Poppy Ott and the galloping snail

Admiral Pepper! That was some fancy handle, I thought, for a gander. But I saw right off that it was no ordinary gander. So the name was all right.

White, like most ganders, though peculiarly marked with small purple spots, it was the biggest fowl of its kind that I ever had seen. Standing on its webbed feet, which reminded me of a pair of palm-leaf fans, its tonneau, as we used to call the rear end of an automobile, sort of dragged behind like an overloaded dump cart. Of course, like all big geese, it waddled when it walked. Yet it had dignity in its waddle. A fat king, you know, would waddle much more becomingly than a fat junk peddler! There was further dignity in the way it held its big head—carriage, I guess you’d call it. It seemed to have no fear of us. To the contrary, in its lordly possession of the house, it sort of acted as though we ought to consider ourselves lucky that we weren’t boosted outside along with the other unimportant rubbish!

I’ve seen people act like that. Stuck-ups. They sort of strut around as though they’re the whole cheese, smell and all. The other human beings in the landscape aren’t even presentable scenery. So my conclusion was that Admiral Pepper, as the saying is, belonged to the aristocracy—the gander-land aristocracy, if you please!

Unlike the ordinary barnyard variety of geese, this one didn’t honk its horn at us, nor did it do any long-necked hissing stuff. Its dignity was too strong. And to that point, having already mentioned a king, can you imagine a ruler, on his grand entrance into the official throne room, yipping to his subjects to stand back and not get any shoe blacking on his long velvet train! Hardly! You see what I mean, I guess.

One time we had a rather strange adventure with a performing hen. I told about that in detail in another book, JERRY TODD AND THE WALTZING HEN. Now I wondered if the gander, like Isadora, the waltzing hen, hadn’t been brought up for the most part, and to a purpose, in a circus. Plainly, it was a pet. It showed in its actions that it was used to living with people instead of birds of its kind. Moreover, it expected special attention, which further went to prove that whoever had owned it had been in the habit of making a big fuss over it. Could it do circus tricks? I wondered.

Recalling Isadora, the thought then jumped into my head that it would be wise for us, if the granddaughter didn’t show up, to inquire in Pardyville if an animal show had stopped there recently. If so, that would sort of explain the old man’s possession of the unusual bird. To some crazy purpose it could have followed him out of the show tent, or, to his discredit, he could have stolen it. Certainly, familiar as he was with its name, he must know where it came from. He had the stuff in his head to tell us. The trouble was his memory was like a locked door—he couldn’t open it until he found the key.

Well, to pick up my story, we shut the kitchen door, convinced now that the wind had opened it. It was queer, of course, that the latch had slipped just when the gander wanted to come in. But that was nothing. Very probably the visitor, hearing us inside, had been waiting at the door for some time, hoping for a chance to get in. And wise to the growing wind and darkened moon, which meant a summer storm, it had done its tap! ... tap! ... tap! ... stuff, to get shelter, just when the wind was strong enough to spring the loose latch.

Taking a sort of shine to the unusual gander, with all of its stuck-up ways, Poppy and I would have made it comfortable for the night in the kitchen, if we had been boss. But the thought of keeping a gander in the house, even though it was an unusual gander, and probably house broken, was too much for Mrs. Doane. You should have heard her explode when we suggested it!

“Laws-a-me!” she stiffly turned us down, getting a broom to drive the intruder away. “Why don’t you think next of turning the house into a pigsty? If you’re so deeply concerned over the gander’s comfort, there’s a barn out back. Certainly, it isn’t going to roost here. Imagine what Corbin Danver would say, could he speak from the grave, to have his kitchen turned into a gander roost. Just imagine!”

The moon was gone now, as I say. The sky was black with tumbling storm clouds. And on the way to the barn, where we fastened the gander in for the night, Poppy and I used a flashlight. What a quick change, I thought, from early evening. The moon had been full of light then. Now the whole world was smothered under a heavy black blanket.

I don’t mind summer storms as a rule. The lightning never scares me. For I have a sort of feeling that God makes the lightning. And certainly, with me taking up the Sunday-school collection week after week, and never hooking a penny, but cheerfully giving instead, He wouldn’t want to jab the deadly lightning at me. That wouldn’t be right. When you’re good you expect to be used good. No, even if the lightning is close by, I have a sort of steady confidence that no harm will come to me. The thunder, of course, makes a fellow jump, especially if he’s half asleep. But a few jumps more or less isn’t anything. As for the rain, I love to hear it—when I’m in bed, I mean. Some rainy nights when it isn’t too hot I sleep in the attic, just to hear the patter! patter! on the roof. Music like that brings out all the peace that there is inside of a fellow, I want to tell you.

But to-night I seemed sort of unprotected in the growing storm. I felt as though certain black scheming things that God’s moonlight had kept away were creeping in to an evil purpose. Couple up a slashing, pounding storm with this mysterious house, I thought, and there was no telling what wasn’t liable to happen.

Returning to the house, after taking care of the gander, we heard Mrs. Doane putting her thick-headed husband to bed on the second floor. Earlier in the evening she had pointed out a room for us—though not the room that Poppy had hoped for!—and as it was long past our own bedtime, as well as the old man’s, we locked the lower doors and lighted our way up the back staircase with a small hand lamp.

