In a trembling voice their mother backed up their
assertion. Ezra French, who had not seen the apparition and did not believe
the tale, scented a revolution. He swore. He threatened the entire family
with starvation. He declared that a lie had been invented to deceive and
betray him.
However, the work at night in the cabbage fields on the French farm was at
an end. The story was told in the town of Bidwell, and as the entire French
family except Ezra swore to its truth, was generally believed. Tom Foresby,
an old citizen who was a spiritualist, claimed to have heard his father say
that there had been in early days an Indian burying-ground on the Turner
Pike.
The cabbage field on the French farm became locally famous. Within a year
two other men declared they had seen the figure of a gigantic Indian
dancing and singing a funeral dirge in the moonlight. Farmer boys, who
had been for an evening in town and were returning late at night to
lonely farmhouses, whipped their horses into a run when they came to the
farm. When it was far behind them they breathed more freely. Although he
continued to swear and threaten, Ezra never again succeeded in getting his
family into the fields at night. In Bidwell he declared that the story of
the ghost invented by his lazy sons and daughters had ruined his chance for
making a decent living out of his farm.
CHAPTER VI
Steve Hunter decided that it was time something was done to wake up his
native town.
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