The Witch Tree Symbol (9 page)

Inside, Bess stepped onto a bench along the wall so that she could look over the dancers’ heads. Every couple on the floor was Amish and Nancy and Ned were nowhere in sight!

“Oh, Dave!” she cried, looking down at her date. “What will we do?”

 

 

 

AT this very moment about three miles away the missing couple were on a sleuthing mission. Nancy and Ned were astride the horse he had hired for the evening. They were riding along a lonely road in complete darkness. The animal still wore its blinders. Nancy, seated in front of Ned, held the reins firmly.

A short distance ahead of the unsaddled horse and its two riders was an Amish carriage being pulled by a black horse. The couple were trailing it, hoping their horse’s hoofbeats were not being heard.

Ned leaned forward and whispered into Nancy’s ear, “You’re sure that’s the stolen carriage with some of Mrs. Follett’s missing furniture in it?”

“I’m almost positive,” Nancy said softly.

“And you feel well enough to go on,” Ned asked her solicitously. “Not faint or anything?”

Nancy assured him she was fine. “I can’t miss this chance to nab Roger Hoelt!”

Suddenly the carriage they were following turned into a wooded road.

“This may be a trick,” Nancy warned, “if the driver knows we’re following him.”

The girl pulled gently on the reins to slow the horse’s gait. Meanwhile, the carriage ahead stopped and its driver got out. Nancy reined in their mount, turning him into the woods.

From among the trees, she and Ned could see a moving light along the road. Was the driver looking for them? As the light played about the nearby area, the hidden couple hardly dared to breathe. Nancy patted the horse soothingly to keep him from pawing the ground or making any sound.

In a few minutes the man turned, retraced his steps, got back in his carriage, and rode off. Nancy and Ned took up the trail again, hoping the hoofbeats of the man’s horse would drown out those of their mount.

“I’m sure that fellow knows he’s being followed,” Nancy said. “We’d better watch out. He may try to trap us!”

Just then the man’s horse began to gallop and the carriage swayed from side to side. Nancy and Ned expected it to turn over at any moment.

“That fellow must be crazy to drive so fast,” Ned said, “or else he’s trying to lose us.”

He nudged their horse and it began to run, bringing them closer. After a chase of a quarter of a mile, the carriage stopped abruptly, blocked by a stream. The vehicle swayed a moment but did not go over.

“You stay here,” Ned ordered, sliding off the horse. “I’ll go ahead and find out what’s going on.”

Nancy insisted upon following Ned. After securing the horse’s reins to a tree trunk, they tiptoed forward, hidden in the shadows of the trees. In a few minutes they reached the carriage.

“Where did the driver go?” Ned said softly.

Nancy was listening to detect any sound in the nearby woods that might indicate where the man was. She could hear nothing but the chirping of crickets.

“Ned,” she whispered, “will you stand guard while I examine the furniture in the carriage? I want to be sure it’s part of the Follett collection.”

“Go ahead,” he urged.

The pieces of furniture were small, and Nancy lifted them out of the vehicle and carried them, one by one, to the carriage lamps to look them over. Each resembled items on Mrs. Tenney’s list, but there was no way to identify them positively as the stolen articles.

Disappointed, Nancy had returned all but one piece, which she now examined. It was a small hassock with mahogany legs and a petit-point top with a design of red roses and festoons of green leaves. It fitted the description of a footstool taken from the Follett mansion!

“Ned,” Nancy whispered, excited. “We’re surely on the right track. This is exactly like one of the stolen pieces on the inventory. And this horse is black, like the one Hoelt took. I think we have enough evidence to report him to the police.”

“Great!” Ned exclaimed, but he reminded her that by the time they could get to a phone, the thief might return and drive away with the evidence.

Nancy nodded. “You’re right. Then we’ll have to take the horse and carriage with us!” she declared. “You ride the horse and I’ll drive the buggy.”

