The two stood looking at each other for a full minute, both as still as mice.
“Did you hear it?” Sally asked at last in a startled whisper, and, “I did, didn’t you?” Billy returned.
They listened and listened but there was no repetition of the sound upstairs. It might have been a mistake, it might have been—oh, anything. The silence was so complete that Billy could hear the blood throbbing in his ears and the faint squeak of a board under Sally’s foot as she shifted her position. A little bright-eyed mouse peeped out of a corner and, deceived by the quiet, thought the way was safe for an excursion across the wide, dusty floor. It was quite in the centre of the room before it discovered that it was in the dreaded presence of human beings, turned, and went scampering back to its hole again. Quite in accord with her usual calm, Sally stared after it and minded its presence not at all. In fact she drew a comforting explanation from the intrusion.
“I believe it was just rats or mice upstairs,” she said; “the noise they make often does sound like people moving about. I don’t really believe it was anything at all.”
Billy looked up at the long flight of rickety stairs that led from the room they were in to the closed door on the floor above. Could any one be up there, was it that door that had moved a little on its rusty hinges, was some one peering at them even now? He could not be sure and, if the truth be told, he had no very great desire to go up and find out. He thought, after all, that Sally’s explanation was the most comfortable one to believe.
There was not very much chance to think further of the matter just then for Captain Saulsby began to occupy all their attention. He roused himself from the strange stupor into which he had fallen, and seemed for a time to be really better. Sally even persuaded him to drink some of the broth that she had brought with her, and had heated before the fire. After he had swallowed it down, with some reluctance and by dint of much persuading, the old sailor sat up and seemed lively and talkative and almost himself again.
The two did not tell him of the sound they had heard upstairs, but let him talk of their adventure in the catboat, of the destroyer, of the ungrateful behaviour of the runaway Josephine. Occasionally his thoughts would wander a little and he would begin telling of some adventure long past; he went back more than once to the night when he had fallen asleep on watch and thought that he had seen a ship. He would bring himself back with a jerk and look at them wonderingly as though he did not quite understand, himself, how his ideas had become confused. Sally made him comfortable by moving the bench into a corner by the fire, whose warmth felt pleasant enough, even to the children, since the air in the old, closed-up mill seemed to grow even more damp and chilly as the night advanced. Billy pulled out the broken armchair for Sally, and she sat down in it gratefully, for she was weary with much trotting back and forth. She answered Captain Saulsby now and again when he paused in his rambling talk, but finally began to speak only at longer and longer intervals. Billy sat opposite on the uncomfortable stool; he propped his head against the chimney piece for a little rest; he did not feel sleepy, but he too was very tired. He watched Sally’s yellow head nod once or twice, he saw her eyelids grow heavier and heavier until at last they closed. She leaned sideways against the arm of the chair, heaved a long drowsy sigh and fell fast asleep.
Captain Saulsby did not seem in the least sleepy, but talked on and on, the thread of his conversation becoming ever more difficult to follow. His mind had dropped away entirely into the past; he talked of Singapore now, and of hot still nights on the Indian ocean, or of the restless, choppy tossing of the China Sea. Billy’s own thoughts wandered farther and farther away, pondering on questions of his own, the sound of the Captain’s voice becoming vague in his ears. He wondered dimly why the bluejackets had not come back; perhaps they had been picked up at the other landing place and had returned to the ship. He had assured them so earnestly that he could get assistance at Sally’s house that probably they had not thought of him again. When he found that the Shutes were away maybe he ought to have gone off at once by the road to get help. But no, that would have left Sally there alone for too long; it would not have been safe, especially with that possibility of something or somebody upstairs. Why, oh, why, had he slept through the ebb tide? That was what had caused all the trouble. His mind drifted further, to his mother and father in South America, and how much he would have to tell them when they got home. It would be more interesting to relate his tale to them than to Aunt Mattie, although she was proving to be rather a good sort, too. He liked Aunt Mattie; he would not have called her “an old-maid aunt” again for anything. How lucky it was she had gone to Boston and was not aware of any of his adventures. He watched the faint moonlight move across the floor, disappear and come into view again; he thought of Johann Happs and his broken clock, and wondered again about the man who had frightened him so. Dear, dear, but this was a long night; would it ever end? He rose at last, walked stiffly over to mend the dying fire and then, going to the door, stood for a little peering out.
A heavy fog was rolling in from the sea, but it seemed to cling to the ground and not to be able to rise very high. The trees and bushes stood knee deep in the thick white mist, with the moonlight still turning the topmost branches to silver. He felt sure that some hours must have gone by, that it must be after midnight, perhaps nearly morning. A light touch on his arm told him that Sally was awake and had come to stand beside him.
“I am so stiff,” he whispered softly, “that I will have to go out and walk up and down a little or I will never be able to move again.” Sally nodded.
“It will do you good,” she answered, also in a whisper, “and the Captain is quiet now.” Billy glanced toward the old sailor and somehow felt more alarmed about him than ever before. He was silent, but not asleep; his eyes were half-closed and he seemed quite unconscious of their presence. His breathing had grown weak and uneven. Sally went over to him; if she felt the same anxiety that Billy did, she managed not to show it.
“Go on,” she ordered, under her breath; “it will be good for you.”
He wondered if perhaps the tide were not down now and the water shallow enough for him to cross the stepping stones. Once beyond the mill creek he could get help so quickly that perhaps his two companions might not even know that he had gone.
To spend such a night as he had, to follow it by sleeping all afternoon on a bare floor, and then sit up on a three-legged stool for half the next night, seemed to make one feel a little queer. He tramped down the path briskly to get the stiffness out of his legs, then turned to look back at the mill to make sure Sally was safe. There was a feeble, flickering light in the lower windows, that was from their fire, and the candle that burned on the mantel shelf. But—
“Is that moonlight?” wondered Billy, as he caught a faint glimmer from one of the panes in a window above.
It might have been moonlight reflected on the glass but he could not be sure. He went back to make certain but could not for the life of him decide. There were outside stairs, so steep as to be practically a ladder, that went up to the top of the mill. The steps led very close past the window at which he was looking and at which he continued to stare for some minutes while he made up his mind to something.
“After all,” he concluded at last, almost speaking his thought aloud, “there is not the least harm in going up to see.”
He stepped upon the stairs as quietly as a cat, so that Sally and the Captain need not be disturbed. The main door to the mill faced the sea, and this he had left open. The steps slanted across the wide, blank wall and passed close below the largest window that also gave upon the sea. As Billy climbed higher and higher he realized what a good lookout the place would make.
The stairs outside were even more unsteady and decayed than was the staircase within, yet they held under his weight. Billy trod gingerly but progressed steadily upward in as complete silence as he could manage. Once or twice a rotten board creaked under his foot, but only faintly. He came nearer and nearer to the window and finally laid his hand upon the sill. He discovered that the sash was pushed half way up and propped with a stick. There was not the slightest glimmer of light inside.
“Now,” he thought, “if the window was up, could the glass above have reflected the moonlight?”
It was a difficult problem to decide, but at last he made up his mind that it could. He listened a long, long time but he did not hear a sound within, not a rustle, not a breath. It was so dark that even after his eyes got used to the blackness, and after he had lifted himself up to peer boldly over the sill, he could spy nothing but vague bulky shapes like boxes or furniture.
“There is surely no one there,” he decided; “there isn’t ............