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Barrett shrieked or, at least, so he said. “You know, it’s supposed to be haunted.”

There was a nervous laugh from everybody clustered around, but in spite of this derisory cachination, I could see certain of them stealing an occasional glance around out of the corners of their eyes.

“Nonsense,” exclaimed Humbert in his squeaky voice. “What decent ghost would take the trouble to haunt an old dump of a theater like this, when we got such nice theaters he could play around in—brandnew ones that probably never had a ghost since they were built.”

Everybody laughed, and Humbert glared around him. I never knew, as I said before, whether he really intended to be funny with remarks of that kind, or whether it was quite unintentional. Nobody else ever did, either. On the face of it, you might think that it was impossible for any one really to be serious with a remark such as that last one, but then you have never seen the bellicose gravity of Ike Humbert. And the occasion was not one particularly apropos to jokes of any kind.

“Don’t you remember that Ambrose Benedict, who built this theater, was shot here on the stage during a rehearsal thirty years ago?” persisted Bill Warrington. “It was Cicely Canson who did it—but I guess that’s before the time of any of you. They used to say that his ghost—”