Reassured by this prophecy, the little folks soon after went to bed. Nor were the older members of the party long behind them. They had had a long and wearying day, and the beds beckoned them.
Ike M’Graw, the timber cruiser, was an excellent weather prophet; and this was proved to be a fact before all of those at Red Deer Lodge had gone to bed on this first night.
Neale O’Neil chanced to raise the shade of one of the windows in the boys’ room before undressing, and exclaimed to Luke:
“Hey! who said it snowed? Look at that moon up there!”
Luke Shepard joined him and looked out, too, at the rather misty orb of night that peered through the breaking clouds. But little snow had fallen during the evening.
“Going to be a good day, just as that old codger said it would,” agreed Luke. “My, how white everything is—really, silver! And a lonely place, isn’t it?”
“You said it,” agreed Neale. He was feeling in his pockets, and suddenly added: “Crackey! I’ve lost my knife.”
“You had it down there peeling apples for the girls,” said Luke, who was beginning to undress.
Sammy was already in bed and sound asleep. Neale started for the door.
“I don’t want to lose that knife,” he said. “I am going to run down and get it.”
The serving people had gone to bed, but there were dim lights on the gallery and one below in the big hall. Neale ran lightly down the carpeted stairs on his side of the house. The light was so dim that he fumbled around a good while hunting for the missing knife.
Suddenly something clattered about his ears—some missiles that came from above, but were not much heavier than snowflakes, it would seem. Neale jumped, and then stared around.
He could not see a thing moving or hear anything. Where the white objects had come from he could not understand. Finally he found one that had rolled on the floor.
“Popcorn! Say! it’s not snowing popcorn in here—not by any natural means,” the boy told himself, immediately suspicious.
Suddenly he spied his knife, and he pocketed that. As he did so there came another baptism of popcorn. He dropped down below the edge of a table which stood in the middle of the room under the chandelier. All the light came from above, and there was not much of that; so it was dark under the table.
He heard a faint giggle. “Ah-ha!” thought Neale. “I smell a mouse! That is a girl’s giggle.”
He saw that the way to the foot of the stairs that were nearest the girls’ rooms, was quite dark. He ran out from under the table, but softly and on his hands and knees, and reached the stairway without making a sound.
The popcorn rattled again upon the table top, and once more he heard the giggle. He wormed his way up the stairs in the shadow and reached the gallery. Here a jet of gas from the side wall gave some light. He saw the robed figure hanging over the bannister and in the act of throwing another handful of popcorn at the spot where the boy was supposed to be crouching.
Neale O’Neil crept forward from the top of the stairs, still on his hands and knees. He was likewise in the shadow, although he could see the figure ahead of him plainly.
“Meow!” crooned the boy, imitating a cat with remarkable ingenuity. “Meow!”
“Oh, mercy!” hissed a startled voice.
“Ma-ro-o-ow!” urged Neale O’Neil, repeating his feline success.
“Mercy!” ejaculated the whisperer. “That’s a strange cat.”
“Ma-row-ro-o-ow!” continued Neale, with a lingering wail.
“Here, kitty! kitty! kitty!” murmured the girl crouching by the bannister. “Oh, where are you? Poor kitty!”
Immediately Neale changed his tone and produced a growl that not only sounded savage but seemed so near that the startled girl jumped up with a cry:
“Oh! Oh! Neale!”
“Ma-row-ro-o-ow! Ssst!” continued what purported to be a cat, and one that was very much annoyed.
“Oh! Oh! OH!” shrieked Agnes, springing up and leaning over the railing. “Neale! Come quick!”
And there Neale was right beside her! He appeared so suddenly that she would have shrieked again, and perhaps brought half the household to the spot, had not the boy grabbed her quickly and placed a hand over her mouth, stifling the cry about to burst forth.
“Hush!” he commanded. “Want to get Mrs. Mac or Mr. Howbridge out here to see what is the matter?”
“Oh, Neale!” sputtered Agnes. “I thought you were a cat.”
“And I thought you were a hailstorm of popcorn.”
“You horrid boy! To scare me so!”
“You horrid girl! To shower me with popcorn!”
“I don’t care—”
“Neither do I.”
Agnes began to giggle. “What were you doing down there?” she asked.
“I was looking for my pocketknife. Wouldn’t lose it for a farm Down East with a pig on it!” declared the boy. “What are you doing out here?”
“I went to Mrs. Mac’s room to give her her nightcap. It was in my bag. Oh, Neale! do you suppose it will be clear by morning, as that funny old man says?”
“It’s clear now.”
“You don’t mean it?”
“Come along here to the window and look for yourself,” the boy said, and led her toward the front of the house along the gallery.
There was a broad and deep-silled window over the front door of the Lodge. Neale drew back the hangings. They could see out into the night which was now all black and silver.
The forest that edged the clearing in which stood the Lodge was as black as ever an evergreen forest could be. The tops of the trees were silvered by the moonbeams, but the shadows at the foot of the trees were like ink.
In the open the new-fallen snow glittered as though the moonlight fell on precious stones. It was so beautiful a scene that for a moment Agnes could only grip Neale O’Neil’s arm and utter an ecstatic sigh.
“Scrumptious, isn’t it?” said the boy, understanding her mood.
“Lovely!” sighed Agnes. “Ruth and Cecile ought to see this.”
