CHAPTER X
SIX PINK PEARLS
I didn’t go to Sunday-school the following morning. Mother said I wasn’t to go anywhere in public till I got bleached out. She used scouring powder on me and lemon juice and sweet cream. When she completed her rubbing and scrubbing I was only a few shades outside of my natural color.
“But your clothes are ruined,” she declared, looking them over with a frown. “I can’t possibly get the ink out of them. Oh, Jerry! How can you do such things?”
“It was an accident,” I defended, shifting my weight uneasily from one foot to the other.
“Of course. But it seems to me you have more than your share of such accidents. What will your father say?”
“Where is Dad?” I countered, running my tongue over my upper lip in search of more cream.
“He drove to Ashton to see about his insurance. There was a fire in the brickyard last night.”
“I know all about the fire,” I returned quickly. “I even know who started it. That’s why I asked for Dad.”
She looked startled until I told her about our mysterious prowler. Then she gave a scattered laugh.
“Jerry! What queer ideas you do get.”
“Queer ideas?” I echoed stiffly.
“To imagine that a mysterious man is trying to steal your cats.”
“But it’s so,” I persisted.
“Nonsense. More than likely it’s some boy trying to bother you.”
“It’s a man,” I declared.
“But why should a man try to get your cats away from you?”
“That’s the mystery. We don’t know why the prowler wants the yellow cat. But it’s a cinch he started the brickyard fire last night.”
“Your father will have a good laugh when he hears this.”
I let my neck go stiff.
“All right,” I said, with a sharp bob of my head. “I won’t tell Dad if I’ve got to be made fun of. But you just wait and see who’s right.”
When the boy came with the Sunday newspapers I rolled up the one that had printed the professor’s cat farm advertisement and beat it for the old mill. Peg was alone when I tumbled in through the door. He took the news section while I buried myself in the funny pictures.
Presently he gave a gasp, as though he had run across something in the newspaper that amazed him. I glanced up and found him staring into my face.
“Here’s a big article about Mrs. Kepple,” he said.
“Our ten-dollar woman?” I inquired quickly.
He nodded and handed me the folded newspaper, putting a finger on the article that had come under his attention.
When I saw the column heading I was so excited I could hardly read. “Mysterious Pearl Robbery” is what stood out before my eager eyes in big black letters. I quickly absorbed the news story, learning therefrom that Mrs. Peter Kepple had been robbed of six pink pearls. Valued at two thousand dollars each, the pearls had mysteriously disappeared from a wall safe in her Chicago home. In describing the pearls the article stated that they were of uniform size, unmounted, and were considered remarkable in their unusual sheen and luster.
The thief, according to the newspaper, had seemingly left no clews behind him. The police and detectives were baffled. Exactly what day or hour the pearls had been lifted from the safe no one knew. Hurrying to get her household in order for a lengthy absence, Mrs. Kepple had only discovered that the gem case was empty when the representative of a bonded safe deposit company called at her home to receive her jewels into storage.
I was still buried in the absorbing article when the sound of squeaking shoes carried to my ears. A moment later Red and Scoop trailed into the mill dressed up in their Sunday clothes.
Peg promptly hoisted his big nose into the air and sniffed.
“Wough!” he cried contemptuously. “I smell perfume.”
“Ma made me use some of her toilet soap on my face,” Red confessed sheepishly.
“You look sort of 99-98/100% pure,” grinned Peg.
“I didn’t want to dress up for Sunday-school but she made me,” Red continued unhappily, giving his starched collar a vicious jerk. “Blame it! How can any one expect a fellow to breathe with a thing like this clamped on his windpipe?”
“If your ma wants to dress you up like a preacher she ought to buy you some nice pink pearls for shirt studs.”
I could tell from this remark that Peg was itching to startle the newcomers with an account of the pearl robbery. So I let him go ahead. When he ran out of wind I offered to read the article aloud. It concluded with a reference to the rose-colored cat that had escaped my attention on the first brief reading.
“The unfortunate owner of the stolen pearls, as is well known along the North Shore, has the distinction of possessing the most valuable cat in Chicago, if not in the entire country. This remarkable feline, Lady Victoria, has secured for her mistress many coveted beauty prizes, and it has been reported that Her Majesty is valued at no less than five hundred dollars.”
“A lot of newspaper bunk,” snorted Scoop, when I concluded. “That alley cat win beauty prizes? Bah!”
“Yes,” followed up Peg, “if the cat we chloroformed is a prize-winner, like the newspaper says, Red here is entitled to a beauty medal the size of a washtub,” and he gave us the wink.
“Hey!” scowled Red, going stiff and scrappy. “How do you get that way?”
I joined in the laugh that followed.
“Anyway,” I put in, tossing the newspaper aside, “it’s a cinch ‘Her Majesty’ won’t pull down any more beauty prizes.”
