He took out a pocket rule and made careful measurements of both prints; the result he set down in a note book. I was quite as excited now as Terry. We crawled along on all fours until we reached the open trap; there was no trace here of either spider-webs or dust. We scrambled into the loft without much difficulty, and found a large room with sloping beams overhead and two small windows, innocent of glass, at either end. The room was empty but clean; it had been thoroughly swept, and recently. Terry poked about but found nothing.
"H'm!" he grunted. "Mose cleaned well.—Ah! Here we are!"
He paused before a horizontal beam along the side wall and pointed to a little pile of ashes and a cigar stub.
"He smokes cigars, and good strong ones—at least he isn't a lady. Did you ever see a cigar like that before?"
"Yes," I said, "that's the kind the Colonel always smoked—a fresh box was stolen from the dining-room cupboard a day or so after I got here. Solomon said it was the ha'nt, but we suspected it was Solomon."
"Was the cupboard unlocked?"
"Oh, yes; any of the house servants could have got at it."
"Well," said Terry, poking his head from the windows for a view of the ground beneath, "that's all there seems to be here; we might as well go down."
We boosted up the two meal bags again, and started back toward the house. Terry's eyes studied his surroundings keenly, whether for the sake of the story he was planning to write or the mystery he was trying to solve, I could only conjecture. His glance presently fixed on the stables where old Uncle Jake was visible sitting on an upturned pail in the doorway.
"You go on," he ordered, "and have 'em put dinner or supper or whatever you call it on the table, and I'll be back in three minutes. I want to see what that old fellow over there has to say in regard to the ghost."