“Hold on!” warned the boy. “Get them out here and we’ll both be sent to bed in a hurry. Ruth’s got her bossing clothes on—has had ’em on ever since we left Milton.”
“Te-he!” giggled Agnes suddenly. “She feels her responsibility.”
“Guess she does,” chuckled Neale. “But there’s no need to add to her troubles. Believe me! the less I am bossed around by her the better I like it.”
“Oh, Neale,” said Agnes, “she only does it for your good.”
“Don’t you fret,” returned the boy, with a sniff. “I can get along without Ruth or anybody else worrying about whether I’m good, or not. Believe me!”
“Oh!” squealed Agnes suddenly. “What’s that?”
“Huh! Seen a rat? Scared to death?” scoffed Neale O’Neil.
“Look at that thing out there! It’s no rat,” declared the girl eagerly.
Neale then looked in the direction she pointed. Not twenty yards from the house, and sitting on its haunches in the snow, was an object that at first Neale thought was a dog. The shadow it cast upon the moon-lit snow showed pointed ears, however, and a bushy tail.
“Crackey, Aggie!” gasped Neale, “that’s a fox.”
“A fox? Right here near the house? Just like that?” gasped the girl. “Why—why, he must be wild!”
“Crackey!” returned Neale, smothering his laughter, “you didn’t suppose he was tame, did you?”
“But—but,” stammered the girl, “if a wild fox comes so near the house, one of those dreadful lynxes may come—or a bear. I never! Why, we might be besieged by wolves and bears and wildcats. Did you ever?”
“No, I never was,” scoffed Neale. “Not yet. But, really, I am willing to be. I’ll try anything—once.”
“I guess you wouldn’t be so smart, young man, if the animals really did come here and serenade us. Why—”
“Listen! That fellow is serenading us now,” declared Neale, much amused.
The sharp, shrill yap of the fox reached their ears. Then, from the rear of the house where Tom Jonah was confined in the back kitchen, the roar of the old dog’s bark answered the fox’s yapping.
And then from somewhere—was it from above and inside the house, or outside and in the black woods?—there sounded a sharp explosion. Agnes flashed a questioning glance at Neale; but the boy pointed, crying:
“Quick! Look! The fox!”
The little animal with the bushy tail that had raised its pointed nose to yap mournfully at the moon, had suddenly sprung straight up into the air. It cleared the snow at least four feet. One convulsive wriggle it gave with its whole body, and fell back, a black heap, on the snow.
“Oh, Neale! what happened to it?” gasped Agnes, amazed.
“Shot,” said the youth, a curious note in his voice.
“Oh, who shot it?”
“Ask me an easier one.”
“Why—what—I think that was sort of cruel, after all,” sighed the girl. “He wasn’t really doing any harm.”
“I thought you were afraid he might eat us all up,” said Neale, dropping the curtain which he had been holding back, and turning away from the window.
“Oh—but—I am serious now,” she said. “Who do you suppose shot him?”
“I could not say.”
“That old woodsman, perhaps? There is none of our party out there with a gun, of course. Oh, dear! I hope I don’t dream of it. I don’t like to see things killed.”
But the thought of dreaming about seeing the fox shot did not trouble Neale O’Neil when he parted with Agnes and went back to his room. Nor was it anything about the death of the creature that absorbed his attention.
It was who the huntsman was and from where the shot was fired that puzzled Neale O ’Neil. Had the shot been made from outside or inside the house?
For it seemed to the boy that the explosion had been above their heads; and he chanced to know that none of the party from Milton—not even the servants—were quartered on the third floor of Red Deer Lodge.
Who, then, could be up there shooting out of one of the small windows at the yapping fox? He said nothing about this to Agnes; but he determined to make inquiry regarding it the first thing in the morning.
They were near the shortest day of the year and the sun rose very late indeed; so nobody at Red Deer Lodge got up early, unless it was the kitchen man who had to light the fires and bring in much wood. He tramped paths through the new-fallen snow to the outbuildings before sunrise. By the time Neale O’Neil, his head filled with the puzzling thoughts of the night before, reached the rear premises, the yard of the Lodge was marked and re-marked with footsteps.
He sought Hedden, however, having seen that the snow in front of the Lodge showed no footprint. The fox lay just where it had been shot.
“Does any of our party sleep in the garret, Hedden?” Neale asked the butler.
“No, young man. We all have rooms at the back of the house.”
The boy told the man about the shooting of the fox. “Of course, one of the men was not out with a small rifle, and plugged old Reynard when he was howling at the moon, was he?”
“No,” replied the butler. “Neither John nor Lawrence knows how to use a gun, I’m sure. Perhaps it was that tall man, Ike M’Graw.”
“Well, seems to me he ought to have come and got the pelt,” said Neale, ruminatingly. “It’s worth something all right, when furs are so high. Say, Hedden, how do you get upstairs into the garret?”
Hedden told him, presuming that it was merely a boy’s curiosity that caused him to ask. But Neale had a deeper reason than that for wishing to find the way upstairs.
He could not understand from what angle the fox had been shot while he and Agnes were looking out of the window, if the hunter had been in the wood. There had been no flash or sign of smoke from the edge of the forest, and Neale’s vision swept the line of black shadow for hundreds of yards at the moment of the report.
