Page:Poor White.djvu/98

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the French farm was at an end. The story was told in the town of Bidwell, and as the entire French fam- ily except Ezra swore to its truth, was generally be- lieved. Tom Foresby, an old citizen who was a spir- itualist, 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 lo- cally 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 re- turning 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 daugh- ters had ruined his chance for making a decent living out of his farm.

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