Poppy Ott and the galloping snail

In putting the gander in our room, was it the “ghost’s” scheme to sort of show us how helpless we were in the big spooky house? Not liking the way we were messing around in his secret affairs, and finding out things, as to-night, was he trying to scare us out?

Thoughts like these soon dried up our shivers. For we knew, all right, who the “ghost” was. Yet it puzzled us to understand how the old man could do so much “mystery” stuff without his wife catching on. She must be an awfully sound sleeper, we concluded.

As an excuse for getting old Goliath up, we told him that some one was in the house. But I don’t think he understood half what we were saying to him. He was too sleepy. Then we went into the hall, where we met Ma on her way to the kitchen with an empty hot-water bottle. She probably didn’t mind parading around in front of us boys in her nightgown, but I took it from her actions that it kind of embarrassed her to put on the show in front of old Goliath.

“Oh, dear!” she cried, glad, I guess, that we were there to listen to her further troubles. “I don’t know but what one of you boys had better run downstairs and telephone for the doctor. For I’m having the awfullest time with poor Pa. It’s that tobacco smoke. He’s sick to his stomach.”

Some more of the old man’s trickery, was our natural thought.

“When was he taken sick?” inquired Poppy. “After he got up?”

“After he got up? Laws-a-me! I can’t get him up. That’s the trouble. I tell him he’ll feel better if he goes outside for a spell. But, no, he won’t listen to me.”

“And hasn’t he been out of bed at all?” pressed Poppy, in a queer voice.

“No. He just lays there and groans. Nor has he let up a single instant since I went to bed with him.”

“Well, I’ll be jiggered!” cried the tangled leader, looking at me.

At Ma’s orders we lit the kitchen stove and warmed some water, which she poured into the rubber bottle. With this on his stomach, the sufferer gradually quieted down. Nor could we make ourselves believe, as we stood over him, that his sickness was put on. There was real misery in his voice. And his wrinkled face was a sort of yellowish-white, like old piano keys. Such a look couldn’t have been manufactured for the occasion. We knew that.

Poppy and I were sort of up a tree, as the saying is. Pa’s stomach ache had upset the whole works for us. If the old man had been in his room all evening, as his wife said, then some one else had been secretly in the house. For certainly the gander couldn’t of itself have opened and closed doors. No, it had been brought here. We couldn’t doubt that for a single moment. And sort of putting Pa out of the tangle for the present, and suspecting the spy, we began to wonder, in growing uneasiness, if, after all, there hadn’t been more deep purpose back of the crazy stunt than we had first imagined.

“What beats me,” says the leader, as we earnestly talked the matter over, “is the easy way the spy slips in and out of the house. Locked doors are the same to him as open doors. And he seems to be wise to every little move we make. For instance, if his work is all on the outside, as we suspected last night, how could he have known that we were sleeping in the dead man’s room?”

“It sure is some tangle,” I waggled.

“I’ll tell the world. And you,” he pointed at the gander, “are the biggest tangle of all.”

“Urk! Urk!” came throatily.

“Wa-al, I swan!” old Goliath came out of a nap. “Where did that beast come from?”

“It belongs in the barn,” says Poppy. “And if you can manage to keep awake for a few minutes longer, to help us take it back, we’ll reward you with a beautiful celluloid stove poker.”

I had a lot of new stuff in my head as I followed the others to the barn. As the leader had said, no part of the tangle was any queerer than the gander itself. It had been brought to the big house for a secret purpose, and furthermore it had been carried to our room for a purpose. But was this really an act of the enemy, as we had suspected? To take the view that the unusual gander was a sort of mouthpiece of the crazy mystery, wasn’t it possible that some one, more completely hidden to our eyes than the spy, and more helpless than we suspected, was trying, in a sort of blind, stumbling way, to lead us into a solution of the mystery through the almost human-acting bird itself? And if we kept a close eye on the gander, in the barn, wouldn’t we be likely to soon find out who the hidden one was?

This thought was new to both of us. And Poppy jumped at it when I sprung it on him. Here was our scheme now: We’d lay low in the barn, close to the gander, and then, at the least suspicious sound from the spotted fowl, we’d flash our light. In that way neither friend nor enemy could come into the barn to get the gander for further secret stuff without us seeing him and thus learning who he was. More than that, we had a clever little trapping scheme, as you will learn.

There was a barrel here, and a clothesline. And how easy it would be, we planned, for one of us to hide in the barrel and do a trick with the rope through the bunghole. We worked out all of the details. Then the leader and I drew cuts to see who would have the bunghole job, for the barrel was seven sizes too small for old Goliath. Anyway, we couldn’t have trusted him alone. He was too much of a sleepy-head.

I got the short straw. That made me “it.” But I didn’t get into the barrel. To sort of make it safer for me, I scrooched and let Poppy put the barrel over me, which gave me a neat roof. Then he tied the rope across the doorway and threaded the loose end into the bunghole.

“Now, don’t forget, Jerry. You’re to let the rope lay flat. I’ll be in the haymow with the flashlight. And if I hear any queer sounds down here, on goes the light. See? I’ll yell if I see anybody beating it for the door. Then you yank on the rope for dear life.”

“And mister geezer gets tripped up, huh?”

“That’s the dope.”

“But suppose he’s a friend, as I say.”

“Well, we aren’t going to kill him. And I have a hunch that if we don’t stop him this way he’ll skin out as quickly as an enemy. For he’s trying to keep in the dark. So do your stuff with the rope. And old Goliath and I will be on top of him before he quits spinning.”

