"But I thought you might help us to an explanation," Frank insisted.
The sleepy and stupid look had passed away. The landlord had once been a seafaring man, and he was a bit superstitious. Still, he was not willing to acknowledge that Frank had beheld something supernatural. He would not deny its possibility, but repeated over and over his belief that ghosts always return to the place of the murder and to no other place, and that the repetition of the story would drive away his summer boarders.
"I tell him he was just dreaming," said Bart.
"Sure!" with a look of relief. "Of course, he was dreaming. There's been nobody in Glen Springs looking like the chap you describe, and I'm sure that nobody has been walking in that corridor, 'less it was burglars."
So Frank went back to his room, accompanied by Bart. He knew that he had not been asleep, though, and he felt sure that he had really seen and heard something, and was not the victim of a hallucination. Merriwell sat down again by the open window, and Bart dropped into a chair by his side.
"If the thing comes again, we'll capture it!" said Hodge. "Somebody may be playing ghost, just to scare us. I have heard——"
He did not complete the sentence, for he really heard something at the moment that stilled the words on his lips and drove the blood out of his face.
Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp!
The sounds came unmistakably from the corridor.
"There it is again!" Frank exclaimed.