“Then to yell ‘Fire!’—Oh, if any ghost should be up here, now,—if there are such things as ghosts,—this is the place for them! Now, to get away.——Ow! Ow! Ouowh!”
The cause of these unmusical yells from Jim was that he heard hasty footsteps issuing from a room to the left, and then a ghost-like figure appeared in the flaring light of the burning impostor.
Jim had almost expected to encounter something horrible, and when this apparition hove in sight his terror was all the more intense.
Setting up horrisonous howls, that would have been a credit to Bob Herriman himself, he forgot all about the dangerous place in the floor,—which, as has been said, the explorers discovered, carefully marked out, and avoided,—and rushed blindly upon it. A groan, a trembling, and it gave way beneath him with the crash of an earthquake.
Marmaduke had just given the word to the priest for the second time, when a succession of frightful howls and yells of agony struck their ears, and a moment later a blinding cloud of dust, plaster, and splinters, pervaded the apartment.
Jim, a scratched and woe-begone object, also fell.
Thus the plotters’ little difficulty was obviated; thus a ghost came to them.
But that was not all. It so happened (rather, of course it happened) that Sauterelle and the general were in the course of the faller.
Before any of the demoralized plotters could think what was the matter, or even think at all, Jim dropped heavily downward, and his feet caught in the rescued one’s outlandish headdress. It was rudely torn off, and Henry’s aching head received so violent a wrench that he could have roared with the pain.