CHAPTER XV--A VERY REAL GHOST INDEED

For a moment or two Laura Belding held to some shreds of courage. Of course she did not believe in ghosts! It was no supernatural thing that had either appeared as light to them, or had attacked her.

Yet when she essayed a third attempt to rise, she was cast to the floor once more, seemingly by the same strong hand, and this time she turned her ankle sharply. Her terror and pain made her cry out, and she lay there for a moment, helpless, watching the moving reflection of the ghostly lantern on the wall!

Suddenly between her and this reflected light, appeared a figure in white. It seemed immensely tall. It glided out of the shadowy portion of the room and came toward her.

_The figure of old Sarah Robinson!_

Outside the running girls shrieked appallingly. And their cries were re-echoed by the larger number of their schoolmates down by the campfire.

Laura closed her eyes for a moment. Consciousness left her.

The white-clad figure moved nearer. It stooped above the prostrate girl. With swift hands it tied Laura's hands together before her tightly. Then a thick veil, doubled many times, was passed across the helpless girl's mouth and tied tightly so that her voice would be muffled should she attempt to cry out.

It took less than a minute for this very palpable ghost to do this. Then, as silently as it had appeared, it glided away and, a moment later, a door might have been heard to bang at the back of the old house.

But the girls without had been so terrified that none of them heard this sound. The bobbing lantern light across the brook had been seen by those around the campfire as well as by the girls who had entered the haunted house. Mary O'Rourke's story had made a strong impression upon the minds of them all. Mary herself was startled by the appearance of the light.

Besides, panic is catching. And the three girls who ran from the house were certainly panic-stricken. Their screams of horror started many of the other girls off, and some of the waiting ones turned and ran from the plateau and down the steep path before Jess, and Dora, and Nellie reached the fire.

"The ghost! the ghost! It's after us!" shrieked the doctor's daughter, and kept right on, following the girls who had already decamped.

It was useless for any of the braver ones to try to stop the stampede. Nobody wanted to remain in the vicinity of the haunted house. They had all seen enough.

An early rising moon cast a ghostly light on the path through the wood, and the girls' feet fairly flew over this way. Celia Prime and Mary O'Rourke were among the last to run; but they did run finally, and never had a hundred or more girls become so entirely panic-stricken as the members of the M. O. R.'s and their candidates for initiation. The ceremony was there and then, and without a dissenting voice, postponed to a more favorable time!

"Where is Laura?" gasped Jess, running hard behind the Lockwood twins.

"Oh, yes! she's so brave!" panted Dora. "She ran first of all, I believe. I bet she's 'way ahead of us."

Jess knew that Laura could outrun most of the girls, whether they were frightened or not. So she took this statement for the truth.

But when they arrived at the inn and the regular picnic grounds, Laura was not there. But some of the girls who had started first had already passed through the gates and were on the road to the cars.

Of course, most of them had stopped running now. They were ashamed of their fright, and did not want to explain it to the people at the inn. But you couldn't have hired one of them to return to the plateau before the haunted house just then.

"I think Laura is just too mean not to wait for us," panted Nellie Agnew.

"She's ashamed, I expect," said one of the twins.

"It isn't like her," Jess said.

"She was scared, all right," said Nellie.

"Well! who wouldn't be?" demanded Jess.

They went on to the car tracks at a slower pace. Some of the first girls to arrive, however, had not waited for the two special cars that stood upon the side track, but took a regular one back to town.

"I believe I saw Hester Grimes get aboard that car that just passed," said one of the twins. "I wonder what she was doing out here?"

"Lots of people ride out this way in the evening," returned another girl. "I suppose Hessie has a right to come, too."

"Wish she'd been up there in that house to get scared." muttered Jess.

"And Laura seems to have taken a car back to town, likewise," said Nellie.

Laura's absence began to trouble Jess. She searched among the other girls, but could get no word of her chum.

"She beat us," laughed Mary O'Rourke, when Jess approached her with the question. "She's gone home."

There was a deal of bustle and laughter as the girls climbed into the special cars. They had recovered from their fright now, and some laughed at it. But not a girl could say what the light was they had seen bobbing over the ground. And the three who had been in the house were half tempted to believe that they had seen something supernatural in that uncanny east room.

"At any rate, I _felt_ there was something there the moment I went in," declared Nellie.

"It was an awfully spooky place," agreed Dora.

"And it smelled--just like a tomb," said Jess.

"I wouldn't go into the house again for a farm!" declared Nellie.

"Not after dark, at any rate," Jess said, more bravely.

"Never again--dark or light," declared Dora. "And I guess the seniors and juniors were scared just as much as we were. They can't laugh at us."

"My! I hope the rest of the initiation won't be as bad as this," said Nellie.

"If it is, I'll want to renig," said Dora. "It costs too much to be an M. O. R."

"We certainly are a brave lot of 'Mothers of the Republic,'" laughed Mary, who heard the sophomores conversing.

"That's all right!" spoke up Jess. "But you didn't go into that house yourself."

"Quite true. It wasn't my place. I was only sending you infants there," returned Mary.

But when the girls all left the cars on Market Street and Jess finally separated from the others at the corner of Whiffle Street, she began to worry about Laura again. It seemed strange that her chum should have run right home.

There was the Belding house ahead. There were figures on the porch. Jess halted at the gate.

"Hullo!" exclaimed Chet Belding. "Where's Laura, Jess?"

He and Lance came down the walk hastily. Jess leaned weakly on the gate, smitten now with the fear that something must have happened to her chum.

"Isn't she here, Chet?" she asked.

"Of course not."

"Didn't she come home with you?" demanded Lance, hastily.

"No. Oh, oh! Something dreadful has happened. Tell me honest, boys--isn't she here?"

"No, she's not," they both assured her, and Chet opened the gate.

"Tell us what's happened," he said. "But speak low. Mother's gone to bed with a head-ache and father's gone to the lodge. Why! Jess! you're crying!"

And Jess _was_ sobbing nervously. She could not help it. Her fear for Laura's safety had taken form now, and for a minute she could not answer the boys' excited question at all.