Then he suddenly got weak and felt as if he were going to faint.
"Don't worry, I get this way sometimes. I have some medicine over at the tent."
As it was only a short distance to the claim, the Judge decided to get him there as quickly as possible.
The professor was like a child in his eagerness to stay at the camp, and finally toward morning the Judge left him there in charge of the boys and Seedy Saunders.
And when Kie Wicks, deciding that he would have a look at the tunnel which he had left in charge of the two ruffians, climbed the trail to the summit the next morning about dawn, the first person he saw was the old professor, smoking his pipe and gazing far off over the hills with a smile of happiness on his face.
Kie wheeled his horse as if he had been shot at and raced madly away.
He was muttering excitedly:
"The mountains are bewitched! That ghost has spirited the old man out of the hut and back to the tunnel."
When his horse finally stopped before the store in Saugus, he was covered with foam and the man who bestrode him was trembling in every limb.
Yet he said nothing to Maude. What was the use? She would only worry and fret, and besides he had always made light of ghosts and said he didn't believe in them.
"But seein' is believin'," he said to himself as he dismounted. "I'm outdone by a ghost."