Agony and Oh-Pshaw, whom Nyoda had also invited to come over to the house party, were spending the holidays with an aunt in New York and could not come, much to Sahwah’s disappointment, who had not seen them since the summer before. Veronica was ill at her uncle’s home and also could not be with them.
Enthroned beside Katherine in a great carved armchair that had come over from England with the first Carvers, sat Sylvia Deane, looking very much like a story book princess. With their customary open-heartedness, the Winnebagos had already made her feel as though she were an old friend of theirs. The romantic way in which Katherine had found her appealed to their imaginations and added to their interest in her. Beside that, there was a fascinating something about her dark eyes and light hair that kept drawing their eyes to her face as though it were a magnet. There was so much animation in her voice when she talked that the most commonplace thing she said seemed extremely diverting. Her eyes had a way of suddenly lighting up as though a lamp had been kindled inside of her, and when she talked about other people her voice would take on a perfect mimicry of their intonations and expressions.
She showed not the slightest embarrassment at being thus transplanted into a strange household, so much more splendid than anything she was accustomed to. She was entirely at her ease in the great house, and acted as though she had been used to luxurious surroundings all her life. Katherine was secretly surprised to find her so completely unabashed. She herself was still prone to make ridiculous blunders in the presence of strangers, and was still ill at ease when anyone looked critically at her.
They were all surprised to learn that Sylvia was eighteen years old, instead of fourteen as they had all thought when they first saw her. Her slender, childlike form, and her short, curly hair made her look much younger than she really was.
The animated talk that had accompanied the first part of the dinner gradually died away, as a sense of repleteness and languor succeeded to eager appetites, and conversation had begun to lag, when Sahwah stirred it into life again by asking if there was not a secret passage in Carver House. A ripple of interest went around the table, and all the girls and boys began to sit up and take notice.
“Haven’t you had enough adventures yet to satisfy you?” asked Sherry quizzically. “Aren’t you content with fishing a lieutenant out of the Devil’s Punch Bowl the last time you were here, that you must begin again looking for excitement? By the way, where is this young Allison?”
“Still across,” replied Sahwah. “His last letter said he would be there for six months yet. He’s going on into Germany. He isn’t a lieutenant any more. He’s a captain.”
“Captain Allison?” asked Justice. “Captain Robert Allison? You don’t mean to say that you know Bob Allison?”
“Does she know Captain Allison!” echoed Hinpoha. “Who sent her that spiked helmet, and that piece of marble from Rheims Cathedral and that French flag with the bullet holes in it, to say nothing of that package of French chocolates? But, of course, you didn’t know,” she added, remembering that Justice had only met Sahwah the day before.
“Do you know Captain Allison?” asked Sahwah.
“Best friend I had in college,” replied Justice. “He was dreaming of flying machines then. Bob Allison, the fellow you pulled out of the water! It seems that all my friends, as well as my family, are going to get mixed up with you girls. It seems like fate.”
“Wherever the Winnebagos come there’s sure to be something doing,” said the captain. “I wonder what the next thing will be. What’s this about secret passages now?”
“With so much paneling,” continued Sahwah, “it seems as if there must be a hollow panel somewhere that would slide back and reveal a passage behind it. Isn’t there one, Nyoda?”
“There may be one, for all I know,” replied Nyoda, “but I have never found it if there is. I have never looked for any such thing. It takes all my time,” she proclaimed with a comic-tragic air, “to keep all the open passages in this place clean, without looking for any more behind panels.”
“Do you care if we try to find one?” asked Sahwah eagerly. “I just feel it in my bones that there is one somewhere.”
“Search all you like,” replied Nyoda, with an amused laugh.
“O goody!” exclaimed Sahwah. “Let’s begin right away.”
She rose from the table and the rest followed, much taken up with this new quest, and the search began immediately. Upstairs and downstairs they tapped, peered, pried and investigated, but without success. One by one they abandoned the quest and drifted into the library where Nyoda and Sherry and Sylvia sat in a close group before the fire; Sherry smoking, Nyoda reading aloud, and Sylvia watching the images in the fire. Sahwah and the captain were the last to give up, but finally they, too, drifted in and joined the ranks of the unsuccessful hunters.
Nyoda paused in her reading and looked up with a smile as Sahwah and the captain came in.
“What have you to report, my darling scouts?” she asked gravely.