The giant grumbled sleepily as he followed the leader up the ladder into the haymow. Such monkey-work, he said, just to keep a gander from being stolen. If it was such a precious gander, why didn’t we take it to bed with us? What was the sense of losing all this sleep for nothing?

But pretty soon the grumbling voice died away. And how very quiet the barn was now! Like a tomb. Yet there was plenty of racket where I was, for the barrel acted like a sounding board for my galloping heart. THUMP! THUMP! THUMP! That’s the way it sounded in my ears. Not that I was scared, though. I just didn’t like being alone.

Squatting under a barrel isn’t the most comfortable job in the world, let me tell you. I soon found that out. My bones began to ache. Nor did squirming around help very much. I thought of Poppy, stretched out on the haymow floor with his face in the ladder hole. How comfortable for him! Somehow I always did manage to get the unluckiest jobs.

What was that? A floor board had creaked. As though some one had gently put his weight on it. There! A footfall. No doubt of it. More footfalls. Each as easy and as guarded-like as you please.

Then deep silence. The deadliest and awfullest silence I ever had known. What was the matter with Poppy? Why didn’t he flash the light? Had he and old Goliath both gone to sleep? It would seem so.

The gander hadn’t made a peep. So I knew it was still on its roost. Why didn’t the man grab it, I thought. I wanted him to. Then maybe it would squawk loud enough to wake up the gallery. Poppy sure was a peach to go to sleep at a time like this. What I’d tell him.

Phew! Of all the funny smells. I got my nose closer to the bunghole. Some kind of a drug-store smell, I told myself.

The roof creaked over my head. And what do you know!—the man was sitting on top of my coop now. It was him I had smelt. Putting a finger through the bunghole, I found that I could touch his leg. But you can bet your Sunday shoes that I didn’t touch him very hard. I guess not.

Ma had told us about “queer smells” in the house. On the dead man, too. Was this the same smell, I wondered. One thing, I knew it wasn’t the dead man himself. For whoever was sitting on my barrel was a whole lot huskier in weight than a ghost. Besides, I had touched him. And you can’t touch a ghost.

More footfalls! And louder ones this time. Some one else had come into the barn. Oh, if Poppy would only flash the light! What was the matter with that kid, anyway?

The man with the drug-store smell wasn’t on the barrel now. He had slid down. And suddenly the barn was filled from top to bottom with the awfullest scream you can imagine. The scared-to-death kind of a scream. Boy, did my hair ever stand on end. Then I heard something else—a dull thump on the barn floor.

“Jerry!” yipped Poppy out of his bed in the moon. “Yank the rope—quick! The flashlight won’t work.”

Well, I yanked. I yanked good and plenty, let me tell you. But I guess I was too late. For nothing skidded into my rope. So, after a few seconds, I tipped the barrel over and got on my feet.

Poppy had seen me jiggle the crippled flashlight to make it work. And I could imagine that he was shaking it now to beat the cars. Pretty soon he got a connection. And did a light ever look so good to me as then. Oh, boy!

Scrambling down the ladder with the light in his hand, the leader looked to me to be all arms and legs. Farther up I could see old Goliath’s slow feet. The light made a round puddle on the floor. It had found something and stopped. Something white and long.

“It’s Mr. Doane,” cried the leader, bending over the body. “Some one knocked him out.”

Yes, sir, the long white thing on the barn floor was old Ivory Dome himself. He was in his nightshirt, exactly as I had seen him the night before in the kitchen. And his face was covered with blood. But he wasn’t dead, as I first thought.

It was old Goliath who discovered that the gander was missing. But just then neither Poppy nor I cared a whang whether the crazy bird had skinned out of the barn of its own accord or had been stolen. What we were thinking of instead was the old man.

Carrying him into the house, we washed the blood from his grizzled hair, as it fringed his bald spot. The forehead high up had been bruised, as though from a club swat. Doctoring the bruise as best we knew how, and putting a bandage on it, we helped the vacant-eyed one back to bed, where his wife, as we could see her through the open door, was snoozing as peacefully as an over-fed kitten.

But she was out of bed the instant her eyes opened.

“Why!... What’s happened to Pa? Has he had another accident?”

“Hadn’t you missed him, Mrs. Doane?”

“Laws-a-me! Do you think I would have been lying here if I had known that he wasn’t in bed with me? Has he been sleepwalking again?”

Poppy didn’t say anything. For that was better, he thought, than saying too much.

“I knew he’d fall and hurt himself,” the woman ran on, to her own idea of things. “Oh, dear! Such a man! Must I strap him in bed hereafter, as they do with simpletons?”

Neither the leader nor I had asked the old man any questions about his accident. Nor had he mumbled more than a word or two all the time we were carrying him around and doctoring him up. For the most part he just stared at us, as though his whole brain had been stunned. Maybe, we thought, realizing that this was a much worse accident than the first one, he wouldn’t have to pretend dumbness now. We hoped, though, that the morning would find him all right again. Then we’d question him, with Ma’s help. And certainly we ought to get something out of him. For he wouldn’t want to hang on to his secret if the rest of us were liable to get what he got.

As though the night hadn’t been exciting enough for us, still another surprise jumped at us when we got back to the big bedroom. The desk was open! And everything in it had been carried away.

A few rifled desks more or less meant nothing in the sleepy life of old Goliath, who already was snoozing in a heap on the floor. And after a few minutes, we, too, stretched out on the bed to get some rest. But we didn’t figure on going to sleep. After all the excitement it didn’t seem possible to us that we could. And to be ready in a jiffy, no matter what bobbed up, we kept our clothes on, even our shoes.