“The inspector and the detective ran across the cellar to the cage; and I followed, still bewildered.  The man in the cage was holding the leg of mutton as far away from him, as possible, and holding his nose.

“‘Lift thig dam trap, quig!’ he shouted in a stifled voice; but the inspector and the detective simply doubled before him, and tried to hold their noses, whilst they laughed, and the light from their lanterns went dancing all over the place.

“‘Quig! quig!’ said the man in the cage, still holding his nose, and trying to speak plainly.

“Then Johnstone and the detective stopped laughing, and lifted the cage.  The man in the well threw the leg across the cellar, and turned swiftly to go down into the well; but the officers were too quick for him, and had him out in a twinkling.  Whilst they held him, dripping upon the floor, the inspector jerked his thumb in the direction of the offending leg, and the landlord, having harpooned it with one of the pitchforks, ran with it upstairs and so into the open air.

“Meanwhile, I had given the man from the well a stiff tot of whisky; for which he thanked me with a cheerful nod, and having emptied the glass at a draft, held his hand for the bottle, which he finished, as if it had been so much water.

“As you will remember, it was a Captain Tobias who had been the previous tenant; and this was the very man, who had appeared from the well.  In the course of the talk that followed, I learned the reason for Captain Tobias leaving the house; he had been wanted by the police for smuggling.  He had undergone imprisonment; and had been released only a couple of weeks earlier.

“He had returned to find new tenants in his old home.  He had entered the house through the well, the walls of which were not continued to the bottom (this I will deal with later); and gone up by a little stairway in the cellar wall, which opened at the top through a panel beside my mother’s bedroom.  This panel was opened, by revolving the left doorpost of the bedroom door, with the result that the bedroom door always became unlatched, in the process of opening the panel.

“The captain complained, without any bitterness, that the panel had warped, and that each time he opened it, it made a cracking noise.  This had been evidently what I mistook for raps.  He would not give his reason for entering the house; but it was pretty obvious that he had hidden something, which he wanted to get.  However, as he found it impossible to get into the house without the risk of being caught, he decided to try to drive us out, relying on the bad reputation of the house, and his own artistic efforts as a ghost.  I must say he succeeded.  He intended then to rent the house again, as before; and would then, of course have plenty of time to get whatever he had hidden.  The house suited him admirably; for there was a passage—­as he showed me afterward—­connecting the dummy well with the crypt of the church beyond the garden wall; and these, in turn, were connected with certain caves in the cliffs, which went down to the beach beyond the church.