use into halves. By the light
which filtered through the soiled windows I examined room after room
from the outside, then, noiselessly, tried the door, but found it
bolted from within as well as locked from without. Either the Butlers
or the commissioners of sequestration must have crawled through a
window to do this. I prowled on, looking for the window they had used
as exit, examining the old house with a fascinated repugnance. The
clapboards were a foot wide, evidently fashioned with care and beaded
on the edges. The outside doors all opened outward; and I noted, with a
shudder of contempt, the "witch's half-moon," or lunette, in the bottom
of each door, which betrays the cowardly superstition of the man who
lived there. Such cat-holes are fashioned for haunted houses; the
specter is believed to crawl out through these openings, and then to be
kept out with a tarred rag stuffed into the hole--ghosts being unable
to endure tar. Faugh! If specters walk, the accursed house must be
alive with them--ghosts of the victims of old John Butler, wraiths
dripping red from Cherry Valley--children with throats cut; women with
bleeding heads and butchered bodies, stabbed through and through--and
perhaps the awful specter of Lieutenant Boyd, with eyes and nails
plucked out, and tongue cut off, bound to the stake and slowly roasting
to death, while Walter Butler watched the agony curiously, interested
and surprised to see a disemboweled man live so long!

Oh, yes, there might well be phantoms in this ghastly mansion; but they
had nothing to do with me; only the absent master of the house was any
concern of mine; and, finding at last the window I sought for, I shoved
it open and climbed to the sill, landing upon the floor inside, my
moccasined feet making no more sound than the padded toes of a
tree-cat.

Then to prowl and mouse, stepping cautiously, stooping warily to
examine dusty scraps lying on the bare boards--a dirty newspaper, an
old shoe with buckle missing, a broken pewter spoon--all the sordid
trifles that accent desolation. Once or twice I thought to make out
moccasin tracks in the dust, as though some furtive prowler had
anticipated me here, but the light filtering through the crusted panes
was meager and uncertain, and, after all, it mattered nothing to me.

The house was divided by a hallway; there were two rooms on either
side, all bare and empty save for scraps here and there, and in one
room the collapsed and dust