isdainfully. "By the way, Bates--I
left a pound of coffee a little ways down the short-cut, you might step
out and get it before dinner."

"Yes, Miss Ocky."

"You ought to find it right in the middle of the path."

"Yes, Miss Ocky."

Bates waited, and when nothing further appeared to be forthcoming he
betook himself wonderingly to his usual habitat in the rear quarter of
the house. Monks in masks, indeed! And why did any one want to leave
a pound of coffee down a trail with rain commencing to fall? He shook
his head despondently over a Miss Ocky returned from foreign parts so
changed from the Miss Ocky of the old days.

She seemed inclined to renew the ghostly topic of conversation when
left alone with her brother-in-law, but Simon gave her no chance. He
stalked off down the hall and entered his study, a small room that
opened off the comfortable, old-fashioned parlor. He closed the door
from the hall behind him, and also, for the sake of greater privacy,
the door that communicated with the living-room. Then he seated
himself at a roll-top desk and turned up the wick of the lamp that was
burning dimly in a wall bracket, close at hand.

He had remembered, as he left Miss Ocky to her eerie fancies, the note
which he had retrieved from the cleft stick. She had driven the
recollection of it from his mind by her idle chatter about ghosts! He
took the slip of paper from his pocket and unfolded it.

A few typewritten lines jumped to his eye, and he nodded as if that
were as he had expected. Before reading the text, however, he leaned
back in his chair and strove to recall the exact circumstances under
which he had discovered the missive. He had been hurrying--no, blast
it, he had been scuttling like a scared rabbit!--along the trail and
had run into the stick, which had been jabbed into the ground where he
could not fail to notice it--and at the very spot where the figure in
black had been standing! Apparition--pooh! If there was one thing
certain about the whole silly business it was that the note had been
put there by that--that creature. Simon did not profess to be versed
in the lore of spooks, but he could not vision an ambassador from
another world leaving behind him a tangible message composed on an
earthly typewriter--! Pooh, and again, _pooh_!

He paused at this stage of his reflections to grin at the thought of
Ocky, denied the knowledge of this consolatory bit of evidence. He
hadn't mentione