Ned did not think this was a safe thing for Nancy to do. The man who had been driving the carriage might be waiting in ambush and would prevent them from reporting the incident to the police.

“That could be,” Nancy said, “but I think he’s not very familiar with this area. He didn’t know about the stream and when he reached it, he was afraid to cross over.”

Ned said that sounded logical, and added that the man probably had known someone was on his trail and had fled in fear of being caught. The question was, Where was he now?

Nancy got into the carriage and urged the horse into a full turn. Then, leading the way, she started off with Ned guarding the rear.

Though both the young people had shown no fear of what they were about to do, each of them was nervous. It was possible that the missing driver had gone off for reinforcements.

At any moment Roger Hoelt and his assistants might come to claim what they considered to be their property! What they might do to the young couple to keep them from going to the police gave Nancy and Ned some uneasy moments. But as they reached the end of the woods road, the tension began to lessen. The riders were not stopped. In fact, they met no one on the road.

Since Nancy knew none of the farmers in the neighborhood and saw no lights in the houses they passed, she decided it would be unwise to stop to telephone at any of them. She concluded that the best plan would be to go to the dance.

Half an hour later she and Ned reached the Fischers’. Instead of going to the barn, where the dance was still in progress, Nancy drove directly to the house. By the time the door was opened by a smiling, broad-shouldered man, Ned had joined her.

Mr. Fischer invited them into the kitchen. Together, they quickly told their story, and the Amish man’s face showed his astonishment. He immediately called the State Police.

“They will send a man,” he reported after he had talked with the captain. “It is good that you two found the stolen furniture. But it is too bad that you should miss the dance. Why don’t you go over there and make a square? I will call you when the police come.”

Nancy thanked him, but said that after their accident she was more ready for a bottle of liniment than a dance!

“I guess I’m not so hardy as your Amish girls,” she added.

The man chuckled. He remarked diplomatically that even an Amish girl who had been thrown out of a buggy and then ridden an unsaddled horse for miles might need a massage with liniment. He offered to awaken his wife to give Nancy a rubdown, but she said a hot bath and a good night’s sleep would fix her up.

While waiting for the police to arrive, she and Ned talked to Mr. Fischer about the farms in the vicinity, and Nancy asked him if he had ever heard of a place called the
schnitz.

“No,” the man said. “But I have not lived here many years. I came from Ohio.”

At once Nancy inquired if he had ever heard of Roger Hoelt from Ohio. The farmer shook his head.

At this moment a car stopped at the house and two State Police officers came in. They introduced themselves as Officers Wagner and Schmidt.

“You are the couple who may have found some stolen furniture?” Officer Wagner asked Nancy and Ned.

“And a stolen horse and carriage,” Ned added.

Nancy told the police about her interview at the carriage factory, and also of hearing that a black horse had disappeared from one of the nearby farms. Officer Schmidt pulled a little book from his pocket and turned several pages.

“Here is a report on both items,” he said. “And unless the person who stole the carriage added a final coat of paint to the underside of the right shaft, it may be possible for us to identify the carriage.”

The group walked outside. Officer Schmidt took a flashlight from his pocket, got down on the ground, and beamed the light under the right shaft. A smile crossed his face.

“This is it, all right,” he said. “The final coat was never put on.”

Both officers congratulated Nancy and Ned on recovering the stolen carriage, then looked into the back of it.

“What makes you think this is part of the collection of stolen furniture?” Officer Wagner asked Nancy.

She told him about the petit-point pattern on the hassock. He smiled and remarked that she certainly was a thorough and discerning detective.

“We’ll take the horse, carriage, and furniture with us,” said Officer Wagner, “and would you like us to return the horse and buggy you rented?”

“Yes, thank you,” Ned said, and told the policemen where they would find the carriage.

The officers said they would explain what had happened to the owner. Ned asked them to have the man send him a bill and gave his address.

After the police had gone, Nancy and Ned decided to go to the dance and find their friends. They went outside, and for the first time realized that Ned’s car was not there. They concluded that their friends must have gone back to the Glicks’.