“Nothing,” replied the captain, rather sheepishly.
Sahwah rubbed her fingers tenderly. “There are miles of oak paneling in this house,” she remarked wearily, “and I’ve rapped on every inch of it with my knuckles, until they’re just pulp, but not one of those panels sounded hollow.”
“Poor child!” said Nyoda sympathetically.
“You should have done the way the captain did,” said Slim. “He used his head to knock with instead of his knuckles; it’s harder.”
A scuffle seemed imminent, and was only averted by Sahwah’s next remark. “Nyoda,” she asked, “where does that door at the head of the stairs lead to, the one that is locked? It was locked last summer when we were here, too.”
“That,” replied Nyoda, “is the room Uncle Jasper used as his study. I’ve been using it as a sort of store room for furniture. There were a number of pieces in the house that didn’t quite fit in with the rest of the furniture and I set them in there until I could make up my mind what to do with them. I didn’t want to dispose of them without consulting Sherry, and as he has been away from home ever since we have lived here until just now, we have never had time to go over the stuff together. As the room looks cluttered with those odd pieces in there I have kept it locked.”
“Your uncle’s study!” exclaimed Sahwah. “Oh, I wonder if there wouldn’t be a concealed door in there! It seems such a likely place. Would you care very much if we went and looked there?”
Nyoda laughed at Sahwah’s eagerness in her quest. “You’re a true Winnebago,” she said fondly. “Never leave a stone unturned when you’re looking for anything. I might as well say yes now as later, because I know you will never rest until you have investigated that room. You’re worse than Bluebeard’s wife. I have no objections to your going in if you’ll excuse the disorderly look of the place and the dust that has undoubtedly collected by this time. I’ll get you the key.”
With the prospect of a fresh field for investigation the others revived their interest in the search and followed Nyoda eagerly as she led the way upstairs and unlocked the closed door at the head. A faint, musty odor greeted their nostrils, the close atmosphere of a room which has been shut up, although the moonlight flooding the place through the long windows gave it an almost airy appearance. Nyoda found the electric light button and presently the room was brilliantly lighted from the chandelier. The Winnebagos trooped in and looked curiously about them at the queer old desks and tables and cabinets that stood about. Sahwah’s attention was immediately drawn to the window at the far end of the room. She knew it was a window because it was framed in a mahogany casement like the other windows in the house, but instead of a pane of glass there was a dark, opaque space inside the casement. Sahwah ran over to it at once, and a little exclamation of astonishment escaped her as she examined it. On the inside of the glass—if there was a pane of glass there—was a heavy black iron shutter fastened to the casement with great screws.
“What did you put up this shutter for, Nyoda?” asked Sahwah wonderingly.
The others all came crowding over then to exclaim over the iron shutter.
“I didn’t put it up,” replied Nyoda. “It was there when I came here.”
“But what’s it for?” persisted Sahwah. “Is the window behind it broken?”
“No, it doesn’t seem to be,” replied Nyoda. “I looked at it from the outside.”
“Then what can it be for?” repeated Sahwah.
“I don’t know, I can’t imagine,” replied Nyoda. A note of wonder was creeping into her voice. “To tell the truth,” she said, “I never thought anything about it. I noticed that there was an iron shutter over that window when we first came here, but I was too much taken up with Sherry’s going away then even to wonder about it. The room has been closed up ever since and I had forgotten all about it. It does seem a queer thing, now that you call my attention to it. But Uncle Jasper did so many eccentric things, I’m not surprised at anything he might have done. We’ll take the shutter off in the morning and see if we can discover any reason for having it there.
“Now, aren’t you going to hunt for the secret passage after I’ve opened the door for you?” she said quizzically. “There’s still an hour or so before bedtime; long enough for all of you to complete the destruction of your knuckles.”
Again the house resounded with the tapping of knuckles against hardwood paneling, until it sounded as though an army of giant woodpeckers were at work, but the eager searchers continued to bruise their long suffering knuckles in vain. The paneling in Uncle Jasper’s study was as solid as the Great Wall of China.
CHAPTER IV
AN INTERVIEW WITH HERCULES
Among the furniture stored in the study was one piece which Nyoda had pounced upon with an exclamation of joy the night before when she opened the room to please the Winnebagos. That was an invalid’s wheel chair.
