This was more than mere visibility--an actual encounter. These four men were of the type who could be believed. The report was reliable. And the next night, in a Kansas farmhouse, the farmer and his wife were awakened by the scream of their adolescent daughter. They rushed into her bedroom. She was in bed, and bending over her was the apparition of a man. Its fingers were holding a lock of the girl's long black hair. At the farmer's shout, the ghost turned; its hand was raised--and the farmer and his wife both saw that the shadowy fingers had lifted the girl's tresses which they were clutching. Then it dropped them and moved away, not through the walls of the room, but out through the open window. The girl was dead. She had suffered from heart trouble; was dead of fright, undoubtedly. It was the beginning of the era of menace. And that next afternoon Wilton Grant telephoned me. His voice had a strange tenseness to it, though it was grave and melodious as always. "Come out and see us this evening, will you, Rob?" "Why, yes," I said. I had not seen them for over a month--an estrangement which I had not understood and which hurt me had fallen between us. "Of course I will," I added. "How's Bee?" "She's been quite ill.... No, not dangerous, she's better now. Don't fail us, Rob. About eight o'clock.... That's fine. We--I need you. You've been a mighty good friend, letting us treat you the way we have--" He hung up. With an ominous sense of danger hanging over me, I went out to see them at the hour he had named. CHAPTER II GROPING AT THE UNKNOWN Wilton Grant was at that time just under forty. He was a tall, spare man of muscular build, lean but not powerful. His smooth-shaven face was large-featured, rough-hewn, with a shock of brown hair above it--hair turning grey at the temples. Beneath heavy brows his grey eyes were deep-set, somber. His ruddy-brown complexion, the obvious strength of his frame at a quick glance gave him an out-of-doors look; a woodsman cast in the mould of a gentleman. Yet there was something poetic about him as well; that wavy, unruly hair, the brooding quality of his eyes. When he spoke, those eyes frequently twinkled with the good nature characteristic of him. But in repose, the somberness was there, unmistakable; an unvoiced, brooding melancholy. Yet there was nothing morbid about Wilton Grant. A wholesomeness, mental and physical, radiated from him. He was a jolly companion, a man of intellectuality and culture. His deep voice had a pleasing resonance suggestive of the public speaker. Normally rather silent, chary of speech, he could upon occasion draw fluently from a vocabulary of which many an orator would be proud.