Finding himself trapped, Frank threw himself on the door and wrenched at the knob with all his strength. It held firm. Again and again he drove his shoulder against the panels, but the door, though old, was stout, and resisted his savage attacks. Soon he gave up in despair the attempt to escape that way.

"I'm kidnapped for sure," he said aloud, and his voice sounded strangely hollow in that empty hallway. He shivered, for, although the night outside was mild and warm, inside there was a deadly chill in the air as if the sunlight had never touched it. A half moon was hanging in the sky and lit the countryside faintly, but in here was the deepest gloom. Tiny slits of light came through the chinks here and there in the boarded windows and cast long knife-like bars across the floor, but instead of lighting the place they actually made it seem blacker because of the contrast.

Frank was not a coward, but he would have given a good deal to be safely out of the place. The whole house seemed full of noises. He turned his back to the door and faced the stairway, which, now that his eyes were becoming accustomed to the gloom, he could make out dimly. He could trace it about half way up to the floor above, where it disappeared into utter blackness. As he strained his eyes and ears a board creaked near him, as if a human foot had trod on it. He recoiled as if shot and turned his eyes in the direction of the noise. But there was no repetition of the sound. Away down the hall where his vision could not penetrate came a rustle as of silk, and then what appeared to be a few stealthy steps; then silence, broken only by the sighing of the night wind around the corners of the house.

It was all Frank could do to keep from yelling with fright, for the noises of the old house had gripped his nerve. But by degrees, as he stood there with his back to the door, he gained control of himself. There was nothing to hurt him, he argued with himself; the noises were only natural ones; the rustlings were perhaps made by the wings of birds that had made their nests in the old house, finding entrance through the chimney, maybe, or through a broken upper window.

"Oh, what a dummy I am," said Frank to himself, "to allow myself to be caught this way! I have been spirited off here and locked up for a while so that Gamma may have its own way up at the Library meeting. But David and Jimmy and the Codfish can carry it through as well or better than I could. They can present the scheme and read the constitution—the constitution," he gasped aloud; "I have it in my pocket!" His hand flew to his pocket. There it was, sure enough, a bulky bundle of papers.

"That settles it. I've got to get out of this hole somehow." There was a determined ring to his voice as it echoed from the bare walls. He left his place by the outer door and turned into the room on the right, the door of which stood partly open. Guided by the chinks of light he examined the windows one after the other. Two of them were broken, but they were securely boarded up from the outside. The window at the side of the room had not even a sash. Raising his foot he drove it here with all his might against the barricading boards, but they did not budge to his repeated blows. He gave up this room as a bad job, and felt his way into the hall once more and across it to the opposite front room. Here he had no better luck. The windows were securely shut and boarded like the windows in the other room. At one of them, where there was an opening of several inches between the boards and where the light came through more strongly than at any other of the windows, he smashed the glass with his foot and, getting hold of the edge of the board, tried to wrench it loose with his hands. He might as well have tried to shake down the door post. The nails, driven in years before, had probably rusted, and the boards would have had to be split to fragments before the nails would release them.

Nothing daunted, Frank kept on. He pushed open doors that squeaked on rusty hinges and battered at the barriers across the windows. Once in his rounds he caught his toe on some obstruction on the floor and fell headlong. The crash woke the echoes in the old house and set in motion scores of mice and rats that went scurrying, squeaking and chattering across the floors.

Retracing his steps, Frank once more found himself, without further mishap, in the hall where he had started his futile round. "I'll try it upstairs," he said, and advanced boldly toward the upper regions of the house. The stairs creaked and groaned horribly as he ascended, and he heard the patter of the feet of rats as they scurried before him. It was none too pleasant a sound. Two of the rooms he tried on the second floor brought no better result, but in the third, at the back of the house, he found a displaced board and a broken sash.

"So this is where our friends, the birds, get in," he said. "The question is, can I get out?"

He stuck his head through the opening and looked down. Below there was nothing but blackness. "I don't dare risk it. I might break my neck in a cellarway if I dropped." He drew in his head, refreshed by the breath of free night air, and continued his search. Stumbling through the gloom of the upper hall, his hand came in contact with a ladder. He gave it a jerk, but it was nailed securely to the floor. "The attic!" he exclaimed aloud; "if there's a skylight and I can get out on the roof perhaps I can make some one hear."

