CHAPTER XXVI.

GHOSTLY VISITANTS.

Wonderingly, Chick followed his employer along the dark corridor, lighted at intervals by the electric flash, until they came to some more winding stairs leading upward.

“There seems to be a secret house within a house here, chief,” muttered Chick. “A great place for ghosts, I should say.”

Carter permitted himself a low laugh, and turned to place a hand on Chick’s shoulder, as he replied:

“Do you know, Chick, you have just about struck the nail on the head without meaning it?”

“I don’t get you.”

“You will in a few minutes. Here we are!”

They had gone up so many stairs that Chick had no clear idea of how high they were in the house, when Carter pressed on the wall to his right and opened a panel door like that which had admitted them to the mysterious region they had been in for so long.

This panel led into a large, lofty room, with the moonlight streaming through a skylight.

“What’s this, chief?”

“This used to be Howard Milmarsh’s laboratory and studio,” was the quiet answer. “It is at the top of the house, as you see, and there is only one other way of reaching it besides that we came in by. That is through the bedroom he used in his lifetime. It is on the floor below this.”

“Wonder whether the present Howard Milmarsh is in the same bedroom?”

“I don’t know,” replied Nick. “But if he isn’t, he is sure to be in one very near it, for the best bedchambers are all on the floor below this.”

“Where do the servants sleep?”

“In the west wing, some distance away from this part of the building. But come over here. I may want some help.”

There was a table and mirror against a wall across from the panel door, with two electric lights each side of the glass.

Chick turned on these lights without hesitation. He knew that the room was so arranged that the light would not show outside, even if anybody should happen to be watching, which was not at all likely.

“Howard Milmarsh was deeply interested in theatricals,” explained Nick. “He often had private performances in this house while his wife was alive, and he always took part in them himself. This was his dressing room. He used to ‘make-up’ here, and I suppose he had as fine a collection of grease paint and other articles needed in a theatrical dressing room as you could find anywhere in America to-day.”

“But what are you going to do?” asked Chick.

“I’m going to make myself look as much like the late Howard Milmarsh as I can,” was the reply. “He always wore a mustache and pointed beard as long as I knew him, and they were iron-gray toward the end of his life. Here are the very things in this drawer.”

Carter took some false beards and mustaches, and began to examine them, occasionally twisting one to bring it to the desired shape.

“Am I to take a hand in this?” asked Chick.

“You certainly are, and you must not waste time, either. We’ve both to be ready before midnight. You make-up like Howard Milmarsh, the present one. There is a full wardrobe in those closets along the wall. You can find anything you want. Just a plain sack suit is all you will need. But there’s a black-and-white check that Howard used to wear a great deal. Put that on. It’s distinctive.”

It was five minutes to twelve when Nick Carter surveyed himself critically in the mirror and decided he was enough like the father of the present Howard Milmarsh to pass for him. Then he looked at his assistant. He was much pleased, and he gave him the praise he felt he deserved.

“Excellent, Chick! Grease paint is a wonderful transformer—if you know how to use it. You have changed all your features. When that fellow downstairs sees you, he’ll think it’s himself.”

“Or his ghost!” said Chick, with a smile.

“Ghost!” repeated the chief. “That’s it exactly. Haven’t you wondered what we are doing all this for?”

“I supposed you had your reasons,” replied Chick humbly.

“I have. I’m going to scare that fellow into telling the truth, if I can. If he isn’t the real Howard Milmarsh, I’m in hopes I’ll make him confess the fraud.”

“But suppose he _is_ the real one, how will you work it then?”

“That’s a question,” answered the detective soberly. “But I do not expect to be called on to answer that. Now, put a little talcum powder on your cheeks, so that you will look a little more ghostly.”

“How about a smudge of phosphorus? Here’s some in this box. The old gentleman certainly did not overlook anything.”

“It might add still more ghostliness to the general effect,” assented Nick. “Rub some on your cheeks and hands, and I will do the same.”

Nick Carter had not exaggerated when he said that anybody seeing Chick might think him the real Howard Milmarsh of the present day.

He might have remarked that his own make-up was also perfect. If the elder Milmarsh had been alive, anybody meeting the detective would have declared him to be the multimillionaire steel manufacturer.

A distant clock somewhere in the house, with deep, cathedral tones, boomed out twelve strokes.

“Midnight!” observed Nick. “Just the time for a ghostly visit.”

He went to a door, which was fastened, like the others, by a secret spring, and opened it wide. A narrow, winding staircase, of the kind with which they had become familiar that night, led to a hall, and along this a short walk brought them to a large door with heavy portières in front.

Howard Milmarsh, the elder, had been so intimate with the great detective that he had told him more about the ways of his mansion than he ever had confided to any one else.

So Nick soon opened the door, and then another one beyond.

