examining the three walls of sacks before us. "Now
here is a sack rather dirtier than the rest and squashy. It looks to me
as if it had had a good deal of rough handling."

He pulled it to the floor as he spoke, and another with it. A space some
three feet high was visible; by crawling one could make his way along
without hitting the ceiling.

"Come on!" said Terry, scrambling to the top of the pile and pulling me
after him, "we've struck the trail of our ghostly friend unless I'm very
much mistaken.--Look at that!" He pointed to a muddy foot-mark plainly
outlined on one of the sacks. "Don't disturb it; we may want to compare
it with the marks in the cave.--Hello! What's this? The print of a bare
foot--that's our friend, Mose."

He took out a pocket rule and made careful measurements of both prints;
the result he set down in a note book. I was quite as excited now as
Terry. We crawled along on all fours until we reached the open trap;
there was no trace here of either spider-webs or dust. We scrambled into
the loft without much difficulty, and found a large room with sloping
beams overhead and two small windows, innocent of glass, at either end.
The room was empty but clean; it had been thoroughly swept, and
recently. Terry poked about but found nothing.

"H'm!" he grunted. "Mose cleaned well.--Ah! Here we are!"

He paused before a horizontal beam along the side wall and pointed to a
little pile of ashes and a cigar stub.

"He smokes cigars, and good strong ones--at least he isn't a lady. Did
you ever see a cigar like that before?"

"Yes," I said, "that's the kind the Colonel always smoked--a fresh box
was stolen from the dining-room cupboard a day or so after I got here.
Solomon said it was the ha'nt, but we suspected it was Solomon."

"Was the cupboard unlocked?"

"Oh, yes; any of the house servants could have got at it."

"Well," said Terry, poking his head from the windows for a view of the
ground beneath, "that's all there seems to be here; we might as well go
down."

We boosted up the two meal bags again, and started back toward the
house. Terry's eyes studied his surroundings keenly, whether for the
sake of the story he was planning to write or the mystery he was trying
to solve, I could only conjecture. His glance presently fixed on the
stables where old Uncle Jake was visible sitting on an upturned pail in
the doorway.

"You go on," he ordered, "and have 'em put dinner or supper or whatever
you c