“Well, there was that mum-moaning cry. You heard it, didn’t you?”
Rodney admitted that he had. “With more time at my disposal,” he asserted, “I opine I would have looked around for the cause of it.”
“Bub-but the howling of the dog?”
“Most dogs are given to howling.”
“How about the white figures Crane and I saw on the island?”
“Imagination sometimes plays right peculiar tricks with the eyesight.”
“But we saw them. Yes, we did,” corroborated Sile earnestly. “I’ll swear to that.”
Piper listened to this colloquy, his eyes bright, his manner that of one keenly interested.
“Comrades,” he announced, rising to his feet and posing, “I shall remain forever unsatisfied if we leave Phantom Lake with this mystery unsolved. I propose to find the solution.”
“Oh, yeou’ll do a lot in that line!” sneered Crane. “Yeou’ve had a swelled head ever since yeou was called to give testimony in court at Stone’s trial. Before that you never done anything but talk, and yeou ain’t done nothing since then. That was an accident.”