“Stand still, Chick!” he whispered. “I must see whether he is in bed.”

A moment later he returned to his assistant and whispered:

“He is in bed and fast asleep. Do not speak a word unless I give you a signal. Walk softly, and keep out of sight for the present.”

Chick followed his chief into a large room which looked more like a bedchamber of a hundred years ago than of to-day.

Instead of the light furniture to which people are accustomed now, with brass or mahogany bedstead and other articles to correspond, there was an immense four-poster, with mahogany cornices, from which depended thick hangings of purple velvet with lace lambrequins draped over them.

A small electric light in a ground-glass globe hung over a table where it would not shine in the face of an occupant of the bed, but which relieved the gloom of the great, shadowy apartment.

The man who might or might not be Howard Milmarsh lay asleep in the bed. His potations had stupefied him to such an extent that he slumbered heavily, his breath coming in long, stertorous snores, and he did not move.

Nick took from his pocket his electric flash, and, turning the light full into the face of the sleeper, shook him gently and continuously.

It required several seconds to bring the man to his waking senses, and even then he was only half-conscious. Lazily opening his eyes, he closed them quickly, for he had been blinded by the glaring eye of the flash light. When, after a pause, he opened them again, the light was gone.

“Hello! What’s this?” he mumbled. “I must have been dreaming!”

Satisfied that this was the explanation of the strange light he thought he had seen, Howard Milmarsh composed himself to drop asleep again, when a deep voice commanded him to “Awake!”

He started up in bed and rubbed his eyes.

“Heavens, I heard somebody speak!” he muttered. “Lampton or——”

It was at this instant that he made out a shadowy form standing near the bed, and as he stared the light of the flash was turned full upon the figure of the ghostly visitor, and, traveling slowly upward, at last came to the face of the elder Howard Milmarsh. Then the light was blotted out, and the man in the bed, shaking with superstitious fear, fell back upon his pillow.

“Who are you?” asked the strange voice out of the gloom.

Hardly knowing what he said, the man in the bed replied:

“I am Howard Milmarsh. Who the deuce are you?”

There was a touch of defiance in the last sentence that did more to make Nick believe in the genuineness of this Howard Milmarsh than anything else he might have said. But he remembered that a man who would have the nerve to impersonate another to the extent of taking possession of a large estate, with an eye to an immense fortune in money later, would hardly be lacking in self-assurance.

“I am your father, Howard Milmarsh, who desires to see his son come into his rights. That is why I am here.”

“Ah!”

Nick realized that it would be impossible to frighten this rather cool individual very long. At first, when he had been awakened from his sleep in such a curious fashion, he had shown terror. But that was passing away, and the detective expected that soon he would be called on to deal with this young man in a material way, if at all.

“This looks as if he might be the real Howard,” was his inward comment. “Howard was never afraid of anything, and certainly he had no superstition in his nature. He would be quite likely to send a bullet through a ghost. Perhaps it is well this gentleman has no gun handy.”

“If you are my son, you will be able to answer certain questions that I shall put to you,” went on Nick.

There was a pause. Then, in an incredulous tone, the young man in the bed said:

“I’ll answer any questions. But be honest about it, and don’t say you said things you didn’t.”

He had been edging away to the other side of the bed, and after the first startled moment it struck the detective that the young man was remarkably self-possessed, considering that he was talking to a supposed ghost.

“What did I say to you just before you went down to the Old Pike Inn that night you killed Richard Jarvis?”

The detective watched narrowly to see what effect his recalling Jarvis’ death would have on the man who had killed him.

He saw a decided start, and then the man in the bed fell upon his face on the farther side of the bed, his face buried in the pillow.

“What did I say?” repeated Nick, in hollow tones.

He waited for a full quarter of a minute, during which the supposed Howard Milmarsh writhed about the bed, with his face in the pillow.

“Will you answer me?”

“I can’t,” moaned the other.

“Why not?”

“Can’t you understand?”

There was such agony in the voice that asked this that Nick was puzzled. Surely it must be remorse that caused the alleged slayer to groan in such utter despair.

“You really are Howard Milmarsh?” asked Nick, after a pause.

“Of course I am,” came the answer in muffled tones from the depths of the pillow. “Why do you ask that?”

“Look up—and see!”

Before Nick said this he beckoned to Chick. When Howard Milmarsh slowly lifted his face from the pillow and turned it toward the other side of the bed his eyes rested upon what might have been the reflection of himself in the clothing he had worn on the night of the fatal poker party at the Old Pike Inn.

For an instant he gazed at the figure of Howard Milmarsh, with its creeping flames on the cheeks—for Chick had not been sparing of his phosphorus—and a muffled shriek sprang from his lips.

Then, as Carter opened his mouth to speak, there was a loud noise outside the room, and a door at the farther end crashed open!