CHAPTER XII A Strange Discovery

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There appeared to be a spirit of uncertainty among the workmen. They were not like the Negroes and Italians who had previously “seen ghosts.” These new workmen were not superstitious. But even they, white-collar-class, as they were called, seemed suddenly given to some strange and nerve-racking fear. They wanted to hurry away from the old Hall where such a strange thing had seemingly just happened, but felt they owed a certain allegiance to their missing fellow worker if not to the burly and baffled boss, Callahan.

“I say, fellows,” one of the men began, “I wonder if we shouldn’t do something about Jim before we leave.”

“What can we do?” faltered the man who had dropped the heavy bar.

It was here that Arden Blake saw her opportunity. Stepping forward with a manner and air that her girl friends warmly complimented her about, she called:

“Are you going to leave without trying to find that missing man?”

“But how can we find him?” a voice from the huddled group asked. “He just disappeared. We can’t find him. There’s nowhere even to look.”

“But have you searched?” Arden demanded.

They seemed confused at that straightforward question.

“No,” one finally murmured.

“Then come back to the house with me!” insisted Arden. “We girls will go with them, Mr. Callahan,” she promised. “We’ll have another good look all around. There is nothing in that house to harm anyone. And we don’t believe in ghosts, so the man must be found.”

“If it comes to a question of ghosts, miss,” said a tall, lanky man, “I don’t believe in ’em myself. But when a man is snatched away, you might say, right from under your nose, why, that’s something different.”

“Sure is,” his friends muttered.

“Could it not very well be,” asked Sim, “that this Jim Danton might have gone to some other part of the house without telling any of you, and have been hurt there?—his hammer may have slipped and hit him on the head, knocking him unconscious. That could have happened.”

“And he may be up in one of the old rooms now, injured, suffering,” added Terry.

“This certainly is getting interesting, to say the least,” spoke Dorothy. “I must give you girls credit for getting up some good theatrical effects in this mystery. That’s quite a mob scene,” and she pointed a rather languid finger at the group of workers.

“Don’t make fun, Dot,” said Terry in a low voice. “This may be serious.” Dot was inclined to be theatrical at the wrong time.

“It is serious,” declared Sim.

Arden still held the center of the stage. She felt the need of prompt, effective action.

“Well, let’s go make another search,” she proposed. “And don’t waste time.”

“We’ll do that with you,” said a young fellow. “But Jim didn’t go to any isolated room and hit himself on the head with his hammer. In the first place, he didn’t have any hammer. He was using a crowbar.”

“That’s right,” came in a murmur, a proper mob-scene murmur, Dorothy thought, though she did not dare mention it.

“And in the second place,” went on the same young fellow, “he was in that closet. I saw him go in.”

“And nobody saw him come out, and there isn’t even a rat-hole in that closet yet,” declared another. “We haven’t started ripping there.”

It looked as though the fear and mystery would start all over again. But Arden was not going to give up.

“Let’s go have a look,” she proposed.

“That’s the idea!” boomed Mr. Callahan. He was getting hopeful once more. “The girls’ll put you fellows to shame! Let’s all go in.”

The Hall was quickly invaded with more persons than it had housed in many a long day. On the two lower floors no work of demolishing the place was visible. The men had first started tearing out the top or fourth floor. It was from the third floor that Jim Danton had disappeared.

“I wonder how much longer Mrs. Howe is going to leave some of her possessions in here?” said Sim as they reËntered the big lower entrance.

“She’ll have to be getting it all out pretty soon,” threatened the contractor, “or I’ll have to set it out for her. I don’t want to damage anything of hers and have her sue me, for she’s a determined woman, though, in ways, as nice as my own mother. But she sort of feels that she is being cheated. It’s none of my doing. She claims this place, and she told me she was going to leave stuff in here to enforce her claim. But it’ll have to be got out of here pretty quick now. The men’ll soon be down to the second floor. There’s hardly any of Mrs. Howe’s stuff on the third floor now. She took it away before I began my work this week.” He was saying this as they tramped into the echoing old hall.

The party, scattering, though the girls kept together, looked all over the first floor. There was no sign of any missing man, though it took some little time to establish this fact, for there were many nooks, corners, passages, closets, and rooms in the lower part of the rambling old place.

The second floor, where the “ghosts” had been said to appear, was likewise devoid of any missing person, man or otherwise. They looked, one after another, calling back and forth like scouts in the woods.

