He stepped upon the stairs as quietly as a cat, so that Sally and the Captain need not be disturbed. The main door to the mill faced the sea, and this he had left open. The steps slanted across the wide, blank wall and passed close below the largest window that also gave upon the sea. As Billy climbed higher and higher he realized what a good lookout the place would make.
The stairs outside were even more unsteady and decayed than was the staircase within, yet they held under his weight. Billy trod gingerly but progressed steadily upward in as complete silence as he could manage. Once or twice a rotten board creaked under his foot, but only faintly. He came nearer and nearer to the window and finally laid his hand upon the sill. He discovered that the sash was pushed half way up and propped with a stick. There was not the slightest glimmer of light inside.
“Now,” he thought, “if the window was up, could the glass above have reflected the moonlight?”
It was a difficult problem to decide, but at last he made up his mind that it could. He listened a long, long time but he did not hear a sound within, not a rustle, not a breath. It was so dark that even after his eyes got used to the blackness, and after he had lifted himself up to peer boldly over the sill, he could spy nothing but vague bulky shapes like boxes or furniture.
“There is surely no one there,” he decided; “there isn’t a person in the world who knows how to keep so still as that. There hasn’t been any one there for twenty years.”
He let himself down from the sill with far less care than he had exercised in pulling himself up. One of his hands slipped a little, and he shifted it quickly along the ledge to get a better hold. As he did so his fingers touched something that lay upon the sill; it dropped, struck one of the steps below him and bounded to one side, then fell with a thud upon the grass beneath. He ran down the ladder quickly and felt about on the ground until he found it. A pair of field glasses it proved to be, quite undoubtedly the same ones that he had picked up once before upon the rocks by the willow-trees.
“No one there for twenty years?” he repeated to himself. His fingers, slipping over the cool metal and the leather covering, assured him that the glasses were not even dusty.
He had to sit down upon the grass, in order to reflect upon this problem long and earnestly.
“There has been some one there lately,” he thought, “but there can’t be any one now; there can’t. Nothing alive could possibly keep so quiet; why, I could have heard even a mouse breathe.”
He was thoroughly convinced that his intent listening could not have played him false and that he must have been mistaken about seeing a light. His reassured thoughts, therefore, went back once more to Sally and Captain Saulsby. Suppose it was so near morning that the tide would be down again; suppose he ran across the causeway for help and got back within half-an-hour, long before Sally could get uneasy. That surely was the best thing to do. The truth was that the old sailor’s condition had filled him with real terror. The creaking upstairs, the field-glasses, the suspicion of a light, all these might puzzle him, but the state of the Captain made him actually afraid. He felt that whatever was to be done must be accomplished at once.