Harry laughed, shrugged his shoulders, crushed his cigarette out on the tray Dot had brought him, and said:
“I haven’t any! I’m as much up in the air as you girls are.”
They were rather wide-eyed at hearing this.
“Of course,” he went on, “this yell is the only manifestation that has come to me. I understand you girls have both seen and heard things.”
“No.” Arden shook her head. “We were never really in the house when anything actually happened. We would arrive on the scene after the men had run out, yelling that they had either seen or heard something. What they heard, so they said, was a scream like the one you describe. Also there was the sound of heavily booted feet tramping on the stairs. And I think one man said he saw what he thought was a soldier in one of the rooms. Then there was the figure on the bed. But we never saw either of those.”
“And the last thing that happened,” said Sim, “I mean just before what you heard this afternoon, Harry, was the disappearance of Jim and his subsequent discovery in the cellar.”
“He said something hit him on the head,” suggested Dot.
“Oh, yes, so he did,” Arden recalled.
“Then,” stated the young man, “we have three sorts of ghostly demonstrations: visible, audible, and manual, I might say, to describe the assault on Mr. Jim. It’s very odd. I can’t account for it. I was sure, after I heard that scream, that some prank-loving chap had slipped into the house after me and was practising his college yell. But the snow told a different story.”
They were silent a little while, and then Arden, in rather a small voice, asked: