A sudden scream burst from the lips of Hal Du Boise. Flinging up his hand, he pointed toward the panel in the wall.
“Look!” he cried chokingly. “Great heavens, look! There it is!”
The panel had been silently opened, and through that opening the trio could see the deathly white face of Dick Merriwell, whose dark, staring eyes were fixed upon them with an accusing gaze that made their very souls seem to shrivel within them.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
A TERRIFIED TRIO.
Duncan Ditson tried to speak, but his dry tongue clove to the roof of his mouth and his heart seemed on the point of bursting in his throat.
Lynch, having turned to look over his shoulder, sat like an image of stone, the color slipping from his usually ruddy face and leaving it almost as ghostly as that dead-white face seen beyond the open panel. One of Mike’s hands lay half-closed upon the table. It began to shake, causing his finger nails to rattle upon the uncovered top of the table like the faint far-away tapping of castanets.
From the lips of Du Boise, who had lately boasted that he would feel no terror were he brought face to face with the wraith of Dick Merriwell, there issued a sibilant hissing breath followed by a quavering whisper:
“It’s the dead! It’s Merriwell’s ghost! We are haunted—haunted!”
There was a thud as he slipped from the chair on which he had been sitting and fell limp and fainting upon the floor. The lights came on with full force. An unseen hand closed the sliding panel, hiding that death-white face from the staring eyes of Lynch and Ditson.
Still those two frightened fellows sat immovable, their bodies cold as ice for some moments after the apparition vanished.