“Smokeless powder is all right,” muttered the boy. “But they can’t overcome the flash of the exploding shell in the dark. No, sir! That marksman was not in the wood. And the report sounded right over our heads!”
He said nothing more to Hedden, but found the upper stairs at the rear of the house. At the top was a heavy door, but it was not locked. He thrust it open rather gingerly, and looked into the great, raftered loft.
The sun was above the treetops now and shone redly into the front windows. There was light enough for him to see that as far as human occupants went, the garret of the Lodge was empty.
There was not much up here, anyway. Several boxes, some lumber, and a heap of rubbish in one corner.
Neale O’Neil stepped into the place and walked to the front of the building. The windows were square and swung inward on hinges. He knew that this row of front windows was directly over that at which he and Agnes stood looking out upon the moon-lit lawn at bedtime.
The windows were all fastened with buttons. As far as he could see none gave evidence—at least on the inside—of having been recently opened. Neale shivered in the chill, dead air of the loft.
If the marksman that had shot the fox was up here, from which window did he shoot? Neale could not find any mark along the window sill or on the floor.
Suddenly the boy began opening the windows, one after the other. Some of them stuck, but he persisted until each one swung open. Outside the snow that had fallen the evening before lay in a fluffy layer on the window sill.
At the third window he halted. In this layer of light snow was a mark. Neale uttered a satisfied exclamation.
It was the matrix of a round tube—the barrel of the gun that had fired the shot which had finished Reynard, the fox!
“Can’t be anything else,” thought the boy. “He knelt right here and rested his gun across the sill. Yes! it points downward—pressed heavier at the outer end than near the window. Yes!”
The boy got down and squinted along the mark in the snow. His keen eye easily brought the huddled, sandy object on the snow down below into range.
“Now, what do you know about that?” Neale O’Neil asked aloud. “Who was up here with a gun last night and popped over that fox? I wonder if I ought to tell Mr. Howbridge.”
Had he done so the lawyer would quickly have pieced together what Hedden had told him about the live embers in the grate and Neale’s discovery. Whether he would have arrived at a correct conclusion in the matter, was another thing.
However that might be, Neale O’Neil was sure that somebody had access to the garret and had shot the fox therefrom. After the rear premises of the Lodge had been tracked up so before daylight, half a dozen people might have left the house by the rear door without their footprints being seen. If the marksman had no business in the Lodge he could easily have got away.
Puzzling over these thoughts, Neale descended to find most of the party before the fire in the living-room, waiting for breakfast. Agnes was eagerly telling of the fox she had seen shot at bedtime.
Neale added no details to her story, save that the fox still lay on the snow outside.
“Whoever hit him didn’t care for the pelt,” said the boy. “Now that it is frozen, it will be hard to skin. A fox hide is worth something. I’m going to thaw out the body and try to save the skin—for Aggie, of course.”
“Oh, my!” cried the beauty, “won’t it be fine to have a collar or a muff made out of a fox that I saw shot with my own eyes?”
“Odd about that,” said Mr. Howbridge thoughtfully. “I wonder who could have been so near the Lodge last evening. And then, to have left the fox there!”
The breakfast call interrupted him. Neale said nothing further about it. After the meal, however, the young people all got into their warm wraps and overshoes and went out of doors.
Tom Jonah was turned loose, and he almost at once dashed around the house to the spot where the body of the fox lay. The children gathered around the fuzzy animal in great excitement.
“Oh, it looks like Mrs. Allen’s spitz dog—only this is reddish and Sambo, the spitz, is white,” Tess said. “The poor—little—thing!”
“This is no ‘expectorates’ dog,” chuckled Neale, grabbing the creature by the tail. “‘Expectorates’ is a much better word than ‘spits,’ Tess. Now, I am going to take this fellow and hang him up in the back kitchen where he will thaw out. No, Tom Jonah! you are not going to worry him.”
“What lovely long fur!” murmured Agnes. “Do you suppose you can really cure the skin for me, Neale?” she demanded.
“What’s the matter with the skin?” demanded Sammy, in wonder. “Is it sick?”
“Good gracious!” exclaimed Agnes. “These children have to be explained to every minute. I hope that fox skin has no disease, Sammy.”
Luke and Ruth and Cecile had gone for a tramp through the wood. The little folks set to work building a snow man which was to be of wondrous proportions when completed. Naturally Neale and Agnes kept together.
Agnes had been wandering along the edge of the wood in front of the house while Neale carried the fox indoors. Tom Jonah came back with Neale and began snuffing about the spot where the fox had laid.
“See here, Neale O’Neil,” cried Agnes, “I can’t find anybody’s footprints over here. Where do you suppose that man shot the fox from?”
“Humph!” grunted Neale noncommittally.
“But here’s just the cunningest hoofprints! See them!” cried Agnes.
The boy joined her. Two rows of marks made by split-hoofed animals ran along the edge of the wood.
“Crackey!” ejaculated the boy. “Those are deer.”
“You don’t mean it?”
“Must be. Red deer, I bet. And right close to the Lodge! How tame these creatures are.”
“Well, deer won’t hurt us,” said Agnes, decidedly. “Let’s see where they went to.”
Neale was nothing loath. One direction was as good as another. He wanted much to talk to somebody about the discovery he had made in the loft of the Lodge; but he did not wish to frighten Agnes, so he did not broach the subject.
