Poppy Ott and the galloping snail

Are you all tangled up in the mystery now? Having read this far, is the cart, in your jumbled mind, pulling the horse? Or, having carefully chewed up and digested Poppy’s wild theory, together with the mess of stuff that led up to that theory, do you have similar fixed ideas about the millionaire’s death, to start with, and all the other more or less hitched-together things, including the granddaughter’s disappearance and the spotted gander?

What stumped Poppy and I right now was the sort of contradictory side of the crazy tangle. There was old Ivory Dome. Having surprised him in the kitchen, very “ghostlike” indeed in his long white nightshirt, we had jumped to the natural conclusion that he was back of all the “spooky” stuff that was going on in the house. But now we knew differently. The old man wasn’t the “ghost,” as we had suspected. He had secrets, of course. And maybe he knew who the “ghost” was. But it was plain to be seen, from what had just happened in the barn, that the two men weren’t pulling together in the same harness. For if they had been, one wouldn’t have knocked the other cuckoo.

No, whatever peril there was coiled up, serpent-like, inside of the queer house, and on its doorsteps, the old man, instead of being safe in his secrets, had as much to dodge as either of us. And, as I have written down in the tail end of the preceding chapter, it was our scheme to use this as a sort of crowbar to pry him out of his hole. We had a good excuse now to get after him, roughshod, if necessary, and make him tell what he knew. And remembering how he was tricking his wife with his pretended dumbness, largely to his own lazy comfort, we didn’t care a whangdoodle whether, like Mrs. Goliath, she cleaned up on him with a rolling pin or not. She couldn’t give him anything that he didn’t deserve.

Yet, until we had the true story, it was interesting to sort of speculate, detective-like, on his motives and hidden actions. There was his trip to Pardyville. Having been sent to town to get the expected granddaughter, he had come home, hours late, with a strange spotted gander, now the very center of the crazy tangle. Meeting the granddaughter, had she put him wise to the fact that there was a bigger hunk of peril in the queer house than either he or his wife had suspected? After his talk with her, did he know why the death-chamber door slammed every night at ten o’clock, and what made it slam? And was it due to a scheme of hers that he had lugged home the spotted gander? Had she given him the gander, in completing her plans to “disappear,” or had she told him where to get it, and why he should get it—further, why he should do all these things and keep his mouth shut, both on her secrets, as she had handed them over to him, and on her hiding place?

It was Poppy’s notion that Dr. Madden, in planning a sort of exposure, had sent for the girl, as her friend. So old Ivory Dome, in meeting the granddaughter at the depot, could very well have talked over certain plans with the returned doctor, too—might even have gotten the gander from the other man, in fact. If so, was it a sort of royal gander, or something like that? And having been brought to America by the doctor, was it considered a big feature in the hidden scheme that its owner was secretly working on?—a scheme, of course, in which old Ivory Dome, like the granddaughter, was playing an important part.

Good night! I’d be thinking next, was the way in which I checked up on my crazy thoughts, that the peculiar gander actually had something to do with the millionaire’s sudden death!

Getting back to more sensible stuff, I followed old Ivory Dome in my mind, from the time he had arrived with the gander until his sort of fatal trip to the barn. I couldn’t recall that he had made any fuss over the gander. And that sort of contradicted the theory that he had been told to bring it home, as important, and take care of it. If anything, he had sort of neglected it. Queer. One thing didn’t jibe with the other at all. And least of all could I figure out why the gander had been turned over to the old man if either the granddaughter or the doctor wanted to be sure of it.

In further spotting the dumb-acting one in the tangle, we had it on him that he had done two distinctly mysterious things since his return from Pardyville, not including the little side trip that had kept him on the road until ten-thirty: That same night he had slipped out of bed to unlock the kitchen door, craftily letting on, when caught by his awakened wife, that he was “sleepwalking.” And to-night he had repeated the stunt, getting as far away from his bed as the barn. Was he doing this midnight shirt-tail stuff at the granddaughter’s orders? If so, what was the big idea? Why did he have to wait until his wife was asleep to go to the barn? And what was there out back to draw him, in the first place? The gander probably. But why all the midnight secrecy? Further, had he been trying to get out of the house, to go to the barn, where the gander was, when I had seen him in the kitchen? Very likely. But the locked door had stopped him. And the reason why he had growled under his breath, when he heard his wife, was because he knew that all chances of doing any secret stuff that night were gone.

