Poppy Ott and the galloping snail

Ma Doane sure was a worker. The supper dishes washed and put away in the cupboard, each dish in its proper place, she got out a little comb-like machine for making switches. A switch, as you probably know, if you have any old ladies in the family, is a tail of false hair. Some oldish women still use them. It’s a part of their dressing-up scheme. Camouflage, Dad calls it.

Switch making, we learned, was a sort of side line with Ma. She earned about a hundred dollars a year that way. A customer wanting a switch would save her hair combings, and Ma would take this tangle of stuff and make it into a switch with the aid of her home made combing machine. In talking with her about the work, which interested us at first, she laughingly told us how she had made wigs for bald-headed men, too. She wanted us to know, I guess, as much as anything, that all wearers of false hair weren’t women!

After watching her for a few minutes, with the feeling that she was mostly doing this work to quiet her mind, or, rather, as a sort of accompaniment to her tangled thoughts, we went upstairs to talk with Pa. For that was our plan, you know. To our surprise, we found the old man smoking in bed, as chipper as you please. Old Goliath was there, too, with another pipe. And in their new friendship if you think the two old geezers weren’t messing up the air with tobacco smoke you should have been there to cut off a sample for yourself.

“Yes, sir,” drawled the runaway, “it’s the nature of some wimmin to be that way. They just kain’t help it, I reckon. Not so much temper, I take it, as temperament.”

“Or distemper, hey?” cackled the other smoker.

“Exactly. Take my Clarissa fur example. She just seemed to have a natural hankerin’ fur throwin’ things at me. I didn’t mind cold ’taters so much, or even soggy dough, though it were blamed oncomfortable sometimes to git some of it squashed in my face, especially when I wasn’t lookin’ fur it. But what I hated worser ’an that, even, was stove lids an’ flatirons. An’ to make it all the more onfortunate fur me, Clarissa had a most powerfully perfect aim.” A big hand parted the brown hair that hung almost to the giant’s shoulders. “See that bump? Some of Clarissa’s fine work. An’ that, mind you, is the very spot she aimed for, too. Every push with that old gal meant a put. So you see, Mr. Doane, everything considered, me not havin’ eyes in the back of my head to pertect me there, to say nothin’ of gittin’ soaked when I was asleep in my chair, it weren’t sech a terribly useless or onreasonable notion of mine to skin out.”

“Ma never throwed stuff at me much,” came the second henpecked tale, “but her jawin’ apparatus is the confoundest waggingest an’ most consistent thing I ever heerd tell of in all my born days. Talk about perpet’al motion! One day when her throat got stopped up so she couldn’t talk I swar to Peter I thought I’d lost my hearin’. I stand her gab jest so long an’ then I send her away on a vacation, so I kin git a rest.”

Poppy nudged me as we stood in the doorway.

“I guess old Pop isn’t so dumb, huh?” says he in my ear.

We had surprised the old man, all right. And listening, I was further puzzled over him. Was it a sort of lifelong game of his, I wondered, to play dumb in his wife’s eyes? It would seem so, from what we knew of him and from what we just had overheard. To hear his wife tell it, he had about as much brains as a hitching post. But in the right kind of company, as now, and with his wife out of his sight, he seemed perfectly able to spread around plenty of fairly intelligent gab.

How shrewd was this trick of his, I then thought. By pretending dumbness he saved himself the job of saying “yes” and “no” all day long as punctuation marks to his wife’s endless tongue wagging. Furthermore, he had no managing job as head of the house, for, of course, not being “all there” in his upper story, he couldn’t be expected to do much work! Some men, you know, are lazy enough to jump at any kind of a scheme to save their backs.

Sort of summing up, I felt that I had a pretty good line on the tricky old man now. And I liked him the less for what I knew about him. Here he was taking it easy—and to that point faithful little old Ma undoubtedly had lugged his dinner and supper up to him on a tray!—while downstairs the innocent one was straining her eyes over a tangle of human hair to earn money to keep him in smoking tobacco.

Getting sight of us through the smoke screen, the two old gossips sort of rolled up their gab, as though they didn’t want us to know too much about their family affairs, though why old Goliath should act this way all of a sudden was a puzzle to me, for certainly, on the way out, he hadn’t been backward in spilling his grief to us.

Then Ma breezed into the room, jawing to beat the cars. Such a smoke! What would the curtains and bedclothes be like? Up went the window ... and out went old Goliath. Not out of the window, you understand, but out of the room.

We grinned at him as he swung past us into the hall.

“I guess,” he drawled, looking back with a comical twist to his face, like a spanked kid, “they wasn’t no false bottom to that story of the old man’s. She sure kin talk. They’s no ifs or ands about that. She’s what you call pur-ficient. An’ between rollin’ pins an’ this, I think, fur a life’s job of it, I’d prefer the rollin’ pins.... Wa-al, where do we bunk?”

“Jerry and I have the notion,” says Poppy—only it was his notion and not mine—“that we’d like to sleep in the dead man’s room. Mrs. Doane says we can. And she’s going to bring quilts and things for you to sleep on the floor in front of the door, if that’s agreeable with you.”

Ma was bustling around in the smoke house, getting ready to go to bed, so Pa was out of our reach for the night at least. However, it wasn’t important for us to talk with him right away, Poppy said. He had lost some of his sympathy for the old geezer, I guess. And I was glad of that. For it looked like a crazy stunt to me to show our hand to the tricky old man, as the other had suggested. He’d have us at a disadvantage then.