“Just the thing for Sylvia!” she exclaimed delightedly. “She can get around the house by herself in this. It’s a good thing you got curious about this room, Sahwah dear; I’m afraid I wouldn’t have thought of opening it until spring. I remember now, Uncle Jasper had a paralytic stroke some months before he died which left him lame, and he went about in a wheel chair during his last days. This certainly comes in handy now.”
The morning after Sahwah had discovered the iron shutter Sylvia was set in the wheel chair and rolled into the study, and the rest came flocking up to watch Sherry and the boys remove the shutter. It was no easy job, taking that shutter off, for the screws had rusted in so that it was almost impossible to turn them. Nyoda gave an exclamation of dismay at the holes left in the mahogany casement. The Winnebagos were too much absorbed in the window which was revealed by the removal of the shutter to pay any attention to the damaged casement. Unlike the other windows in the room, which were of clear glass, this one was composed of tiny leaded panes in colors. It was so dirty on the outside that it was impossible to see what it really was like. Sahwah hastened out and got cleaning rags and washed it inside and out, standing on the roof of the side porch to get at it on the outside, because it did not open. When it was clean, and the bright sun shone through it, the beauty of the window struck them dumb.
The leaded panes were wrought into a design of climbing roses, growing over a little arched gateway, the rich red and green tints of the flowers and leaves glowing splendid in the mellow light that streamed through it.
After a moment of breathless silence the Winnebagos found their voices and broke into admiring cries. Hinpoha promptly went into raptures.
“Why, you can almost smell those roses, they’re so natural! Oh, the darling archway! Did you ever see anything so beautiful? Don’t you just long to go through it? O why did your uncle ever have that horrible old shutter put over it?”
“Maybe he was afraid it would get broken,” suggested Gladys.
“But why would he put the shutter on the inside?” asked Sahwah shrewdly. “There would be more danger of the window’s getting broken from the outside than from the inside, I should think.”
“There wouldn’t be with Slim around,” said the captain, and prudently barricaded himself behind a bookcase in the corner. Slim gave him a withering glance, but did not deign to follow him and open an attack. He could not have squeezed in behind the bookcase, so he ignored the thrust.
“I wonder why he didn’t put shutters on the other windows also,” said Katherine.
“Mercy, I’m glad he didn’t!” said Nyoda with a shiver, eyeing the ugly screw holes in the smooth mahogany casement with housewifely horror at such marring of beauty. “One set of holes like that is enough. Isn’t it just like a man, though, to put screws into that woodwork! It’s time a woman owned this house. A few more generations of eccentric bachelors and the place would be ruined.”
“But,” said Sahwah musingly, “didn’t you tell us once that this house was the pride of your uncle’s heart, and he never would let any children in for fear they would scratch the floors and furniture?”
“That’s so, too,” replied Nyoda. “Uncle Jasper was so fond of this house that it was a byword among the relations. He loved it as though it were his own child. How he ever allowed anyone to put screws into that mahogany casement is a mystery.”
“Don’t you think,” said Sahwah shrewdly, “that there must have been some great and important reason for putting up that shutter? A reason that made him forget all about the holes he was making in the woodwork?”
A little thrill went through the group; all at once they seemed to feel that they were standing in the shadow of some mystery.
“What kind of a man was your uncle Jasper?” asked Sahwah.
“He was a queer, silent man,” replied Nyoda, sitting down on the edge of a table and rubbing her forehead to aid her recollection. “He was an author—wrote historical works. I confess I don’t know a great deal about him. I only saw him twice; once when I was a very little girl and once a few years ago. He never corresponded with any of his relations and never visited them nor had them come to visit him. Most everybody was afraid of him; he was so grim and stern looking. He couldn’t have been very sociable here either, for none of the people of Oakwood seemed to have been in the habit of calling on him. None of those that called on me had ever been inside the house before. The old man didn’t mix with the neighbors, they said. He seldom went outside the house. No one seems to know much about him. Of course,” she added, “living up here on the hill he was sort of by himself; there are no near neighbors.”
“Maybe he put up that shutter for protection,” suggested Hinpoha.
“With all the other windows in the house unshuttered?” asked the captain derisively. “A lot of protection that would be! Besides, do you think the neighbors were in the habit of shooting pop guns at him?”
“Well, can you think of any other reason?” retorted Hinpoha.
“Why don’t you ask old Hercules?” suggested Sahwah. “He might know.”
