next room. The door shut, and I thanked Providence that
I was to be left in peace. But I was curious to know where the doolies
had gone. I got out of bed and looked into the darkness. There was never
a sign of a doolie. Just as I was getting into bed again, I heard,
in the next room, the sound that no man in his senses can possibly
mistake--the whir of a billiard ball down the length of the slates when
the striker is stringing for break. No other sound is like it. A
minute afterwards there was another whir, and I got into bed. I was not
frightened--indeed I was not. I was very curious to know what had become
of the doolies. I jumped into bed for that reason.

Next minute I heard the double click of a cannon and my hair sat up. It
is a mistake to say that hair stands up. The skin of the head tightens
and you can feel a faint, prickly, bristling all over the scalp. That is
the hair sitting up.

There was a whir and a click, and both sounds could only have been made
by one thing--a billiard ball. I argued the matter out at great length
with myself; and the more I argued the less probable it seemed that one
bed, one table, and two chairs--all the furniture of the room next to
mine--could so exactly duplicate the sounds of a game of billiards.
After another cannon, a three-cushion one to judge by the whir, I
argued no more. I had found my ghost and would have given worlds to have
escaped from that dak-bungalow. I listened, and with each listen the
game grew clearer. There was whir on whir and click on click. Sometimes
there was a double click and a whir and another click. Beyond any sort
of doubt, people were playing billiards in the next room. And the next
room was not big enough to hold a billiard table!

Between the pauses of the wind I heard the game go forward--stroke
after stroke. I tried to believe that I could not hear voices; but that
attempt was a failure.

Do you know what fear is? Not ordinary fear of insult, injury or death,
but abject, quivering dread of something that you cannot see--fear that
dries the inside of the mouth and half of the throat--fear that makes
you sweat on the palms of the hands, and gulp in order to keep the uvula
at work? This is a fine Fear--a great cowardice, and must be felt to
be appreciated. The very improbability of billiards in a dak-bungalow
proved the reality of the thing. No man--drunk or sober--could imagine a
game at billiards, or invent the spitting crack of a "screw-cannon