Up the ladder he went. If it was black below, it was still blacker where he was now penetrating, for not even a ray of moonlight entered. The air was close and stifling, and in the attic of the old house, where he found himself in a few moments, he could scarcely breathe. His entrance there disturbed some night birds that had taken possession of the place, and they flew about uttering angry cries and dashing so close to him that he could feel the fanning of air from their wings. With his arm across his face, he felt for a ladder which must lead to the skylight, if indeed there was a skylight in the roof above. After traversing half the length of the house and colliding with the corner of the chimney, his hand touched wood. It was another ladder, and his heart jumped with joy at the touch. The rounds were covered with a thick layer of dust, deposited there through many years of disuse. Up its short length Frank went cautiously till his head touched the roof. He felt around carefully till his hand touched a hasp. With a sudden jerk he pulled it aside and with his head pressing against the skylight, bored upward. To his great joy the heavy skylight moved and swung up on its rusty hinges, and in another moment he was out on the roof of the house with the stars above his head.

What a relief it was to be out of that dismal house! The horrors of it lay below him, but was he any better off? Could he make any one hear him, and, if they did hear him, would any one be likely to come to such a place? Wasn't he in as bad a fix as before? These questions jumped into his brain in rapid succession.

"Help! Help!" Frank raised his voice and shouted. Again and again he shouted, but there was no answering hail. Off to the left he could plainly see the lights of Queen's School. As a bird flies, it was not more than half a mile from his perch to the Library where his friends were holding their meeting and no doubt wondering where he was. What were they thinking of him? He began hitching along on the roof toward the front of the house, his intention being to attempt a descent, hand over hand, along the roof's edge to the eaves, where, if he could see the ground, he might risk a drop.

Hitching along laboriously, Frank encountered an obstruction when he was halfway to the end of his journey. He felt of it. It was an insulator, and stretching away from it on both sides was a wire of small diameter. "Telephone," said Frank to himself. "How I wish I had an instrument." He climbed over it and went on. Suddenly he stopped: "By Jove, I wonder if that is our wire to Queen's Station? It certainly comes down this way." He was thinking hard.

"It is the wire!" he shouted joyfully. "I remember now Murphy said he put an insulator on this old house because there were no trees near to take the span."

Instantly he turned back to the wire. On one side of the insulator the wire was stretched tightly, but the other side hung sagging. He reached out and pulled on the slack side and found that he could draw it up a foot or more.

"Just the thing!" he exclaimed joyfully. "Now we'll see what happens!"

Straddling the roof, Frank again took hold of the slack loop of the wire and pulled with all his strength. When he had hauled it as tight as possible, he reached down and put a coil around his foot, and was overjoyed to find that he could hold the wire in position that way, although the strain almost pulled him apart. Then, taking his knife, he began to saw at the wire. When he had made a little notch in it he worked it back and forth, bending it this way and that, and suddenly it fell apart.

"Hurrah!" shouted Frank. "Now we'll see if any one hears me."

Taking a broken end of wire in each hand he began tapping them together. Carefully he called: F-F-F-F-F-F; JC-JC-JC-JC. These were the calls of his own room and of Jimmy's. He was using the ends of the broken wire to send Morse signals. After each attempt, with fingers moistened to accentuate their sensitiveness to any return signal, he waited. Thus calling and waiting he kept on for several minutes. "They're probably all in the Library, but Murphy ought to hear me if the wire is cut in at the Station."

Varying the call of Q, which was the Station, with calls of F and JC, Frank kept on, but with the strain of the wire pulling on his foot and cutting into the flesh he was nearly exhausted.

Suddenly in response to his call of F-F-F came a shock which made him jump. Some one had opened a telegraph key somewhere on the line. The current had been broken and closed. He tapped slowly, making the letters very plain so that no one could misunderstand, "C-o-m-e q-u-i-c-k h-a-u-n-t-e-d h-o-u-s-e F-r-a-n-k." Over and over he repeated his message. Suddenly there came a succession of electric thrills along the wire as if a key had been rattled rapidly, and Frank received the signals plainly through his moistened fingers "O-K." He had been heard and understood. With a sigh of relief, he let go of the loose end of the wire and shook it free of his foot. The released wire went swishing down the roof and the connection was broken for good.

Carefully Frank made his way back to the skylight and backed down the ladder into the darkness beneath. "I'll be ready for them—if they come," he added dubiously. "And the back room where the board is off is more comfortable in spite of the rats than this sharp roof." Down among the startled birds that beat madly around the attic he went again, down the second ladder to the floor, and then made his way to the back room, where he settled himself on the window ledge waiting for his rescue, if rescue it was to be.

Frank found himself in comfort compared to his position on the roof, but he soon began to wonder whether he had not better, after all, take a chance of a drop in the darkness. He got up, examined the opening, found it too small to squeeze through, and was preparing to make the best of it on his ledge, when his ear caught the sound of a step in the lower part of the house. He stood up with body bent forward listening intently.