But to-night he had pulled the trick to his satisfaction. His wife sound asleep, he had crept out of the bedroom, very well pleased, no doubt, to find that the kitchen door was already unlocked for him. And that he couldn’t have suspected that anybody else was in the barn ahead of him, least of all a hidden enemy, was shown by his open actions. The first man had sort of crept into the barn. On tiptoes. But old Ivory Dome had stepped in as bold as brass. Then had come the scream ... and to me this was the most dizzy part of all. For it wasn’t the old man who had screamed. No. He had been struck on the head, as we know, but it was the other man who had done the screaming. Yet, if you can figure out any sensible reason why the man with the drug-store smell should scream, womanlike, as though he was scared out of his wits, you’re a heap smarter than me.

And now the gander was gone. The man had it, of course. But if he had come to the barn purposely to get it, why had he hung around so long in the dark? Could it be that he had hid there, as an enemy, to get a secret crack at the other man? It would seem so. But how could he have known that at midnight old Ivory Dome would put on the usual shirt-tail parade stuff? And, to repeat, having done the intended biffing act, why had he screamed, and not the biffed man, himself?

You can see how puzzling it was for us. Whatever theory we dug out of our minds, there was something to contradict it. But of this we were dead sure: Some one, as mysterious in his hidden movements as any real ghost could have been, was secretly working in and around the big house. Yet even there we met with contradiction. For if the hidden man really had wanted the gander, as his trip to the barn suggested, why hadn’t he kept it when he had it earlier in the evening, instead of putting it in our room? And knowing that we were in the barn, why had he risked capture by tagging us there? Again, if he was so dead eager to put a dent in old Ivory Dome’s thick skull, why hadn’t he taken the easier and surer course of biffing the marked man while he was asleep?

It was Poppy’s further theory that the gander had been put in our room to get us away, so that the desk could be secretly cleaned out. And there again was more contradiction. For if the hidden man had wanted to work at the desk, why had he followed us to the barn? Still, was our conclusion, it probably hadn’t taken him many minutes to pry open the desk—only we learned, on getting up, that a key had been used to open the desk and not a jimmy.

And what had been taken out of the desk? Money? We had talked excitedly of thousand-dollar bills. But we really didn’t know that there was any money in the locked desk. And now that I gave the matter more thought, realizing how the house had been closed and thus left at the mercy of tramps, I began to lose faith in the “money” idea. No, instead of money, it was secret papers that the man was after. And so as not to overlook the particular paper that he wanted, he had taken everything. But how queer, was my thought here, that he had waited until the last night before the reading of the will to clean out the desk! To believe Mrs. Doane’s story of slamming doors and mysterious footfalls, the “ghost” of the big house had been secretly at work for more than a week. Why then had he waited until to-night to rob the dead man’s desk? A spy of Lawyer Chew’s, if that theory still held, had he been given orders at the last minute to grab everything in sight?

If only we could have known all this truck ahead of time! Then, on spotting the spy in the storm, we could have made sure about his capture, even to going after him in a desperate way. And to that point, with the house open to him, why had he stayed outside in the wind and rain? That, too, was puzzling.

There now! If that doesn’t completely tangle you up, I guess you had better go into the detective business yourself. But clever as you are, don’t be too blamed sure of yourself! For a whale of a surprise may jump out at you in the tail end.

As I say, Poppy and I had no intention of going to sleep. But when a boy is completely fagged out, he drops off in spite of himself. And that’s the way it was with us, though we did a lot of talking back and forth, as I have just written down in my own way, before sleep got the best of us. Nor did we wake up to find our heads in one corner of the big room and our arms and legs in another, or Goliath’s, either. In her own room further down the hall, Ma was bustling around, talking a blue streak, as usual, so we knew that everything was all right over there—only we were to learn at breakfast time that the injured shirt-tail parader, on top of being light-headed, had itchy spots all over his back.

But Ma wasn’t as much upset over the old man’s new itchiness, and the disturbing truck that had come ahead of it, as you might imagine. This was a big day for the little old lady. Soon now she would know, in the reading of the will, how the dead man’s property was going to be dished out. And, bu-lieve me, she wasn’t bashful about speaking up for herself!

“One time,” she told us, as she twiddled the bacon and eggs in the frying pan, “Mr. Danver promised me the red-plush settee in the hall. For, as I hinted to him at Aunt Samantha’s funeral, it was a perfect match for the parlor suit that the other relative left to me—only this one piece, I dare say, cost twice as much as all five of Aunt Samantha’s pieces put together. So I hope he didn’t forget about the settee when he was making out his will. If only I was sure, I’d have you boys crate it this morning. Still, I better wait. For I may get a lot more things than I figure on.”