“To be sure!” cried Nyoda, springing down from the table. “Why didn’t I think of Hercules before? Of course he’d know. He was with Uncle Jasper all his life. I’ll call him in and ask him and we’ll have the mystery cleared up in a jiffy. Will one of you boys go out and bring him in?”
The captain and Justice sprang up simultaneously in answer to her request and raced for the stable. In a few minutes they were back, bringing old Hercules with them. Hercules had a somewhat forlorn air about him like that of a dog without a master. Nyoda said he was grieving for Uncle Jasper; Sherry said it was the goat he was mourning for. At any rate, he was a pathetic figure as he hobbled painfully up the stairs one step at a time on his shaky, stiff old limbs. His eyes brightened a bit as he saw the door into Uncle Jasper’s study standing open, and he looked around the room with an affectionate gaze as the boys piloted him in. Nyoda saw his eyes rest on the window from which the shutter had been removed, and it seemed to her that he gave a start and gazed through the window apprehensively.
“Hercules,” said Nyoda briskly, “we’ve just taken this ugly old shutter off that stained glass window, and we’re curious to know why it was put up. It seems such a pity to have put those great screws into that mahogany casement. Why did Uncle Jasper put it up?”
Hercules scratched his head and shifted his corn cob pipe to the other side of his mouth. “Dat shutter’s bin up a good many years, Mis’ ’Lizbeth,” he quavered.
“I see it has, from the way the screws were rusted in,” replied Nyoda. “But why was it put up?”
“Dat shutter’s bin dere twenty-five years,” reiterated the old man solemnly, still looking at it in a half-fascinated, half-apprehensive way.
“Yes, yes,” said Nyoda, trying to control her impatience. “But why has it been there all this time? Why did Uncle Jasper put it up?”
Hercules scratched his head again, and replaced his pipe in its original position. “I disremember, Mis’ ’Lizbeth,” he said deprecatingly. “It’s bin so long since. My memry’s bin powerful bad lately, Mis’ ’Lizbeth. Seems like I caint remember hardly anything. It’s de mizry, Mis’ ’Lizbeth; it’s settled in my memry.” He carefully avoided her eyes.
“Please try to remember!” said Nyoda, trying hard to hold on to her patience, but morally certain that Hercules was trying to sidestep her questions. “Think, now. Twenty-five years ago Uncle Jasper put up an iron shutter to cover the most beautiful window in Carver House. Why did he do it?”
Nyoda turned so that she looked right into his face, and her compelling black eyes held his shifty gaze steady. There was something strangely magnetic about Nyoda’s eyes. People could avoid answering her questions as long as they did not look into her eyes, but once let her catch your gaze, and things she wanted to know had a habit of coming out of their own accord. Hercules seemed to be on the point of speaking; he cleared his throat nervously and shifted the pipe once more. Nyoda cast a triumphant glance at Sherry. In that instant Hercules shifted his gaze from her face and met another pair of eyes, eyes that seemed to look at him accusingly, and sent a chill running down his spine. These were none other than the eyes of Uncle Jasper, who, hanging in his frame on the study wall, seemed to be looking straight at him, in the way that eyes in pictures have. When Nyoda glanced back at Hercules he was staring uneasily at Uncle Jasper’s picture and there was a guilty look about him as if he had been caught in a misdemeanor.
“I ’clare, I cain’t remember nothin’ ’bout why dat shutter was put up, Mis’ ’Lizbeth,” he said earnestly. “Come to think on it now, Marse Jasper ain’t never told me why he want it put up,” he continued triumphantly. “He just say, ‘Herc’les, put up dat shutter,’ and he ain’t ever say why. I axed him, ‘Marse Jasper, what for you puttin’ up dat shutter over dat window?’ and he say, ‘Herc’les, you put up dat shutter and mind your business. I ain’t tellin’ why I wants it put up; I jest wants it put up, dat’s all.’ No’m, Mis’ ’Lizbeth, I’s often wondered myself about dat shutter, but I never found out nothin’.”
He glanced up at Uncle Jasper’s picture as though expecting some token of approval from the stern, grim face.
Nyoda saw it was no use trying to get anything out of Hercules. Either he really did not know anything, or he would not tell.
“You may go, Hercules,” she said. “That’s all we wanted of you.”