“Ain’t that a fact,” agreed Scoop, following me in thought to the cat grave on the crest of the adjacent hill.
“I have the feeling,” I added, “that there’s going to be a six-cylinder shake-up in the Kepple family when they learn that their prize-winner has kicked the bucket.”
“Let’s hope,” put in Scoop, with a shrug of his shoulders, “that we don’t get damaged in the shake-up.”
Peg went thoughtful.
“We do a lot of guessing,” he said slowly, “and more than half of the time we guess wrong. But I’m going to make the prediction that there’s some unknown connection between the rose-colored cat, the stolen pearls and the mysterious prowler. From the way the article reads I take it that the cat was sent to us about the time the pearls disappeared. That in itself strikes me as being more than a coincidence.” He let this thought sink in, then added: “Possibly the cat buyer isn’t the mysterious prowler, as we think. The newspaper mentions detectives. Maybe the man who boarded at the farmhouse is a Chicago detective.”
Here Red gave a yip and jumped into the conversation.
“I know,” he cried. “The cat buyer is a detective, as Peg says, and the prowler is the pearl thief.”
This was contrary to Scoop’s theory that the cat buyer was in reality the mysterious prowler.
“Why should the thief hang around Tutter?” I put in, unwilling to immediately accept Red’s view. “The newspaper says he got away with the pearls. Why doesn’t he play safe and head for Mexico or South America?”
“I guess we know well enough why he’s hanging around here,” returned Red. “He wants the yellow cat. Don’t you see, Jerry? The thief is somebody who knows Mrs. Kepple pretty well. Not satisfied with hooking the pearls he intends to steal her cat. Um—— I guess there’s a lot of crooks who’d steal a five-hundred-dollar cat if they had a chance. Doesn’t that sound reasonable?”
I told him his idea didn’t register with me at all. A hot argument followed. Then Peg flagged my attention, pressing me with questions bearing on the previous night’s adventure.
“And you say you didn’t get a look at the prowler’s face, Jerry?”
I shook my head “no.”
“And you don’t know whether the man is short or tall or skinny or fat?”
I squeezed my memory.
“He was a big man,” I said slowly. “Not fat, but well-built. Had he been skinny I would have knocked him over when I rammed into him.”
“You had a good look at the cat buyer the afternoon we followed the Strickers into the country,” proceeded the questioner. “Would you call him a big man?”
“No-o,” I returned slowly. “He seemed more like a boy just growing into a man.”
Peg’s black eyes snapped with satisfaction.
“Exactly!” said he, and turned to the others. “You’re right, Red. The prowler and the cat buyer are two different men. And, that being the case, what more likely than that one is a detective, as I say?”
“Nix,” scowled Scoop, unwilling to see his theory go down in defeat. “The fact that we have the cat buyer’s cap is evidence that the man was in the mill last Thursday night.”
Peg crossed the room and removed the gray cloth cap from its peg.
“I happen to know,” he said quietly, “that this isn’t the cat buyer’s cap, as you imagine. When I was down town yesterday afternoon I met the farmer’s wife on the street and she told me she had found a gray cloth cap in the closet of the vanished boarder’s bedroom. Also the black hat he wore the evening he disappeared from the farmhouse was his own and not the farmer’s. You see, Scoop, you guessed wrong. I intended to tell you all the woman said but I forgot about it in the rush of fixing the ink trap.”
Scoop’s chestiness went punctured and he shut up. He’s a good pal, and I like him a lot, but I can’t say was I sorry to see him get tripped up. A fall now and then lets him know without us telling him that he’s just as likely to stumble over his own feet as we are to stumble over ours.
“Come along,” he growled to Red, “it’s Sunday-school time.”
Left alone, Peg and I went deeper into a discussion of the mystery. But the more we talked about the affair the greater became our mental confusion. If the prowler were indeed the pearl thief, why was he risking his liberty to get possession of the yellow cat? Suppose he were arrested in the act of stealing it. The police would search his pockets and find the stolen pearls. That would mean a jail sentence for him. Easy. Why then did he invite a situation that was so likely to bring about his downfall?
Peg said it was the five hundred dollars. I argued in return that Lady Victoria wouldn’t be worth five hundred dollars to the thief because he couldn’t sell her. If he tried that he would be arrested.
And if the vanished cat buyer were a Chicago detective, as Peg still contended, why did he work so mysteriously in the dark, instead of coming to us openly to enlist our support? Where was he hiding out? Who sent him the telegram from the state capital?
“To-morrow,” reflected Peg, “is the day Mrs. Kepple arrives at the Walkers Lake Sanitarium. Let’s hope she’ll have an answer to the riddle.”
This concluding reference to the owner of the rose-colored cat recalled to my troubled mind the tragic outcome of Scoop’s operation. And anxiety settled deeper about me as my thoughts probed the future.