There was no imagination about it this time. It was a slow step, sometimes shuffling, then again firm and quick. Occasionally it stopped, seemingly irresolute. Then it began again. Whatever or whoever it was, the owner of the step appeared to be going the round of the rooms. Now it was on the stairs ascending. Frank listened with his heart in his mouth. Slowly the step came on, reaching the landing, stopped, began again and came on shufflingly in his direction. Frank stepped on the window ledge and reached for the opening between the boards. Suddenly a light flared up, and through the open door Frank saw a boy standing with a lighted match in his hand. It lit the gloom only for a moment and went out in the draft. Frank, startled by the sight, gave a yell. There was an answering groan, the sound of a falling body and then silence. Almost at the same moment shouts were heard outside. Frank sprang to the opening and answered the hail with all the power of his lungs: "Here, here, 'round at the back of the house!" There was the sound of crashing through the tangle of shrubbery and a voice from below—Jimmy's voice—calling, "What in thunder are you doing there?"

"Taking a moonlight meditation," returned Frank flippantly; "but hurry up, I've had enough. Rip off a board on one of the lower windows if you can. I'm in trouble up here."

Lights flashed below and the sound of several different voices came to Frank's ears. Reassured by the presence of his friends, Frank groped his way to the door in front of which his visitor had fallen. He found the huddled heap of humanity, touched the face and felt it warm, which relieved him greatly. From below came the sound of ripping wood and breaking glass, and, in another minute, Jimmy, with a lantern in his hand, bounded up the stairway, followed by Lewis and several other boys. All were astonished to see Frank, his face streaked with dust and grime, standing by the side of a prostrate figure. The rays of the lantern were directed to the face of the one on the floor.

"Bronson!" all exclaimed in a breath.

"Great Scott!" cried Jimmy in amazement, "what are you fellows doing here and what's the matter with Bronson?"

Bronson, who had fainted from fright when he heard Frank's yell in the darkness, now opened his eyes and sat up, looking around dazedly. Suddenly he seemed to remember: "Don't leave me! Don't leave me!" he cried piteously, grabbing Jimmy by the legs. "I'll tell all about it, but don't leave me here. He'll come back."

"Tell us what? Who'll come back?" ejaculated Jimmy.

And there on the floor Bronson poured out his story in broken sentences and with hanging head. He told how the Gamma had planned the kidnapping of Frank to break up the meeting, with the hope that the attempt to form a new society might be checked and the absent boy discredited. The attempt, as it proved, had been partly successful, for, despite the eloquent words of the Codfish and David, who had striven to hold it together until Frank could be found, the Gamma element in the meeting had broken it up. It was on Jimmy's return to the room that he had heard Frank's signal and gone in search of him.

"Was Dixon in this scheme?" said Frank, when Bronson finished.

"Yes," was the answer.

"And was he responsible for the affair in the bell tower?"

"No; Whitlock, Colson and I were the ones in that. But I'll make it right with Dr. Hobart. I'll confess everything. Only don't leave me here, please don't."

On the way back to Queen's School, Bronson freely confessed his part in the affair of the haunted house. He had been detailed by Dixon to see that the men who had been hired to spirit Frank away, carried out their part of the work, and he was hidden near the path when Frank was marched past him. Just as he started to leave, there arose alongside of him the gigantic figure of a man, who, muttering something about being on his property, drew him to the back of the house and, entering by the cellarway, left him there, fastening the door on the outside. More dead than alive from fear, Bronson had heard Frank shuffling around on the floor above him, and then, when the noise ceased, with a few matches he had in his pocket he started to find his way out. During Frank's absence on the roof he had gained the first floor, and it was he whom Frank heard when he returned to his post by the broken window. The shock of Frank's voice when Bronson, searching for a means of escape, had penetrated to the second floor, was too much for his shaking nerves, and he collapsed on the floor. The men who had kidnapped and carried off Frank were three men from the village, one of whom was a locksmith, which accounted for his possession of a key to the old house.

It later came out that the gigantic man who had captured and incarcerated Bronson, was none other than a half-witted negro of the village, who was abroad at all times of the night, and who, unknown to any one, had a way of entering and leaving the old house by an open cellarway. It was probably he who, by showing lights in the house at night, had terrified the villagers into the belief that the place was haunted.

Before Bronson was allowed to go that night, he was taken to Frank's room, where, under the dictation of the Codfish, he wrote and signed a full confession of the part he had played in the bell tower incident, and of his knowledge of the kidnapping of Frank.