The two rows of hoof marks went on, side by side, along the edge of the clearing. They followed them to the very end of the opening which had been cleared about Red Deer Lodge—the northern end.
Here began a narrow path into the woods. The spoor of the two animals led into this path, and the boy and girl tramped along after them.
“I guess nothing frightened them,” said Neale, “for they appear to be trotting right along at an easy gait. They must have passed this way in the night. And that’s kind of funny, too.”
“What is funny?” asked Agnes.
“Why, deer—especially two, alone—ought to have been hiding in some clump of brush during the night. They don’t go wandering around much unless they are hungry. And there is plenty of brush fodder for them to eat along the edge of the swamps, that is sure.”
“Are you sure they are deer?” asked Agnes. “They couldn’t be anything else, could they?”
“I reckon not,” laughed Neale. “I say! who lives here?”
They caught a glimpse of an opening in the forest ahead. Then a cabin appeared, from the chimney of which a curl of blue smoke rose into the air. There were several smaller buildings in the clearing, too.
“Guess we have struck that old timber cruiser’s place,” Neale said, answering his own question.
“Oh! Mr. Ike M’Graw!” cried Agnes. “Now we can ask him if he shot the fox last night.”
“But where did these deer go?” exclaimed Neale, stopping on the edge of the little clearing and staring all around.
For here the tracks they had followed seemed to cross and criss-cross all about the clearing. That wild deer should frolic so about an occupied house was indeed puzzling. He saw, too, that there were human footprints over-running the marks of the split hoofs.
Suddenly from around the corner of the cabin appeared the long, slablike figure of the woodsman. He saw them almost immediately.
“Hullo, there!” he cried. “Ain’t you out early? I wouldn’t have been up near so early myself, if it hadn’t been for those confounded shoats of mine.”
“What happened to the pigs?” asked Neale, smiling.
“They broke out o’ their pen. Always doin’ that!” returned M’Graw. “Run off through the woods somewhere, and then come back and made sech a racket around my shanty that I can’t sleep. Confound ’em!”
Neale suddenly saw a great light. He seized Agnes’ hand and squeezed it in warning. With his other hand he pointed to the marks in the snow.
“Are those the pigs’ footprints?”
“Yes. I just got ’em shut up again,” said the woodsman. “Come in, won’t you? I guess my coffee’s biled sufficient, and I’m about to fry me a mess of bacon and johnnycake.”
“What do you know about that?” murmured Neale to the giggling Agnes. “We followed those pig tracks for deer tracks. Aren’t we great hunters—I don’t think!”
The interior of Ike M’Graw’s cabin was a place of interest to Neale and Agnes. There was not much room, but it was neat and clean. There were two bunks, one over the other at one end of the room. At the other end was the big, open fireplace.
There were andirons, a chimney crane for a pot, a dutch oven, and a sheet-iron shelf that could be pushed over the coals, on which the old man baked his johnnycake, or pan-bread.
The coffee pot was already bubbling on this shelf and gave off a strong odor of Rio. The bacon was sliced, ready for the frying pan. Ike wanted to cut more and give his two young visitors a second breakfast; but they would not hear to that.
“We’ll take a cup of coffee with you,” Agnes said brightly. “But I know I could not possibly eat another thing. Could you, Neale?”
“Not yet,” agreed the boy. “And anyway,” he added, with a smile, “if we are going to have a big storm as they say we are, Mr. M’Graw will need to conserve his food.”
“Don’t you fret, son,” said M’Graw; “I’ve got enough pork and bacon, flour, meal and coffee, to last me clean into spring. I never stint my stomach. Likewise, as long as I can pull the trigger of Old Betsey there, I shan’t go hungry in these here woods. No, sir!”
Neale stepped to the rack in the corner where stood the brown-barreled rifle the woodsman called “Old Betsey,” as well as a single and a double-barreled shotgun.
“Which of these did you use last night, Mr. M’Graw, when you shot that fox?” Agnes asked.
“Heh? What fox?”
“Maybe it wasn’t you,” said the Corner House girl. “But somebody shot a fox right up there in front of the Lodge.”
“When was this?” demanded the old man, looking at her curiously.
Neale told him the time. The woodsman shook his head slowly.
“I was buried in my blankets by that time,” he declared. “Are you sure the fox was shot, young feller?”
“I’ve got it hung up to get the frost out so I can skin it,” said Neale quietly.
“Shot, eh?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What sort of a ball killed it?”
“A small bullet. It was no large rifle bullet,” said Neale confidently. “I should think it was no more than a twenty-two caliber.”
“Pshaw! that’s only a play-toy,” returned the old man. “Who’d have a gun like that up here in the woods? Guess you’re mistook, young feller.”
“When you come up to the house you take a look at the fox,” said Neale.
“I’ll do that. Where’d the feller stand when he shot the fox?”
“Why,” put in Agnes, as Neale hesitated, “we couldn’t find his footprints at all.”
“Humph!” muttered the old fellow.
He poured out the coffee. The cups were deep, thick, and had no handles. He poured his own into the deep saucer, blew it noisily, and sipped it in great, scalding gulps. Agnes tried not to give this operation any attention.
Neale meanwhile was examining several fine skins hung upon the log walls. There was a wolf skin among them, and a big, black bear robe was flung over the lower bunk for warmth.