Outside, the wind was swishing around the corners of the house to beat the cars. And a giant, or so it seemed to me in crazy fancy, was slinging sand at the windows by the scoop full. Boy, was I ever glad now that I was inside, and not out there!

Pretty soon the rain came. Not an ordinary rain, but a sort of mixed up cyclone and cloudburst. It was some storm, let me tell you. I never hope to see a worse one. Looking down on the yard, in the lightning flashes, I could see a big lake. The sand had turned into water.

“Well,” grinned Poppy, as he slid out of his clothes, “I wonder what the program is for to-night.”

He was thinking about the ghost, of course.

“Maybe we ought to take turns staying awake,” says I.

“Nix. We want the ghost to come. And it won’t come if we aren’t asleep.”

“Just back up,” I fired at him, fishing my nightie out of the little bag that held my truck—an extra shirt, tooth brush, and things like that—“if you think that little sugar plum is going to let old spooky foot catch him asleep.”

“The ghost isn’t going to catch us—we’re going to catch it.”

“‘It’ or ‘him,’ which?”

“It’s a ‘him,’ all right.... I wonder who it is.”

Bang! went a bucket of water against the window.

“Some storm!” I cried.

“A queer smell,” mused Poppy, recalling the housekeeper’s story, “footsteps in the dead of night, windows creaking in their slides.” Then he laughed. “I hope that the spook, whoever he is, puts on the whole show to-night.”

“Lock the door,” says I, “and push the dresser in front of it.”

“Cuckoo! We’d stand a fine chance of catching the ghost if we locked ourselves in. Do you suppose he’s going to smash the house down to get at us?”

“Then we aren’t going to lock the door?”

“Absolutely not.”

“That being the case,” I grinned, making a dive for the bed, “I know who’s going to sleep next to the wall.”

Settled cozily in bed, Poppy then began at the beginning of the mystery, as we understood it, and went over it step by step, the better, I guess, to sort of figure out what was liable to happen to us if we took a notion to work on it!

And listening, I became sort of fascinated. I thought of other mysteries that we had solved—the talking frog, the rose-colored cat, the Oak-Island treasure, the whispering mummy, the stuttering parrot. What a wonderful chance this was, I told myself, all worked up, for a clever little Juvenile Jupiter Detective to show his stuff.

First of all, in Poppy’s check-up, came the strange house itself. Why had it been built here? Or, to put the question another way, what had been Mr. Danver’s hidden purpose in building it here—a fifty-thousand-dollar mansion on a ten-cent farm? Was it to be alone? Possibly. Then in his lifetime he must have been a sort of recluse. It isn’t hard for a recluse to get kind of queer in his head, so we could safely conclude that the dead house owner had been queer. Therefore he was subject to doing queer things—could even have planned things to happen to a queer purpose after his death.

All right. That was that.

To go further, there had been a son, Harold Danver, of whom we knew very little except that he had quarreled with his father, nor had the quarrel been patched up at the time of the younger one’s death. Married to a woman who was “much too big for her shoes,” to use the housekeeper’s words, the son had left a daughter named Ruth, or, as the housekeeper had respectfully expressed it, “Miss Ruth.” The daughter-in-law with the big feet had kept up the family quarrel, even telling the granddaughter that she couldn’t go to the funeral when the head of the house died. At the death, which had been sudden—and this hinted at mystery!—all of the relatives had flocked in, of whom none were more hopeful of getting a handful than “Ma” and “Pa.” Disappointment!—the will wasn’t to be read for a year. On this occasion “Ma” had gone snooping, to the awful discovery that the casket had a “queer” smell—a drug-store smell. Evidently after the funeral the house had been closed up and the keys sent to the granddaughter. Since then the better part of a year had passed. And now, when it was almost time to open and read the will, the granddaughter had made mysterious plans to have the house opened for her. She was to come quietly and secretly on the seventh of the month, which was two days before the time set for the reading of the will. Coming to the house at the granddaughter’s secret request, “Ma” and “Pa” had found “queer smells,” slamming doors, creaking windows, and the like.

We spread out the dope like this:

Well, as I say, with the door wide open and so much “ghost” talk in my head, I had no idea of going to sleep. It didn’t seem possible to me that I could drop off. Yet I did. And so did Poppy.

Suddenly I was lifted ten feet into the air by an old gee-whacker of a thunderclap. And when I came down to earth again, and realized where I was, maybe you think I didn’t do some quick neck-stretching to see if there was anything white in the room with us. But we were safe.

Boy, was it ever pouring outside! I got up and went to the window. I don’t know—maybe, half awake and half asleep as I was, I expected to see the bushes floating around. Or even the barn.

A hundred electric generators were sending out lightning flashes. One after another. So it was easy for me, and for Poppy, too, who stood beside me, to see the flooded world below.

Suddenly the other caught his breath. He had seen something!

“Jerry!” he pointed. “Look down there by that big bush. No, more to the right. What do you see?”

“A man,” I breathed.

The leader then began to jerk on his clothes. And I knew without being told that he was going out in the storm to learn, if possible, who the spy was.

That’s old Poppy for you! Every time! And do I ever love that kid for his wonderful grit. He’s one pal in a million.