“Well, Phillips, seeing that it’s you, I’ll tell you: It’s none of your business. Maybe we’re going to swim to the Farallones. Do you understand me perfectly?”
“Isn’t it? We’ll see. And I don’t know whether we want you snuffing around here or not,” replied Phillips. He was a choleric man, was Phillips, with a neck too thick even for a policeman. I thought for a moment Lanagan would have us both ordered back, but he only laughed, in that mocking, Machiavelian laugh of his that could rasp like a file on a sore tooth.
“Dear me,” he said, “your mood fits the weather, Phillips; very disagreeable. I am not concerned with your wants. I’m going to snuff to my heart’s content. Now please step off the right of way and permit us to pass. We are both citizens of this great and glorious city that overpays you most disgracefully in proportion to your attainments; and as such citizens our powers and privileges on the county domain are precisely as full and complete as yours. Phillips, you’ll never do. No policeman ever succeeds who begins by antagonising newspaper men. I’m telling you, you won’t do. Step aside, please. We want to go on and we don’t purpose to walk around you to do it.”
For a moment things looked ugly, with Phillips standing fast. Castle took him by the arm.
“Come on, Tom, you’re wrong,” he said, and the two officers stepped to one side and we passed on, with Lanagan chuckling aloud.
“Ghost hunting is becoming a regular fad,” he said finally. “And I shouldn’t be surprised to find a few more hunters scattered around. We will let Phillips and Castle pass.”
We stepped quickly to one side and sank down behind a hillock of very wet and very cold sand. Lanagan was correct. The two detectives had turned and followed us. They went on ahead, having missed us.
It was shivery. Here were four men, two trailing two others who assumed they were the trailers; and all bound for a murder house on a black night to hunt ghosts: for it was safe to assume that in some fashion Phillips and Castle had heard the ghost episode. Did we but know it at the time, we were in turn being trailed by two keen eyed, storm-coated men, each of whom kept a ready hand in his overcoat pocket.
For, as Phillips and Castle disappeared on ahead and we were just stepping back to the railroad tracks from our place of concealment, Lanagan suddenly bore back and dropped. I followed suit.
“More ghost hunters,” he whispered in my ear, pointing. Two blurred, indistinct figures passed along the right of way. It was awesome. But Lanagan gave me no time for questions. Stooping low, threshing softly through the dripping salt grass, in and out among the sand dunes, we worked our way gradually toward the cliffs along the ocean. The coat fairly well protected my body, but my shoes were soaked and I was drenched with the cold, numbing rain to my knees.