today?”

“Oh, you mean tourists. Not yet. We just put up the sign.”

“Perhaps the young lady would like to show us what she’s advertising,” the man Honey recognized suggested.

“Why, certainly,” Judy began, but the short, stout man interrupted.

“It ain’t secluded enough for what we want,” he said to the driver. “What we had in mind was a place in the upper price brackets, not a tourist home.”

“We’ll have a look, anyway.”

But Judy had changed her mind about showing them the house and said so.

“I think you’ve made a mistake. My house isn’t for sale,” she informed them.

There was a moment of silence, broken only by the sound of the wind. It was almost moaning. Judy had never heard it make such a strange noise before.

“The place ain’t ha’nted, is it?” the stout man asked.

“It might be,” the third man said, and Judy couldn’t tell whether or not he was serious.

“Maybe we can find another place farther out in the country,” the short man suggested.

“You’re headed for a town right now,” Honey told them. “Roulsville is just a few miles below here. Then comes a long stretch of state forest land—”

“National forest,” Judy corrected her.

The tallest man in the group looked at her sharply.

“Does it make any difference?”

“Why, n-no,” she stammered, feeling suddenly uncomfortable under his scrutiny. “There are both state and national forest reserves just west of here. I don’t know where one ends and the other begins, really. I didn’t mean—”

Judy stopped abruptly. A voice that seemed to come from the trees themselves had said, with unmistakable urgency:

“Don’t look for it!”

CHAPTER II
The Talking Tree

“Don’t look for what? Who said that? Where—”

Judy’s voice trailed off in bewilderment. She moved closer to Honey, whose startled expression showed that she had heard something, too. The men had started hurriedly toward their car.

“We may be back,” the driver called as they climbed in and drove on toward Roulsville.

Judy gazed after them, her thoughts in a whirl. She was a sensible girl, not easily frightened. Before she and Peter Dobbs were married, she used to spend part of every summer with her grandparents in this very house. She knew every tree in the grove of beeches where the two girls were now standing in puzzled silence.

Judy’s voice trailed off in bewilderment

“Grandma used to tell me those trees could talk,” Judy said at last.

“But how?” asked Honey. “Those men didn’t do it. They were frightened, too.”

“They did seem to be,” agreed Judy, “but maybe it was a trick of some kind. I don’t believe they wanted rooms at all.”

“I don’t either. They acted more as if they were looking for something—”

“And then the—the trees warned them not to! That’s it!” exclaimed Judy.

All of a sudden she remembered an old family legend that when danger threatened, the trees would sound a warning. She had laughed at the superstition when she first heard it from her grandparents. Later, after the old couple died and willed the house to her, she remembered it only in her more fanciful moments, never mentioning it to