“Well, he isn’t here,” Mr. Callahan finally announced.

“No,” Arden was forced to agree, with a sense of disappointment. She had really hoped to find the man and so dispel the unreasoning fears about the place as well as to save Jim Danton.

“Now, we’ll try once more to see how it could happen that Jim could possibly have vanished out of a closet that you say hasn’t even a rat-hole,” spoke the contractor, as they all went up to the third floor like some awkward brigade. Some of the rooms there were open to the weather, their outer walls having been torn away in uneven patches.

“There’s where he went in but where he didn’t come out!” said the man who claimed to have heard the weird ghostly howling through the ash-chute.

One by one the men, the girls, and the contractor looked and stepped inside the closet. As before, it seemed as solid as any such place always seems. There were rows of old hand-forged iron hooks on the two side walls and the back, but it appeared solid; unbroken in walls and, as had been said, there wasn’t even a rat-hole for escape.

“A collector would give a good deal for those hooks,” said Dot. “They’re real antiques.”

“We’re looking for a man, not antiques,” said Sim, under her breath.

Mr. Callahan and some of the men stamped on the floor and kicked at the baseboards. Everything was solid. The door was the only visible means of egress.

“And Jim didn’t come out of the door!” declared several of his companions, at which all of them shook their heads in positive agreement.

“Well, it sure is queer,” the contractor had to admit when they had finished inspecting the third floor, including a big room next to the one containing the closet that seemed to be the starting point of the mystery. This room had an immense fireplace, and one of the men even stooped within it and peered up the chimney.

“He isn’t up there,” he announced, scraping some soot and dirt down the uncovered ash-chute with his foot. “Jim isn’t there.”

This was terrifying. Workmen might be familiar with accidents, but the girls could hardly stand such suspense.

The entire third floor, at least the undemolished rooms, was thoroughly searched, with no result. The fourth floor and the roof over it were so nearly destroyed that it required but the briefest of inspections to make sure no missing man was there.

Baffled, the party went down to the lower hall, Mr. Callahan becoming more serious and even showing alarm now that his workman could not be traced or located.

“What do you think now, Arden?” asked Terry in a low voice.

“I don’t know what to think, but he must be some place.”

“There’s no use in our staying here any longer, is there?” asked Dorothy.

“I can’t see what good we can do,” agreed Sim.

The contractor was talking to his men off a little to one side. He was arguing against their desire to quit.

“If you go,” he threatened, “you’ll lose the bonus I promised to everybody who’d work a week straight here and not be scared away by silly stories. Besides, we’ve got to keep on looking for Jim.”

“A man vanishing isn’t a silly story,” snarled one man.

Sim, Terry, and Dorothy were interested in the efforts of the contractor and realized that he was trying desperately to keep his force together. It was a sort of last stand with him, since so many of the more ignorant workers had left previously. Arden, hardly knowing why, wandered out and around to the rear of the old Hall. She was tired of the confusion but did not want to give up.

“I wonder if I could think this out?” she reasoned. “There must be some answer.”

In a sort of mental fog, Arden walked on a little farther into the field. She found herself in a tangle of weeds where once had been beds of flowers. There was one of the entrances to the great cellar under the old mansion, just under a little back porch.

Arden peered down the crumbling stone steps and looked past the sagging, rotting, open door into the blackness. A damp, musty smell floated up to her; perhaps the remains of the aroma that must have clung to the cellar since its days of full and plenty.

As Arden stood there, she was surprised to see a little flickering light in the darkness of the cellar. Suddenly the light, which was bobbing about like a will-o’-the-wisp, came to a stop.

“Somebody’s down there!” gasped Arden. “Oh——”

A moment later she heard a scream. It was the high-pitched and frightened voice of a girl.

Then, out of the black cellar, with horror showing on her face, came running—Betty Howe!

“Oh! Oh!” she screamed. “It’s terrible! Down there—in the cellar—a dead man!”

“A dead man!” repeated Arden, her mind now working fast. She wanted to be sure of her ground. “Are you sure, Betty?” she asked.

“Yes! Oh, yes! I saw him—as plain as anything!”

Betty rushed toward Arden, all but falling upon her, the flashlight still glowing. At the same moment Arden became aware of the approach of an old woman from around the corner of the house, at the rear.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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