Carefully guarding against stepping into fresh places, he stooped down and shook from his dredger a regular and equal quantity of dust on to the handmarks and footprints which they had made.
Then Jem understood the use of the flour dredger.
Spot by spot the captain pursued his task until he had reached the window, against which Jem leaned, stolidly watching him.
"There," whispered the captain, pointing to the polished floor, which presented an unbroken surface of dust. "If you were obliged to swear that the room had not been entered--that the floor had not been walked across for five years, would you have any objection to say so?"
"Not I, capt'n," retorted Jem, quickly. "Not that that signifies, because I'd swear to anything, but it's right enough. Anybody 'ud say this room hadn't been looked at for years. At least," he added, with a shudder, and in a lower voice, "not by human critturs. There's other sort I have heard don't make no footprints nor no noise, so they don't count."
"All right," he said, "I don't care for ghosts, Jem, they only frighten such fools as you. Get up on the sill and shake the dust down on these bare parts."
Jem laid his hand upon the sill and was about to draw himself on to it when he was conscious of a sudden stream of soft blue light in the room.
Without turning round he whispered, warningly:
"Don't turn the light on so full, captain. Somebody might be about and see it at the window."
"What light?" said the captain, who was bending down with his face to the window, powdering the spots from which their feet had removed the dust. "I have turned no light--hah!"
The exclamation which broke the sentence caused Jem to turn his head with a vague sense of alarm.
No sooner had he done so than he fell to the ground in a paroxysm of fear.
There, on his knees, motionless as a statue, and his dark face upturned, was the captain, staring at a misty blue light which seemed growing out of the side of the room.
Jem uttered a groan of dismay and horror as there slipped, or rather floated into the room the dreadful figure which he had seen at the oriel window.
Slowly, and with a floating, gliding motion, the figure advanced.
Then it seemed to see them, for it moved its skull slightly in the direction of the men and stopped.