CHAPTER XII
THE LITTLE COFFIN
IN the morning I was lying on the floor where I had fainted, between the bureau and the bed.
Was it going to turn out that I could not live in the House of the Five Pines after all, that I should never be at peace with it? Would there be another manifestation the next night, and another the night after, until my mind was gone? I felt that it was going now.
At midnight I could not help but think that what I heard was caused by ghosts; by day I refused to accept anything supernatural and forced myself to a material explanation.
Did I, or did I not, lock the cat inside the haunted room?
There was only one way to find out. I unwired the door and climbed up again, and found in the sunlight that there was nothing more alive in the attic than the rocking-horse. Opening the eaves closet, a shaft of light disclosed a hole in one end large enough to admit a cat, granting that she could climb to the roof by means of one of the pine-trees. But cats do not prowl around in the rain.
Why had I been so certain that the New Captain had not preceded me through the eaves closet the day before? While I was coming up the stairs he could have pushed the little door wide enough open to crawl out under the bed and put the bed back again. He might do it another time, or half a dozen times a day, until I put a nail into it, playing hide-and-seek up one stairway and down the other. He could have crept up the secret stairs and been hiding in the attic at the very time that I wired up the door at the foot.
This time I tried to make the fastening more secure, but found that the flimsy partition had warped with the wet weather; and I ended by locking the outside door of the coat-closet with a key that I managed to fit to it after trying each one in the house. The two doors of the eaves closet upstairs I nailed securely from my side.
“Now get out if you can,” I said aloud. I felt like some one who steps up on the stage and ties the hands of the magician. At the same time I realized perfectly that if whatever was not there in the attic when I fastened it up could get in later, it could also get out.
I went back to the theory that I held yesterday.