“I got him,” said the woodsman, “five year ago. He was in a berry patch over against the mountain, yonder. And he was as fat as butter.”
“And the wolf?” asked Agnes, with considerable interest.
“I trapped him. Last winter. He was a tremendous big feller,” said M’Graw, heaping a tin plate with johnnycake and pouring bacon grease over it. “There’s a small pack living up in the hills, and I’m likely to get more this winter. These heavy snows will no doubt be driving ’em down.”
“Oh! Wolves!” gasped the girl.
“They won’t bother you none,” said M’Graw. “Don’t go off by yourself, and if any of your party takes a long tramp, carry a gun. Like enough you’ll get a shot at something; but not wolves. They’re too sly.”
The conversation of the old backwoodsman was both illuminating and amusing. And his hunting trophies were vastly interesting, at least to Neale.
There was a big photograph on the wall of Ike and another man standing on either side of a fallen moose. The great, spoon-shaped horns of the creature were at least six feet across.
“You’ll see that head up over the main mantelpiece up to the Lodge,” said M’Graw. “That’s Mr. Birdsall. He an’ me shot that moose over the line in Canady. But we brought the head home.”
Over his own fireplace was a handsome head—that of a stag of the red deer.
“Got him,” Ike vouchsafed between bites, “down in the east swamp, ten year ago come Christmas. Ain’t been a bigger shot in this part of the country, I reckon, ’ceptin’ the ghost deer Tom Lawrence shot three winters ago over towards Ebettsville.”
“Ghost deer!” exclaimed Neale and Agnes together.
“What does that mean?” added the boy.
“Surely you don’t believe there are spirits of deer returned to earth, do you, Mr. M’Graw?” asked Agnes, smiling.
M’Graw grinned. “Ain’t no tellin’. Mebbe there is. I’m mighty careful what I say about ghosts,” he rejoined. “But this here ghost deer, now—”
He had finished breakfast and was filling his pipe. “Lemme tell you about it,” he said. “I will say, though, ’twasn’t no spirit, for I eat some of the venison from that ghost deer.
“But for two seasons the critter had had the whole of Ebettsville by the ears. The hunters couldn’t get a shot, and some folks said ’twas a sure-enough ghost.
“But if ’twas a ghost, it was the fust one that ever left footprints in the snow. That’s sure,” chuckled M’Graw. “I went over there with Old Betsey once; but never got a shot at it. Jest the same I seen the footprints, and I knowed what it was.”
“What was it?”
“Looked like a ghost flying past in the twilight. It was an albino—white deer. I told ’em so. And fin’ly Tom Lawrence, as I said, shot it. Why they hadn’t got it before, I guess, was because them that shot at it shivered so for fear ’twas a ghost they couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn!” and M’Graw broke into a loud laugh.
“I did not know that deer were ever white,” Agnes said.
“One o’ the wonders of nature,” Ike assured her. “And not frequent seen. But that critter was one—and a big one. Weighed upwards of two hundred pound. Tom give me a haunch, and when it was seasoned some, ’twasn’t much tougher than shoe-leather. Me, I kill me a doe when I want tender meat. My teeth is gettin’ kind of wore down,” chuckled the old man.
“Was it really all white?” asked Neale.
“Well, that buck’s horns an’ hoofs was considerable lighter in color than ordinary. With them exceptions, and a few hairs on the forehead and a tuft on the hind leg, that critter was perfectly white. Queer. Jest an albino, as I said,” M’Graw concluded between puffs.
Beside the chimney on a big nail driven into a log, hung a string of rusty keys, with one big shiny brass one by itself. Agnes said:
“I guess you have to lock everything up when you leave home, don’t you, Mr. M’Graw?”
“Me? Never lock a thing. We don’t have no tramps. And if I leave home I always leave a fire laid and everything so that a visitor can come right in and go to housekeeping. It’s a purty mean man that’ll lock up his cabin in the woods. No, ma’am. I never lock nothin’.”
“But those keys?” the Corner House girl suggested curiously.
“Oh! Them? Just spare keys I picked up. All but this,” and he reached for the brass key briskly. “This is the key to the Lodge padlock, I’m goin’ to take it up to that Mr. Howbridge of yours and tell him something about it. I’ll walk back with you.”
He slipped into his leather jacket and buckled up his leggings. Then banking the fire on the hearth, he said he was ready to go. He put the big brass key in his pocket, but as he had intimated, he left the cabin door unlocked.
Once outside, they saw that the sun was clouded over again. “That storm is surely a-coming,” Ike observed. “I shouldn’t wonder, when it does get here, if it turns out to be a humdinger. ‘Long threaten, long last,’ they say.”
When they arrived at the Lodge the old man took a look at the fox Neale had hung up. He examined the small hole under the ear where the bullet had gone into the animal’s head.
“Nice shot,” he muttered. “Dropped him without a struggle, I reckon. And you sure are right, boy,” he added to Neale. “It was a twenty-two. Nothin’ bigger. Humph! mighty funny, that.
“Well, you let it hang here and I’ll skin it for you before I go back home. Fust off I want to see your Mr. Howbridge.”
As M’Graw went through the hall to find the lawyer, Neale and Agnes were called by Luke from one of the sheds. His voice and beckoning hand hurried them to the spot.
