on the slope of the ravine, and he was glad
to have light just here, for it was the most perilous point of his
enterprise. By deft scrambling, however, he succeeded in getting on the
moonlit ledge.

"I clumb like a painter!" he declared triumphantly.

He rested there for a moment before attempting to reach the vines high
up on the left hand, which he must grasp in order to draw himself up
into the shadowy niche in the rock, and begin his zigzag course back
again across the face of the cliff to the projecting bough of the tree.

But suddenly, as he still stood motionless on the ledge in the full
radiance of the moon, the clamor of frightened voices sounded at the
house. Until now he had forgotten all about the ghost. He turned,
horror-stricken.

There was the frightful thing, plainly defined against the smooth
surface of the opposite cliff--some thirty feet distant--that formed the
other side of Old Daddy's Window.

And certainly there are mighty few dancers such as that ghost! It lunged
actively toward the precipice. It suddenly dashed wildly back--gyrating
continually with singularly nimble feet, flinging wiry arms aloft and
maintaining a sinister silence, while the frightened clamor at the house
grew ever louder and more shrill.

Several minutes elapsed before Si recognized something peculiarly
familiar in the ghost's wiry nimbleness--before he realized that the
shadow of the cliff on which he stood reached across the ravine to the
base of the opposite cliff, and that the figure which had caused so much
alarm was only his own shadow cast upon its perpendicular surface.

He stopped short in those antics which had been induced by mortal
terror; of course, his shadow, too, was still instantly. It stood upon
the brink of the precipice which seems the sill of Old Daddy's Window,
and showed distinctly on the smooth face of the cliff opposite to him.

He understood, after a moment's reflection, how it was that as he had
climbed up on the ledge in the full moonlight his shadow had seemed to
rise gradually from the vague depths below the insurmountable
precipice.

He sprang nimbly upward to seize the vines that shielded him from the
observation of the ghost-seers on the cabin porch, and as he caught them
and swung himself suddenly from the moonlit ledge into the gloomy shade,
he noticed that his shadow seemed to fling its arms wildly above its
head, and disappeared upward.

"That air jes' what dad seen las' night