Hercules looked unaccountably relieved and started for the door. Half way across the room he turned and looked long through the clear panel of glass underneath the archway of the gate in the stained glass window. He stood still, seemingly lost in reverie, and quite oblivious to the group about him. Finally his lips began to move, and he began to mutter to himself, and Sahwah’s sharp ears caught the sound of the words.
“Dey’s tings,” muttered the old man, “dat folks don’t want ter look at, and dey’s tings dey dassent look at!”
Still lost in reverie he shuffled out of the room and hobbled painfully downstairs.
CHAPTER V
THE FIRST LINK
“What did old Hercules mean?” asked Sahwah in astonishment. “He said, ‘Dey’s some tings folks don’t want ter look at, and dey’s tings dey dassent look at!’”
“I can’t imagine,” said Nyoda, thoroughly mystified. “But there’s one thing sure, and that is, Uncle Jasper had some very potent reason for putting that shutter over that window, and I more than half believe Hercules knows what it was. Hercules’ explanations always become very fluent when he is not telling the truth. If he really hadn’t known anything about it he probably would have said so simply, in about three words, and without any hesitation. The elaborate details he went into to convince me that he knew nothing about it sounds suspicious to me.
“But I don’t believe the exclamation he made when he went out was intended to deceive me. I think it was the involuntary utterance of what was in his thoughts. He seemed to be thinking aloud, and was quite unconscious of our presence.
“But what a queer thing to say—‘Dey’s tings people dassent look at!’ I wonder what it was that Uncle Jasper dared not look at? Was it something he saw through this window? What is there to be seen out of this window, anyway?” She moved over in front of the window with the others crowding after her to see, too.
Uncle Jasper’s study was at the back of the house and the windows looked out upon the wide open meadow which stretched behind Carver Hill, between the town and the woods. The front of Carver House looked out over the town. Nearly half a mile to the east of Carver Hill another hill rose sharply from the town’s edge. Upon its top stood another old-fashioned dwelling. This hill, crowned with its red brick mansion, was framed in the arch of the gateway in the window like an artist’s picture, with nothing between to obstruct the view. A beautiful picture it was, certainly, and one which could not possibly have any connection with Hercules’ muttered words.
“Who lives in that house?” asked Sahwah.
“I don’t know,” said Nyoda. “It’s way up on the Main Street Hill. I’m not acquainted with the people in that end of town.”
Sherry got out his binoculars and took a look through the window. “Nothing but an old house on a hill,” he reported, and handed the binoculars to Sylvia, that she might take a look through them.
“Why,” said Sylvia after peering intently through the glasses for a minute, “it’s the house Aunt Aggie and I live in! What did that old house have to do with your Uncle Jasper?” she asked wondering. “It’s been empty for many, many years.”
“Oh, wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a romance in your Uncle Jasper’s life?” exclaimed Hinpoha eagerly. “A blighted romance. He never married, did he?”
“No, he never married,” replied Nyoda.
“Then I’m sure it’s a blighted romance!” said Hinpoha enthusiastically. “I just know that some deep tragedy darkened the sun of his life and left him shrouded in gloom forever after!”
Even Nyoda smiled at Hinpoha’s sentimental language, and the rest could not help laughing out loud.
“You sound like Lady Imogen, in ‘The Lost Heiress,’” said Katherine derisively.
“Well, I don’t care, you’ll have to admit that there are some very romantic possibilities, anyway,” said Hinpoha stoutly.
“Yes, and some very prosaic ones, too,” retorted Katherine. “Uncle Jasper probably never married because he was a born bachelor, and preferred to live alone.”
“O Katherine, why are you always taking the joy out of life?” wailed Hinpoha. “It’s lots more fun to think romantic things about people than dull, stupid, everyday things.”
“I think so too,” said Sahwah, unexpectedly coming to the defense of Hinpoha. “I’ve been thinking a lot about old Mr. Carver, living alone here all those years, and I’ve wondered if there wasn’t some reason for it. Certainly something happened that made him put that shutter up, that’s clear.”
“Well, whatever motive the old man may have had for putting it up, we’ll probably never find it out,” said Sherry, gathering up the screws and screwdriver, “inasmuch as he’s dead and it’s no use asking Hercules anything; so we might as well stop puzzling over it. I’ll hunt up something to fill in those screw holes with, Elizabeth, and polish them over.” Sherry, in his matter-of-fact way, had already dismissed the matter from his mind as not worth bothering over.
