“I’ll do it,” volunteered Dick. “That is, I will if I can reach that window-sill; it’s about fifteen feet up.”
“We’ll put you there,” promised Ned, and he locked arms with Dave Wilbur. The two braced themselves close to the wall of the house. Tapley and Rogers mounted to their shoulders and Dick, climbing nimbly to the top of this human pyramid, grasped the window ledge above and drew himself upon it. In a moment he was inside, and pausing only long enough to accustom his eyes to the gloom of the interior, he picked his way down the unfinished stairs and unhooked a shutter that opened upon the front porch. By this means the other boys entered, but paused in awe of the deathly stillness of the place.
“Gee! It’s like a tomb!” shivered Sanford, and struggling with a window-fastening, he threw open another shutter at the westerly end, admitting a flood of sunlight which revealed an apartment nearly thirty feet square, partly paneled with oak and floored with the same material.
Opposite the entrance, a stairway had been completed up to its first broad landing, but the remainder of the flight was still in a rough, unfinished condition. Through a wide, arched doorway could be seen another large room, evidently designed for a dining-hall but entirely unfinished except for the floor, which, as in the case of the first apartment, was of quartered oak.
“What’s down below?” asked Wat, as he peered through a rectangular opening into the blackness beneath. “Ugh! It looks spooky!”
“There’s nothing down there except a big cellar,” replied Ned, reassuringly. “This hole was left for the cellar stairs to be built in, but they were never even begun.”
Further investigation of the interior showed the oaken paneling to be warped and cracked by dampness and long neglect, but the floors, beneath their thick covering of dust, were in fairly good condition.
“It’s the floor that we’re most interested in for our proposition,” declared Dick. “I believe that a few days of hard work with scrapers would make these two rooms fit for dancing. We could put the music on that stair-landing and leave this whole lower space free and clear.”
“Do you think we could get a crowd to come way out here?” asked Tommy Beals doubtfully. “It’s a lonesome dump even in the daytime, and at night it is mighty easy to believe these yarns about its being haunted.”
“Why not make that the big attraction!” exclaimed Ned with sudden inspiration. “Everybody is looking for thrills nowadays. We might be able to give ’em a brand new one.”