“What do you know about this?” cried Luke. “Here are two perfectly good sleds—a big one and a smaller. And one of those drivers that have just started back for Coxford, told me where there was a dandy slide.”
“Crackey, that’s fine!” agreed the eager Neale.
Agnes, too, was delighted. The other girls were eager to try the coasting.
“But we must get away without the children. It is too far for them to go,” Ruth said. “At least, we must try it out before we let them join us.”
“They are all right at the front with their snow man. I just saw them,” Agnes said. “Come on!” Agnes was always ready for sport.
They started away from the house, the two boys dragging the bobsled. There were about four inches of fluffy, dry snow on top, and under that the drifts were almost ice-hard.
“Ought to make the finest kind of sledding,” Luke declared.
Meanwhile Ike M’Graw had found Mr. Howbridge reading a book in a corner of one of the comfortable settees in the big living-room. He dropped the book and stood up to greet the woodsman with a smile.
“How are you, this morning, M’Graw?” asked the lawyer. “How about the key?”
“Here ’tis,” said the guide. “Found it just where it should be. Looked as though it had never been touched since I was gone. But, of course, as I tell you, anybody might have been in my cabin. I don’t lock nothin’ up.”
“If the key was used, it was by somebody who knew it was the key and where to find it,” Mr. Howbridge said reflectively.
“You struck it there,” agreed Ike. “And there’s only two keys to that big padlock. Unless there’s been one made since Mr. Birdsall died,” he added.
“If anybody borrowed the key and got in here, they got out again and locked the front door and returned the key.”
“So ’twould seem. You say there wasn’t no marks in the snow when your folks fust came?”
“No.”
“It snowed the day after I went away from here to Ebettsville. They must have come here and gone before that snow then. That snow covered their tracks. How’s that?”
“Not so good,” the lawyer promptly told him. “You forget the live embers in the grate. Those embers would not have stayed alive for five days.”
“Ain’t that a fac’?” muttered the old man.
They pondered in silence for a moment.
Hedden suddenly entered the room. He seemed flurried, and his employer knew that something of moment had occurred.
“What is the matter, Hedden?” the latter asked.
“I have to report, sir, that somebody has been at the goods in the pantry—the canned food and other provisions that we brought up.”
“What do you mean?” asked Mr. Howbridge curiously.
“The chef, sir, says that quite a good deal of food has been stolen. He put the stuff away. There is a lot of it gone, sir—and that since last night at dinner time.”
“Humph! Isn’t that strange?” murmured the lawyer.
M’Graw grunted and started for the front door.
“Where are you going, M’Graw?” asked Mr. Howbridge.
“I’m going to find out who shot that fox,” was the woodsman’s enigmatical answer.
The party of young people with the bobsled was very merry indeed just as soon as they got out of hearing of the Lodge. By striking into a path which opened into the wood right behind the barns, they cut off any view the two little girls and Sammy Pinkney might have caught of their departure.
“I feel somewhat condemned for leaving them behind,” Ruth said. “Yet I know it is too far for such little people to go along and get back for lunch.”
“Oh, they are having a good time,” Cecile said. “You make yourself a slave to your young family, Ruthie,” and she laughed.
“We will make it up to the kids,” Luke joined in. “After we have tried the slide they can have a shot at it.”
“That’s all right,” grinned Neale O’Neil. “But if Tess Kenway thinks she has been snubbed or neglected—well! you will not hear the last of it in a hurry, believe me.”
This part of the wood into which the young people had entered was a sapling growth. Not many years before the timber had been cut and there were only brush clumps and small trees here now.
Flocks of several different kinds of birds—sparrows, buntings, jays, swamp robins, and others—flew noisily about. There were berries and seeds to be found in the thickets. The birds had begun to forage far from the swamps—a sign that the snow was heavy and deep in their usual winter feeding places.
“The dear little birdies!” cooed Agnes, waving her gloved hand at a flock that spread out fan-wise in the covert, frightened by the approach of the young people.
Suddenly there arose a vast racket—a whirring and trampling sound, as though it were of runaway hoofs. Agnes shrieked and glanced about her. The other girls looked startled.
“That horse! It’s running away!” cried Agnes. “Oh, Neale!”
“Shucks!” said that youth, scornfully. “‘The dear little birdies!’ Ho, ho! I thought you liked ’em, Aggie?”
“Liked what?” she demanded, as the noise faded away into the wood.
“The birdies. That was a flock of partridges. They can make some noise, can’t they? Food in the swamps must be getting mighty scarce, or they would not be away up here.”
“Who ever would have thought it?” murmured Cecile. “Partridges!”
“Wish I had a gun,” said Luke.
“Don’t be afraid. They won’t bite,” chuckled Neale O’Neil. “And we won’t be likely to meet anything much more dangerous than birds in the day time.”
“Yet we saw that big cat yesterday,” Ruth said.
“It ran all right. We might have brought Tom Jonah; only he was playing with the kids,” said Neale. “Anyway, the best he would do would be to scare up creatures in the thickets that we otherwise would not know were there.”
“Now, stop that, Neale O’Neil!” cried Agnes. “Are you trying to frighten us?”
“Shucks, Aggie!” he returned. “You know the kind of wild animal we scared up this morning when we found Ike M’Graw’s place.”
