ann. “How do you suppose they know what the weather is going to be?”

The band walked along beside the swamp until it narrowed into a running river again.

“Gulls like the pond, too,” Jo said. “Especially when a storm is blowing up. When the wind begins to be too strong the gulls sweep into the cove and watch for the fish that are beating into the mouth of the river. They hang up there in the air and laugh as if they liked the storm. They laugh out loud and shriek and have a great time. When they get tired and pretty well fed they let the wind carry them back here to the pond, where they settle in droves on the sheltered water. They wait until the storm blows over. Next nor’easter that blows up, I’ll remember to show them to you. You can see them easily from the kitchen.”

He was leading the band and they were drawing nearer to the road. Suddenly he stopped short, so short that Ann, who was next, bumped into him. “Hello!” he said. “What’s this?”

At his feet were the charred embers of a fire. They were still smoldering and, as he brushed the ashes aside with his foot, the coals gleamed brightly.

“Who do you suppose did that?” he exclaimed indignantly. “None of the folks around here would ever leave a fire burning in the woods. Why, it might spread and burn off the whole territory. Once a fire got started up through the pines nothing could stop it.”

Ann looked down at the wicked gleam. She never would have dreamed that it was wicked if Jo hadn’t told her it was, but what he had said made her regard the fire from a very different standpoint. To her imagination the live embers glowed and flickered like the lantern she had seen on the wrecked ship.

She grew vaguely excited, for if no native of Pine Ledge could have left that fire, then some stranger must be prowling around the neighborhood, some one who didn’t want to be seen. Perhaps the very person who lighted this fire to cook his breakfast was the same invisible person who carried the swinging lantern across the deck, that first night.

The keen-minded Jo saw her excitement. “What’s up?” he asked. “Is something the matter?”

Ann hesitated. “Perhaps I am imagining, but I think I know of some one who might have built this fire.”

So she told them about that tiny pin point of lantern light. Jo listened silently until she had finished, although Ann could see that he, too, was growing excited.

“I shouldn’t wonder if you were right,” he said at last. “It looks to me as if some one who has no business here is hanging about. But if we tell the other folks about it they will say that it is nonsense; they think that we are too young to know much of what we are talking about. I think we had better keep a good lookout, and if we actually discover anything we can tell them then. This is a job for Robin Hood’s men all right.”

Jo threw up his head and squared his shoulders.

“What ho, merry men!” he shouted. “How many will follow me in fathoming the mystery of the wrecked ship?”

“I will follow,” Ann said quickly.

“I want to be in on it, too,” Ben cried breathlessly.

“Me, too,” Helen chimed in a voice that was a bit frightened but nevertheless determined. “I want to help hunt for ghosts.”

“Then we are united?” Jo asked.

“Aye, aye,” shouted Ben. “Lead on.”

Before they started on their way again they dipped water from the river in their cupped hands and threw it hissing upon the live coals until the fire was out. As an extra precaution, for the fire might have gone deep into the pine needles beneath, Jo raked away the leaves and twigs and needles until he had made a wide circle of bareness.