Not so Nyoda and the Winnebagos. The merest hint of a possible mystery connected with the shutter set them on fire with curiosity and desire to penetrate into its depths.
“I wonder,” said Nyoda musingly, eyeing the massive desk before her with a speculative glance, “if Uncle Jasper left any record of the repairs and improvements which he made to the house while he was the owner. The item of the shutter might be mentioned, with the reason for putting it up.”
“It might,” agreed the Winnebagos.
Nyoda looked around at the litter of odd pieces of furniture crowding the room. “Sherry,” she said briskly, “make up your mind this minute whether you want any of that old stuff, because I’m going to clear it out of here and sell it.”
“A lot of good it would do me to make up my mind to want any of it, if you’ve made up your mind to sell it,” said Sherry in a comically plaintive tone.
“All right,” responded Nyoda tranquilly, “I knew you didn’t want any of it. Boys, will you help Sherry carry out those two tables and that high desk and the chiffonier—all the oak furniture. I’m not keeping anything but the mahogany. Set it out in the hall; I’ll have the furniture man come and get it to-morrow.
“There, now the room looks as it did when Uncle Jasper inhabited it,” she remarked when the extra pieces had been cleared out.
“It certainly was a pleasant room; I don’t see how Uncle Jasper could have maintained such a gloomy disposition as he did, working all day in a room like this. The very sight of that open field out there makes me want to run and shout—and that window! Oh, who could look at it all day long and be crusty and sour?”
“But he had the shutter over the window,” Sahwah reminded her.
“Yes, he did, the poor man!” said Nyoda in a tone of pity. She whisked about the room, straightening out rugs and wiping the dust from the furniture, and soon announced that she was ready to begin investigations. She looked carefully through the desk first, through old account books and files of papers and bills, but came upon nothing that touched upon repairs made to the house. There was a long bookcase running the entire length of one wall, and she tackled this next, while the Winnebagos sat around expectantly and Sylvia looked on from her chair, which she could move herself from place to place, to her infinite delight.
The boys had gone downstairs with Sherry to hear reminiscences from “across.” All three boys worshipped Sherry like a god. To have been “across,” to have seen actual fighting, to have been cited for bravery, and finally to have been shipwrecked, were experiences for which the younger boys would have given their ears, and they treated Sherry with a deferential respect that actually embarrassed him at times.
Nyoda opened the bookcase and began taking out the books that crowded the shelves, opening them one by one and examining their contents. Most of them were works on history, some of them Uncle Jasper’s own; great solid looking volumes with fine print and dingy leather bindings. Ancient history, nearly all of them, and nowhere among them anything so modern as to concern Carver House.
“What a collection of dry-as-dust works to have for your most intimate reading matter!” exclaimed Nyoda, making a wry face at the books. “Not a single book of verse, not a single romance or book of fiction, not the ghost of a love story! There are plenty of them downstairs in the library, that belonged to Uncle Jasper’s father and mother, who must have had quite a lively taste in reading, judging from the books down there; but Hercules told me that Uncle Jasper hadn’t opened the cases down there for twenty-five years. He never read anything but this ancient stuff up here.
“He did write one book that had some life in it, though,” she continued musingly. “That was a story of the life of Elizabeth Carver, his great grandmother, the one whose portrait hangs downstairs over the harp in the drawing-room. He’s got all her various love affairs in it, and it’s anything but dry. I sat up a whole night reading it the time I came across it in the library down below. But from the date of its publishing, Uncle Jasper must have been a very young man when he wrote it, probably before the ancient history spider bit him.”
“And before the shutter went up,” added Sahwah.
“Well,” said Nyoda, after she had peeped into nearly every book in the bookcase, “there doesn’t seem to be anything here more modern than the Fall of Rome, and that’s still several seasons behind the affairs of Carver House. Hello, what’s this?” she suddenly exclaimed, holding up a book she had just picked up, one that had fallen down behind the others on the shelf.