Having washed ourselves, Poppy and I skinned up the back stairs, while we were waiting for breakfast, to see what we could pump out of the old man.

“Good morning, Mr. Doane,” says the leader, when we were beside the sick bed. “Feeling better to-day?”

The squirming invalid looked at us with eyes that didn’t seem to see us.

“Heh?” he fumbled vacantly, moving over in bed so that he could scratch his itchy back on a corner of the headboard.

“How’s your head?” says Poppy.

“Heh?” with more back scratching.

“Ah!... Come out of it. We know you aren’t as dumb as you let on.”

“Heh?” as the itchy one tried the other corner of the headboard for a change.

“Tell him to put on a new record,” I grinned.

“Did you know,” Poppy then tried to catch the old man by surprise, “that Miss Ruth is downstairs?”

But the only answer that we got was a dumb and itchy “Heh?” So we gave it up. For you can’t squeeze water out of a sponge when the sponge is petrified.

“Say, Mrs. Doane,” says Poppy, during breakfast, “do you have a key to the desk in the room where we slept last night?”

“What! Me have a key to the desk where Corbin Danver kept his private papers? Laws-a-me, no! Why do you ask that?” Then, in sudden stiff suspicion: “Have you boys been snooping in that desk?”

“No,” says Poppy truthfully. Then he asked further. “Who has the key?—Lawyer Chew?”

“Outside of what keys you see here in the doors, the rest, from all over the house, were sent to Miss Ruth by registered mail.”

“Who mailed the keys to her?—Lawyer Chew?”

“No, Dr. Madden.”

“Maybe he kept out one or two.”

“I can’t say that he didn’t, but I don’t believe it. For he was too loyal a friend of my dead relative’s to fail, in the smallest way, to carry out the dying man’s final wishes.”

“Then you think Miss Ruth has the desk key?”

“She sent me a few keys, when she wrote and asked me to come here and open up the house for her. I imagine she has all the rest, the desk key included.”

“Can you think of any reason,” Poppy then sprung the question, “why she should send some one here, with the key, to rob the desk just before her grandfather’s will was read?”

Staring, the woman started to say something, to better get the leader’s meaning, I imagine. Then, on a call from above, she dropped her breakfast and flew up the stairs to the sick room, where the unlucky invalid, in trying to doctor his itchy back, had gotten the ammonia bottle by mistake. From the way he was yipping and dancing around, his back was the next thing to being on fire, I guess.

Dr. Madden was called at nine o’clock, for the sick man was in bad shape now, and when Poppy and I learned that the family doctor was already on his way to the big house, having left his own home before eight o’clock, we had the jumpy feeling that something big was getting ready to drop.

While we were waiting, eager-like, for the doctor to drive in, the leader and I went to the barn. The gander was gone, all right. There was no doubt about that. In looking around for possible clews, we discovered a small room, without windows, that seemed to be a sort of storage place for empty bottles, the most of which were of the same size and shape.

“Phew!” gagged Poppy, pulling a cork. “Smells like rotten eggs.”

Getting a whiff, I quickly took down several bottles, smelling of them one after another, convinced now that we were getting closer to a solution of the mystery. For here was the same smell that had come to me through the bunghole!—and probably the same smell that Mrs. Doane had noticed in the house, and on the dead man!

Poppy was excited when I told him. Then, in further quick detective work, we made the most amazing discovery of all.

Shoved into a dark corner of the room was a corrugated-paper box filled with bottles that hadn’t been opened. There appeared to be a dozen of the bottles, all packed carefully in excelsior. The liquid, we saw, taking a bottle into the light, was red, like blood. But what excited us, more than the discovery of the filled bottles, was the name on the box cover. Here it is:

Dr. A. J. Neddam,
Sandy Ridge,
Illinois.

Do you catch on! NEDDAM was MADDEN turned around. And more, there was a shipping date marked on the box which showed that the package had been taken out of the express office and brought here in June ... not the June before the millionaire had died so suddenly, but the last June on the calendar.

How could Dr. Madden, in ordering the medicine under a hidden name, and to probably secret purposes, have brought it here when he was in Europe? The answer was, of course, that he hadn’t been in Europe at all! And with his own Neponset Corners home closed, it was as plain as the nose on our face—or should I say noses?—that he had been secretly living here.

So he was the “ghost!”