“I wonder if that shack’s got anything to do with—anything,” he mused.
Even as he thought this a man came out of the place and walking around a corner of the house disappeared at the back. He was a large man; that Johnny could tell plainly enough. And it seemed that the man limped slightly. But of that he could not be sure, the distance being too great.
It was a thoughtful Johnny who walked back down the track to the nearest station, then took the train for the city. Matters were getting serious, very serious indeed, and he had not thought things through at all.
“I must go over to the scene of that last fire,” he told himself. “Do it as soon as I get to the city. May learn something there.”
He did go there. It was night when he arrived. The great, black, burned out skeleton of the Simons Building loomed above him as he searched, and its vacant window holes stared at him like the empty sockets of a skull. Somehow they seemed to accuse him of slowness and stupidity. He fairly flinched beneath their stare.
His search did not last long. Where the office of the one time recreation center had been was now a twenty foot pile of smouldering rafters, plaster and brick.
“Nothing to be learned there,” he murmured as he turned away.
At that same moment he caught sight of a dark shadow that flitted past the corner of the Simons skeleton, and after that he distinctly caught a chuckle which ended in well formed words:
“This is only the beginning.”
Johnny shuddered. But courage did not desert him. With a dash he was around that corner. His bravery was to no avail. If there had been a figure there other than a ghost, it had vanished. Nor did a careful search reveal any living creature.