“That’s right,” came in a murmur, a proper mob-scene murmur, Dorothy thought, though she did not dare mention it.
“And in the second place,” went on the same young fellow, “he was in that closet. I saw him go in.”
“And nobody saw him come out, and there isn’t even a rat-hole in that closet yet,” declared another. “We haven’t started ripping there.”
It looked as though the fear and mystery would start all over again. But Arden was not going to give up.
“Let’s go have a look,” she proposed.
“That’s the idea!” boomed Mr. Callahan. He was getting hopeful once more. “The girls’ll put you fellows to shame! Let’s all go in.”
The Hall was quickly invaded with more persons than it had housed in many a long day. On the two lower floors no work of demolishing the place was visible. The men had first started tearing out the top or fourth floor. It was from the third floor that Jim Danton had disappeared.
“I wonder how much longer Mrs. Howe is going to leave some of her possessions in here?” said Sim as they reëntered the big lower entrance.
“She’ll have to be getting it all out pretty soon,” threatened the contractor, “or I’ll have to set it out for her. I don’t want to damage anything of hers and have her sue me, for she’s a determined woman, though, in ways, as nice as my own mother. But she sort of feels that she is being cheated. It’s none of my doing. She claims this place, and she told me she was going to leave stuff in here to enforce her claim. But it’ll have to be got out of here pretty quick now. The men’ll soon be down to the second floor. There’s hardly any of Mrs. Howe’s stuff on the third floor now. She took it away before I began my work this week.” He was saying this as they tramped into the echoing old hall.
The party, scattering, though the girls kept together, looked all over the first floor. There was no sign of any missing man, though it took some little time to establish this fact, for there were many nooks, corners, passages, closets, and rooms in the lower part of the rambling old place.