The three boys got on their knees beside the repentant ghost.
"I was just doing it for fun," he said. "I learned to walk on stilts this summer. Oh, my arms! and I thought it would be a good joke to start a scare in the school—so I got a sheet—and wrapped it around me down there in the woods—and then walked around here and—down behind the football stand, where I hid the stilts—Oh, I know I'm going to die!" This confession came out in gasps, for the fall over Frank's cord, hampered as the "ghost" had been by the entangling sheet, had been a severe one. But, fortunately, it had broken no bones, and the worst damage it had done the Codfish was to knock all the wind out of his body.
He was a very humble ghost as the investigators helped him up to his room that night.
"But for heaven's sake don't tell any one about it. I'd never hear the last of it," he begged. But like the other joke on the Codfish, the story somehow got out and the "ghost" was guyed about his tumble for the rest of his school course.
And the next day the Milton Record had another story of how Frank Armstrong trapped the mystery of Queen's School. It was the sensation of the year.
CHAPTER XX.A CONTEST AT THE GYMNASIUM.
With the laying of the ghost, excitement dropped temporarily from the life of Queen's School. It was the time for work now, and right valiantly did every one study, making up for some of the lost time in the glorious fall days which invited one out in the open to waste the hours. Examinations were coming along, and the evenings were put in poring over the books.
Mrs. Armstrong was a visitor at the school for a day at this time, and Frank conducted her around the grounds, to the boat-house, the football field, the baseball field and the gymnasium. She wanted to know where they had trapped the ghost, and he showed her. It was a happy day for Frank, who pointed out the various things of interest around the old school as if they belonged to him personally.