Eleven-thirty found us parked in our bedrooms for the night, Ma and Pa in their room halfway down the long hall, and the three of us in the “master’s chamber,” as the big room was called. A sweller bedroom I never hope to see. Say, it was more like a parlor than a bedroom. Boy, the carpet was so thick that it tickled our knees. And the bed alone must have cost a thousand dollars. It was some bed. Like a king’s. On top of the headboard was a fancy doo-dad—a sort of red-plush curtain, folded as slick and pretty as you please, with gold fringe. And there was more of the same plush stuff over the windows. The walls were laid out in big panels, and each panel was a separate picture worked into cloth. Tapestry—I guess that’s the right word to use. The ceiling was a big picture of dancing ladies wrapped in strings of flowers—and bu-lieve me, all those ladies did have on was flowers! That was an awful side-show for a man to lay in bed and look at, I thought, blushing. The chairs had biscuit cushions and toothpick legs. Further, there was a table, a swell dresser that matched the bed, a grandfather’s clock and a writing desk. Everything being new to us, it was an awful temptation to start snooping. For one thing, we thought, the desk might be crammed full of money! Of course, it wasn’t money that we could take—I don’t mean that—but it would be exciting to count it. Thousand-dollar bills, maybe. Millionaires do have thousand-dollar bills. Sure thing. And having died very suddenly, the rich man might not have remembered, as a last act, to send his money back to the bank. But we didn’t snoop, even though the thought came to us that among the packages of greenbacks in the desk we might find a private paper, or some such thing, that would clear up the crazy mystery. For Mrs. Doane hadn’t told us that we could open the desk. Anyway, we couldn’t have opened it if she had said so, for it was locked.

Poppy spent quite a bit of time examining the clock. For it was his idea that there might be a pair of hidden electric wires between the timepiece and the door. But he could find no wires. And we were dead sure, too, that there were no hidden springs in or around the door.

Helping old Goliath make up his floor bed, we tucked him in and then went to bed ourselves. The light was out now. And though I wasn’t scared, still, as I lay there in the dark, I had a queer feeling. I put my nose against the sheets. They smelt all right. And just because they were cold didn’t mean that they had been touched by dead hands. Sheets were naturally cold, I told myself. Yet somehow these sheets felt different. Sort of clammy-like.

I got closer to Poppy. If the sheets would only hurry up and get warm, was my thought. What was that? Oh!... Goliath had kicked the wall in his sleep. I tried to quit shivering. Those blamed co-old sheets.

“If you want to shimmey,” purred Poppy, kept awake, “why don’t you get out on the roof where you’ll have more room?”

“This is a crazy notion,” says I unhappily.

“What?”

“Sleeping here. What good’ll it do us, anyway?”

“You seem to be getting a lot of exercise out of it.”

“I’ve got a notion to get up and sleep with old Goliath.”

“If he rolls over on top of you in the middle of the night you’ll wish you’d stayed here.”

“I’d rather be a pancake than an icicle.”

“You don’t mean to say you’re cold!”

“Oh, no! I’m roasting. Get me a fan.”

“But how can you be cold on a hot night like this?”

“Ask me why porcupines have whiskers.”

“You and your porcupines!”

“Tell me why you want to sleep here,” I pressed.

“For the same reason that a ten-year-old likes to monkey with the family clock. I’m curious to know if anything spooky can happen in this room.”

“I’ll never sleep a wink!”

“Kid, you aren’t half as shivery as you try to let on.”

“What if the spy breaks into the house?”

“Let him. We know who he’s working for. And at our orders old Goliath will lay him cold.”

“I feel better,” I told him, after a few minutes.

“That’s the stuff,” he encouraged, like the good pal that he was.

“Shall we go to sleep?”

“Sure thing. For if we don’t we’ll be half dead to-morrow.”

The sheets were nice and warm now. And how different I felt! That’s the way it is with a fellow—he gets shivery one minute and then in another minute he’s all right again. I rather liked it now. I felt like a king. What was that story in the Arabian Nights? Oh, yes! A boy wanted to be king, and one night the real king, in going around secretly, heard the boy wishing. And for a joke the boy was carried in his sleep to the palace where he was put in the king’s bed. Waking up the next morning, he was king, all right, just as he had wanted to be! He was king all that day. Then in the dark they carried him home again.

That was me. I was king, too. And in the morning the black eunuchs, or whatever you call ’em, would come in, bowing and scraping. The Grand Vizier would come in, too, to find out which of my six hundred suits I wanted to wear that morning, and how many prisoners’ heads I wanted cut off before breakfast. Maybe I would be asleep when the Grand Vizier came. He wouldn’t dare to wake me up, me being king. That is, he wouldn’t dare to shake the tar out of me as Mother does when she gets out of patience with me on school mornings. Still, he might ever so gently touch my royal fingers as they lay on the solid gold coverlet. And that’s exactly what he did do! He reached down and touched my fingers—only it wasn’t my fingers it was my bare toes. More than that, he pinched. Good night! Didn’t the dumb-bell know any better than to pinch the king’s toes? I’d fix him for this. I’d have his head cut off. And now what was he doing? Why was he stooping over? Was he going to bite my toe? Well, of all things! I could see his white teeth ... and then, as he took hold, I could feel his teeth.

I woke up to find Poppy shaking me.

“For the love of mud, kid! Why don’t you kick the house down.”

“The Grand Vizier bit my toe,” I yipped.

“The Grand Vizier! You’ve been dreaming.”

“But my toe hurts. Something did bite it.”

“Urk! Urk!” says a familiar throaty voice beside the bed. “Urk! Urk!”

The spotted gander! It was in the room. Some one had mysteriously brought it into the house while we were asleep. And wanting to wake us up, or so it seemed, it had pecked at the first hunk of flesh that it had seen hanging out of the bed, which happened to be one of my bare feet.

Poppy got up then and lit the lamp.

“You better get up, too,” says he in a queer voice. “For there’s no telling what’s liable to happen next in this house.”