It was a fat, ledger-like volume heavily bound in calfskin. There was no title printed on the back of it and Nyoda opened the cover. Two truly terrifying figures greeted her eyes, drawn in India ink on the yellowed page; figures of two pirates with fiercely bristling mustachios, and brandishing scimitars half as large as themselves. Nyoda quite jumped, their attitude was so menacing. Under one was printed in red ink, “Tad the Terror,” and under the other “Jasper the Feend.” Underneath the two figures was printed in sprawling capitals:
DIERY OF JASPER M. CARVER, ESQWIRE
Nyoda gave a little shriek of laughter and held it up for the Winnebagos to see. “It must be Uncle Jasper’s Diary when he was a boy,” she said. “His youthful idea of a man is a rather bloodthirsty one, according to the portrait, I must say. I suppose ‘Jasper the Feend’ is supposed to be Uncle Jasper. His mustachios bristle more fiercely than the other’s, and his scimitar is longer, so without doubt he was the artist.”
Her eyes ran down the pages following, glancing at the lines of writing, which, having apparently been done in India ink, were still black, although the page on which they were written was yellow with age. As she read, her eyes began to sparkle with interest and enjoyment.
“O girls,” she exclaimed, “this is the best thing I’ve read in ages. Sherry and the boys must see it. I have to go and get lunch started now, but all of you come together after lunch and I’ll read it out loud to you.”
“We’ll all help,” said Migwan, “and then we’ll get through faster,” and the Winnebagos hurried downstairs in Nyoda’s wake.
CHAPTER VI
UNCLE JASPER’S DIARY
After lunch the Winnebagos and the boys gathered around Nyoda in Uncle Jasper’s study to hear her read aloud from “The Diery of Jasper M. Carver, Esqwire.” She held the book up that all might see the portraits of the fearsome pirates, and then turned over to the next page, where the sprawly, uneven writing began, and started to read.
“October 7, 1870. Confined to the house through bad behavior while father and mother have gone to the fair. I wasn’t lonesome though because I had company. A boy ran into the yard chasing a cat and saw me sticking my head out of the upstairs window and blew a bean shooter at me and hit me on the chin and I hit him with an apple core and then he dared me to come out and lick him but I couldn’t go out of the house so I dared him to climb up the porch post and come in the window. He came and I licked him. He is a new boy in town and his name is Sydney Phillips, but he wants to be called Tad. He lives up on Harrison Hill. We are going to be pirates when we grow up. I am going to be Jasper the Feend and he is going to be Tad the Terror. We swore eternul frendship and wrote our names in blood on the attic window sill.”
“Oh, how delicious!” cried Sahwah at the end of the first entry. “Your uncle must have been lots of fun when he was young. What crazy things boys are, anyway! To start out by fighting each other and end up by swearing eternal friendship! Go on, Nyoda, what did they do next?”
Nyoda proceeded.
“November 10, 1870. Tad and I made a great discovery this afternoon. There is a secret passage in this house. It is——”
The concerted shriek of triumph that went up from the Winnebagos forced Nyoda to pause.
“I told you there was!” shouted Sahwah above the rest. “Please hurry and read where it is, I can’t wait another minute!”
Nyoda turned the page and then paused. “The next page is torn out,” she said, holding the book up so they could all see the ragged strip of paper left hanging in the binding, where the page had been torn out.
“Oh, what a shame!” The wail rose on every side.
“Maybe it tells later,” said Sahwah hopefully. “Go on, Nyoda.” The dairy continued on a page numbered six.
“January 4, 1871. Tad and I played pirat to-day. We made a pirat’s den in the secret passage. We are going to hide our chests of money there, all pieces of eight. We haven’t any pieces of eight yet just some red, white and blue dollars we found in the desk drawer in the library. Tad thinks maybe they are patriotick curency they used in the Revolushun”
Nyoda had to wait a minute until Sherry had got done laughing, and then she proceeded:
“February 19, 1871. I am in durrance vile, being locked in my room for a week with nothing to eat but bread and water because I shut Patricia up in the secret passage and went away and forgot all about her because there was a fire. I remembered and let her out as soon as I got home but she had fainted, being a silly girl and afraid of the dark, and she couldn’t scream because we tied a handkerchief over her mouth when we kidnapped her, being pirats. So now I am in durrance vile and cannot see any of my family, not even Tad. But he stands behind the hedge and shoots pieces of candy through my window with the bean shooter and lightens my durrance vile which is what a sworn frend has to do when their names are written in blood on the attic window sill.”
Thus the entries in the scrawling, boyish hand covered page after page, recounting the adventurous and ofttimes seamy career of the two youthful pirates, through all of which the two stood up for each other stanchly, and never, never gave each other away, because they were “sworn frends till deth us do part,” and their names were “written in blood on the attic window sill.”