“Oh! Oh!” cried Agnes, with laughter.
“What’s the joke?” asked Luke.
So Neale told the rest of the party how he and Agnes had followed the footprints of the “deer” clear to the old man’s cabin.
“And there we could hear them squealing in their pen,” was the way Neale finished it.
“Two mighty hunters, you!” chuckled Luke.
The road over which they dragged the sled soon became steep. They were now climbing a long hill through heavier timber. It was a straight path, and the crown of the ascent was more than a mile from Red Deer Lodge.
Half way up they passed a fork in the timber road. The roads were not rutted at all, for they were full of firm snow. This second road dipped to the north, running down the steep hill and out of sight.
“That chap who told me about this slide told me to ’ware that road,” Luke said. “Around that curve he said it was steep and there’d be no stopping the sled for a long way. If we stick to the right track, we’ll slide back almost to the Lodge itself.”
“That’ll help some,” Cecile said. “I am getting tired tramping over this snow. It’s a harder pull than I imagined it would be.”
“We were very wise not to let the children come,” Ruth remarked.
Uphill for all of a mile was, in truth, no easy climb.
Agnes and Neale O’Neil began to bicker.
“I’m no horse,” said Neale rather grumpily, when Agnes suggested that the boys could drag the girls on the sled.
“No; your ears are too long,” she retorted impishly.
“Now, children!” admonished Ruth, “How is it you two always manage to fight?”
“They’re only showing off,” chuckled Luke Shepard. “In secret they have a terrible crush on each other.”
“Such slang!” groaned his sister.
“Real college brand,” said Agnes cheerfully. “I do love slang, Luke. Tell us some more.”
“I object! No, no!” cried Ruth. “She learns quite enough high-school slang. Don’t teach her any more of the college brand, Luke.”
They puffed up the final rise and arrived at the top of the ascent. This was the very peak of the ridge on which Red Deer Lodge was built.
Because it was winter and all but the evergreens and oaks were denuded of leaves, they could see much farther over the surrounding landscape than would have been possible in the leafy seasons; however, on all sides the forest was so thick at a distance that a good view of the country was not easily obtained.
The valley toward the north was black with spruce and hemlock. One could not see if there were clearings in the valley. It seemed there to be an unbroken and primeval forest.
This valley was included in the Birdsall estate, and the timber which the Neven Lumber Company wished to cut practically lay entirely in that wild valley.
The hills to the west were plainly visible. Their caps were either bald and snow covered, or crowned with the black-green forest. Toward the lakeside the slopes were alternately tree covered and of raw stumpage where the timber had recently been cut. These “slashes” were ugly looking spots.
“That is what all that part yonder of this estate will look like when the lumbermen get through,” said Ruth. “Isn’t it a shame?”
“But trees have to be cut down some time. I heard M’Graw say that much of the timber on this place was beginning to deteriorate,” Luke said in reply.
“Shucks!” exclaimed Neale O’Neil, “if a tree is beautiful, why not let it stand? Why slaughter it?”
“There speaks the altruistic spirit of the young artist,” laughed Luke. “Ask Mr. Howbridge. How about the money value of the tree?”
“Shucks!” Neale repeated, but with his eyes twinkling. “Is money everything?”
“Let me tell you, boy,” said Luke a little bitterly; “it buys almost everything that is worth while in this world. I want beautiful things, too; but I know it will cost a slew of money to buy them. I am going to set out and try for money first, then!”
“Hear the practical youth!” said Cecile. “That is what he learns at college. Say! aren’t we going to slide downhill? Or did we come up here to discuss political economy?”
Luke, holding up his hand in affirmation, declared: “I vow to discuss neither polit, bugs, pills, psyche, trig—”
“Oh, stop!” commanded Ruth, yet with curiosity. “What are all those horrid sounding things?”
“Pshaw!” cried the collegian’s sister, “I know that much of his old slang. ‘Trig’ is trigonometry, of course; ‘psyche’ is psychology; ‘pills’ means physics; ‘bugs’ is biology; and ‘polit,’ of course, is political economy. Those college boys are awfully smart, aren’t they?”
“I want to sli-i-ide!” wailed Agnes, stamping her feet in the snow. “I am turning into a lump of ice, standing here.”
“Get aboard, then,” answered Neale.
She plumped herself on the sled. Luke straddled the seat just behind the steering wheel. The other girls took their places in rotation after Agnes, while Neale made ready to push off and then jump on himself at the rear.
“Ready?” he cried.
“Let her go!” responded the steersman.
“Hang on, girls!” commanded Neale, as he started the sled with a mighty shove.
The bobsled moved slowly. The runners grunted and strained over the soft snow that packed under them and, at first, retarded the movement of the sled. But soon the power of gravitation asserted itself. Neale settled himself on the seat. The wind began to whistle past their ears. In front a fine mist of snow particles was thrown up.
Faster and faster they rushed down the descent. The young people had thought this trail very smooth as they climbed it; but now they found there were plenty of “thank-you-ma’ams” in the path. The bobsled bumped over these, gathering speed, and finally began to leave the snow and fairly fly into the air when it struck a ridge.
The girls screamed when these hummocks arrived. But they laughed between them, too! It was a most exciting trip.
Like an arrow the sled shot past the fork in the road, keeping to the left. But it would have been a very easy matter, as Luke Shepard saw, to turn the sled into the steeper descent.
