"The only objection I have to ghost stories," said young Sanford, "is from a literary point of view. They're so badly done, you know."  
"In what way?" said the clerk of the hotel, settling back in his office chair, and smiling at young Sanford and the circle of men who had come down for their keys from the billiard-room.
 
"Well, in this way. I'm not considering the little harmless stories where the heroes are only frightened, or even those where their heads are grey in the morning. I'm thinking of those where they never live to tell the awful tale, you know; the ones in which they tell their friends to come if they call, and then they never call; the ones in which, although they scream and scream, nobody hears them.
 
"And yet the old trembling man who points them to the haunted room knows perfectly well that five men have entered that room on five nineteenths of[192] October, and never come out alive. Yet he only warns them, or at most only beseeches them not to go in. He has no police force—not that police could seriously harm the ghosts, but somehow they never appear to the police; he does not arrange with the victim's friend to burst in the door at twelve-thirty, anyhow, whether they are summoned or not; he doesn't—but then, what do any of them do that they might be expected to? And all this forced condition of things so that the ghost may have all the evening to work quietly in. Do you mean to tell me that if I were frightened to the extent of grey hair in the morning, I couldn't scream loud enough to be heard any distance?"
 
This speech drew nods of approval from several of the men. "I've thought of that, too," said the clerk. In a dark corner behind the stove sat a man, hunched over his knees, silent, and apparently unknown to any of the others. At this point he looked up, cleared his throat, and said in a strange, husky voice:
 
"Do you really suppose that that is anything else than nonsense?" Young Sanford flushed.[193] "Sir"—he began. The other continued in his rough, thick voice:
 
"Do you suppose they don't try to scream? Do you suppose they don't think they're screaming?"
 
A little silence of discomfort fell on the circle. There was something disagreeably suggestive in the question. Suddenly the man spoke again.
 
"I had a friend," he said, "in fact, I had two friends. One was young—about your age," nodding to Sanford. "The other was older. He was not so clever nor so attractive nor so brilliant nor so jolly as the younger, but he had a characteristic—perhaps his only one—for he was a very ordinary man. He had an iron will. His determination was as unbreakable as anything human could be. And he was devoted to his friend, who, somehow, loved him. I don't know why, because he had so many other admirers—but he stuck to his friend—Joan. They called the two Darby and Joan. Their real names were not unlike those, and it was rather funny. Darby used to talk as you were talking, sir," he nodded again to Sanford, "and he was sure, cock sure, that what he said was right. He[194] would tell what things were possible and what were not, and prove what he said very nicely. Joan wasn't clever, but he knew that it does no good to call a thing impossible. He knew, in fact, that nothing is more possible than the most impossible things."
 
The man coughed and cleared his throat and waited a moment as if to see whether he were intruding. No one spoke, so he went on.
 
"One day Darby rushed into Joan's study and told him of a haunted mill he'd discovered. It was one of the old mills where the farmers used to bring their sacks before the big concerns in the West swallowed all the little trades. It was dusty and cobwebbed and broken down and unused and ha............