Dempsey looked at the speaker indulgently.  To his sharpened transatlantic sense, these old men, in this funny old village, seemed to him a curiously dim and feeble folk.  He could hardly prevent himself from talking to them as though they were children.  He supposed his grandfather would have been like that if he’d stayed on at Ipscombe.  He thanked the stars he hadn’t!

But since he had been summoned to consult, as a person who had a vested interest, of a rather blood-curdling sort, in the Great End ghost, he had to give his opinion; and he gave it, while Halsey listened and smoked in a rather sulky silence.  For it was soon evident that the murderer’s grandson had no use at all for the supposed ghost-story.  He tore it ruthlessly to pieces.  In the first place, Halsey described the man seen on the grass-road as tall and lanky.  But according to his grandfather’s account, the murdered gamekeeper, on the contrary, was a broadly-built, stumpy man.  In the next place—­the coughing and the bleeding!—­he laughed so long and loudly at these points in the story that Halsey’s still black bushy eyebrows met frowningly over a pair of angry eyes, and Betts tried hurriedly to tame the young man’s mirth.

“Well, if yer don’t think that man as Halsey saw was the ghost, what do you s’pose ‘ee was doin’ there?” asked Betts, “and where did he go?  Halsey went right round the farm.  The hill just there is as bare as my hand.  He must ha’ seen the man—­if it wor a man—­an’ he saw nothin’.  There isn’t a tree or a bush where that man could ha’ hid hisself—­if he wor a man.”

Dempsey declared he should have to go and examine the ground himself before he could answer the question.  But of course there was an answer to it—­there must be.  As to the man—­why Millsborough, and Ipscombe too, had been full of outlandish East Enders, flying from the raids, Poles and Russians, and such like—­thievin’ fellows by all accounts.  Why couldn’t it be one of them—­prowling round the farm for anything he could pick up—­and frightened off, when he saw Halsey?

Betts, smoking with prodigious energy, inquired what he made of the blood.  Didn’t he know the old story of how Watson was tracked down to the cart-shed?  Dempsey laughed again.

“Well, it’s curious, grant ye.  It’s real funny!  But where are you going to get blood without a body?  And if a thing’s a body, it isn’t a ghost!”

The two old men were silent.  Halsey was lost in a hopeless confusion of ideas, and Betts was determined not to give his pal away.

But here—­say what you like!—­was a strange man, seen, on the road, which had been used, according to village tradition, on several previous occasions, by the authentic ghost of Watson; his course was marked by traces of blood, just as Watson’s path of pain had been marked on the night of the murder; and on reaching the spot where Watson had breathed his last, the apparition, whatever it was, had vanished.