The entries became farther apart after a while, and the spelling improved until finally there came this announcement:
“Tad and I can’t be pirates any longer. We are going to college next week.”
There the India ink ceased and also the illustrations. After that came page after page of neat entries in faded but still legible blue ink, telling of the progress through college of the two boys; chronicles of the joys, the troubles, the triumphs and the escapades of the two friends, still so inseparable that their names have become a byword among the students and they go by the nickname of David and Jonathan. When one of them gets into trouble the other one still does “what a sworn friend has to do when their names are written in blood on the attic window sill.” The Winnebagos listened with shining eyes while Nyoda read the tale of this remarkable friendship.
The dates of the entries moved forward by months; records of scrapes became fewer and fewer; David and Jonathan had outgrown their colthood and were beginning to win honors with brain and brawn. Then came the record of their graduation and return to Oakwood; of “Tad the Terror” becoming a doctor, of the marriage of Jasper’s sister Patricia to a sea captain; the death of his father and the passing of Carver House into his possession.
Later came the account of a delightful year spent abroad with Tad Phillips, of mountain climbing in the Alps; of browsing among rare old art treasures in France and Italy; of gay larks in Paris. It was always he and Tad, he and Tad; still as loyal to each other as in the days when they wrote their names in blood on the attic window sill.
After the entry which chronicled Jasper’s return to Oakland and settling down in Carver House with his mother, and his enthusiastic adoption of literature as a profession, came an item which made the Winnebagos sit up and listen. It was:
“June 3, 1885. I have had a new window put into my study on the side which faces toward’s Tad’s house on Harrisburg Hill. I had the young Italian artist, Pusini, who has lately come to New York, come and set the glass for me. It is a representation of a charming scene I came across in Italy—an arched gateway covered over with climbing roses. The window is arranged so that through the arch of the gateway I can look directly at Tad’s house. It gives me inspiration in my work.”
“What a beautiful idea!” said Hinpoha, carried away completely by the great love of Jasper Carver for his friend, so simply expressed in his diary.
“So that was Tad’s house, that we are living in!” said Sylvia excitedly. “I wonder where he is now.”
“Go on reading, Nyoda,” said Sahwah, consumed with interest in the tale. “See if he says anything about the shutter.” Nyoda passed on to the next entry.
“June 27, 1885. Went to the Academy of Music in Philadelphia to hear Sylvia Warrington sing. She is the new singer from the South that has created such a furore. The Virginia Nightingale, they call her. What a God-gifted woman she is! There never was such a voice as hers. She sang ‘Hark, hark, the lark,’ and the whole house rose to its feet. She was Spring incarnate. Sylvia Warrington! The name itself is music. I cannot forget her. She is like a lark singing in the desert at dawning.”
A vague remembrance leaped up for an instant in Katherine’s mind and died as it came.
Nyoda read on through pages that recorded Uncle Jasper’s meeting with Sylvia Warrington; his great and growing love for her; his persistent wooing, her consenting to marry him; his wild happiness, which found vent in page after page of rapturous plans for the future. Then came the announcement of Tad’s return from a period of study abroad, and Uncle Jasper’s proud presentation of his bride-to-be. After that Tad’s name appeared in connection with every occasion, still the faithful David to his beloved Jonathan.
Then, almost without warning, the great friendship ran on the rocks and was shattered. For Tad no sooner saw Sylvia Warrington than he too, fell madly in love with her. A brief and bitter entry told how she finally broke her engagement to Uncle Jasper and married Tad, and how Uncle Jasper, beside himself with grief and disappointment, turned against his friend and hated him with the undying hate that is born of jealousy. With heavy strokes of the pen that cut the paper he wrote down his determination to have no more friends and to live to himself thereafter. Then, in a shaky hand in marked contrast to the fierce strokes just above, he wrote: “But Sylvia—I love her still. I can’t help it.” That shaky handwriting stood as a mute testimonial to his heart’s torment, and Nyoda, reading it after all these years, felt a sympathetic spasm of pain pass through her own heart at the sight of that wavering entry.
“It’s just like a story in a book!” exclaimed Hinpoha, furtively drying her eyes, which had overflowed during the reading of the last page. “The beautiful lady, and the rival lovers, and the disappointed one never marrying. Oh, it’s too romantic for anything! Oh, please hurry and read what comes next.”