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 green45 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.

45

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 

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