“But how are we going to get home?” Nancy asked.

“Surely somebody here will give us a lift,” Ned suggested.

They walked to the barn door and stepped inside. They had no sooner appeared than one of the Amish girls who was dancing stopped short and shrieked.

Pointing a finger at the couple, she cried out, “The witch girl! The witch boy! They’ve flown back here to hex us!”

The dancing ceased abruptly and the musicians stopped playing. There was a surge of unfriendly looking young men and women toward Nancy and Ned. Fearfully the couple wondered what was going to happen!

 

 

 

WEARY from the experiences of the evening, Nancy was in no condition to cope with the oncoming hostile group. But Ned instantly took command of the situation.

“Stop!” he cried, holding up his hands.

As the young Amish couples paused, he told them that all the talk about the witch girl and boy was utterly ridiculous. Furthermore, both he and Nancy might have lost their lives because of the foolishness of one of their drivers.

There was silence for a moment, then one of the boys called out,
“Ya,
but I go by the old ideas. This girl makes trouble, ain’t?”

“On the contrary,” Ned said in a loud voice so that all could hear him. “Nancy Drew is doing your neighborhood a favor. She has just found a horse and a carriage that was stolen from some of your people.”

The dancers exchanged glances of amazement. The girl who had made the original statement about Nancy being a witch girl withdrew from the forefront of the group, embarrassed. Ned went on to tell the whole story.

“Nancy is an excellent detective,” he stated firmly in conclusion, “but she is not a witch girl. And now, tell us where our friends are. We would like to go home.”

Some of the people in the group shook their heads, then most of them turned away. The music started and the dancing began again, but several young men approached Nancy and Ned and offered to drive them wherever they wanted to go.

“I am sorry about what happened,” one of them said. “We thank you for what you have done.”

Ned was about to accept the offer of a lift when he and Nancy heard the sound of a familiar car motor. Looking outside, they saw Ned’s convertible come to a stop. Bess and George, spotting the missing couple, quickly climbed out and rushed over to them.

“Oh, I’m so glad you’re all right!” Bess exclaimed, hugging Nancy.

George added, “You scared us out of our wits. We heard you had an accident, and we saw the overturned buggy. We couldn’t find you.”

“We’ll tell you all about it on the way home,” Nancy said, as Ned took her arm and helped her into the car.

Burt and Dave grinned. “Why didn’t you two tell us you were going to ride around all of Lancaster County by yourselves on a horse?”

“How were we to know?” Ned joked.

As they rode toward the Glick farm, Nancy surprised the others by saying that she and Ned had actually come to the dance hours before.

“You heard about our little accident,” she said. “Well, Ned and I chased the horse and caught him. We were so close to the dance that we thought we’d just ride him there and make arrangements to pick up the carriage later.

“After we tethered the horse and were walking to the barn, we noticed an Amish carriage and a black horse some distance away from the others. My curiosity got the better of me and I decided to take a look. No one was in the carriage, but in the back was some furniture that looked like the stolen Follett pieces.”

“What!” Bess and George cried in unison.

Nancy smiled. “At least I thought so, and later I found out I was right. Well, we waited around to see if Roger Hoelt was in the vicinity. In a few minutes a man came sneaking around the side of the barn, as if he had been spying on the dancers.”

“I guess he was looking for you, Nancy,” Burt put in. “Was he Roger Hoelt?”

“No. The man came to the carriage, got in, and drove off.”

Ned chuckled. “And you know Nancy!” he said. “She decided he was a pal of Hoelt’s. And of course she wanted to follow him. So we did!”

He told the rest of the story and the others listened in amazement.

Upon reaching the Glicks’, they found that the cobbler and his wife were still up. The couple were overjoyed to see Nancy and Ned and insisted on hearing the whole story.

When it was finished, Mrs. Glick said, “How good that you are safe. And you must be hungry. We will have a little bite to eat. You will all sleep better.”