“As nearly as I could tell,” said the ghost-hunter, “the scream came from the room of the mysterious closet. At least, it sounded so to me. As I say, I was in the room where the old four-poster bed was.”
“Where the workman said he saw the dead body,” interposed Arden.
“Exactly. Well, I left that room on the jump, you may be sure, when I heard that terrible yell. I knew it hadn’t come from the room where I was, and I headed for the closet room, as we’ll call it.”
The girls nodded their heads understandingly but did not interrupt.
“But there was nothing there,” young Pangborn said. “Not a thing that could have screamed. There was nothing there. Absolutely!”
“Whatever did you do?” asked Terry, her eyes brighter. Really, this was all so eerily interesting that she almost forgot the pain of her bandaged ankle.
“I just looked around,” was the answer. “That horrible scream seemed to be still echoing through the big bare room, and to me it seemed to come up out of the ash-chute of the fireplace.”
“That’s what one of Jim’s companions said,” remarked Sim. “He said it sounded like a dying cat, and he dropped a brick down.”
“If this was a cat it must have been a mountain lion,” said Harry, seriously enough. “I’ve hunted them, and those catamounts do yell, groan, or scream in a most unearthly fashion at times. But there are none within many miles of here, unless one has escaped from a menagerie. Of course, that’s possible.”
“Do you think,” asked Dot, examining one of her pink nails, “that it could be an animal who has been responsible for all the demonstrations?”