They started up a gray and white rabbit beside the path, and it raced them in desperate fright for several hundred yards, before it knew enough to turn off the road and leap into the brush. Luke’s head was down and his eyes half closed as he stared ahead. But Neale gave voice to his delight in reëchoed shouts.
There were slides in Milton. The selectmen gave up certain streets to the young folk for coasting. But those streets were nothing like this.
On and on the bobsled flew, its pace increasing with every length. Although this wood road was in no place really steep, the hill was so long, and its slant so continuous that the momentum the sled gathered carried it over any little level that there might be, and at the foot of the decline still shot the merry crew over the snow at a swift pace and for a long distance.
Indeed, when the sled stopped they were almost at the back of the Red Deer Lodge premises. A mellow horn was calling them to lunch when they alighted.
“Oh! wasn’t it bully?” gasped the delighted Agnes. “I never did have such a sled-ride!”
“How about your trip up the lake!” Cecile asked.
“Oh! But that scooter was different.”
The other girls were quite as pleased with the slide as Agnes; and the three ran into the house to dress for lunch, chattering like magpies, while the boys put the sled away under the shed.
When Luke and Neale went into the house they found Ike M’Graw skinning the fox in the back kitchen, Tom Jonah being a much interested spectator. The woodsman beckoned Neale to him.
“Look here, young feller,” he said. “You seen this critter shot last night, you say?”
“Yes,” replied the boy.
“Where was it shot from? I’m derned if I can find any place where the feller stood along the edge of the woods to shoot him.”
“No. I couldn’t find any footprints either,” Neale confessed.
“Not knowing from which direction the bullet came—”
“Oh, but I do know that, Mr. M’Graw. I am pretty positive, at least. I have been doubtful whether to say anything about it or not—and that’s a fact.”
“What d’you mean?” demanded the old man, eyeing him shrewdly.
“Well, I thought when I heard the shot and the fox was killed that the explosion was right over my head.”
“What’s that? Over your head! In the attic?”
“That is where the shot came from—yes.”
“Air you positive?” drawled the old man.
“I went up there this morning and saw the place where the fellow had rested the barrel of his gun across the window sill to shoot.”
“My! My!” muttered Ike thoughtfully. “And there wasn’t nobody up there this morning?”
“No. And I asked Hedden, and he said neither of the other men knew how to use a gun and that they all were in bed at the time the fox was shot.”
“Do tell!” muttered the woodsman. “Then they—well, the feller that shot the fox was up there in the attic about bedtime, was he?”
“Yes. Who do you suppose he was, Mr. M’Graw?” asked Neale curiously.
“Well, I wouldn’t want to make a guess. This here man workin’ in the kitchen tells me that there wasn’t a foot mark in the snow at all when he got up and went out of the back door here the fust time this morning. And, of course, there wasn’t no footprints at the front of the house, was there?”
“Oh, no! Not until after breakfast time.”
“Uh-huh! Well, after this John had tramped back an’ forth to the woodshed and the like half a dozen times, anybody could have gone out of here without their footprints being noticed. Ain’t that a fac’?”
He said this to himself more than to Neale, who had become vastly interested in the subject. He eagerly watched the old man’s weather-beaten face.
Suddenly the woodsman raised his head and looked at Neale thoughtfully. He asked a question that seemed to have nothing at all to do with the subject in hand.
“What kind of a dog is this here Tom Jonah?” Ike demanded. “Ain’t he got no nose?”
Of course Ike M’Graw could see for himself very easily that Tom Jonah had a nose. It was pointed just then at the fox pelt in the old woodsman’s hands, and was wrinkled as the dog sniffed at the skin.
So Neale O’Neil knew that the man meant something a little different from what he said. He, in fact, wanted to know if Tom Jonah was keen on the scent, and Neale answered him to that end.
“We think he’s got a pretty good nose, Mr. M’Graw, for a Newfoundland. Of course, Tom Jonah is not a hunting dog. If he runs a rabbit he runs him by sight, not by scent. But give him something that one of the children wears, and he’ll hunt that child out, as sure as sure! They play hide and seek with him just as though he were one of themselves—only Tom Jonah is always ‘it.’”
“Uh-huh?” grunted the old man. Then he said: “Don’t seem as though any stranger could have come down from the attic and got through that hall yonder without this dog making some sort of racket.”
“I never thought of Tom Jonah,” admitted Neale.
“He was in here all night, they tell me,” went on Ike.
“Yes. But didn’t the kitchen man, John, let him out when he first came downstairs this morning?”
“No. I asked him. He said the dog didn’t seem to want to go out. He opened that door yonder into this back kitchen and called the dog. This here dog come to the door, but he did not want to go out and turned away. So John shut the door again.”
“Crackey!” exclaimed Neale. “Then there was somebody in here, and don’t you forget it, Mr. M’Graw!”
“Uh-huh? But why didn’t the dog give tongue? Was it somebody the dog knowed? You see, son, there’s been food stole from that pantry yonder durin’ the night. Could it be the feller that shot the fox from the attic winder was right in here when John called the dog, loadin’ up his knapsack with grub?”
“Why—why—”
“This dog must ha’ knowed him—eh?”
“I—I suppose so. But who could it be?” demanded Neale with wondering emphasis. “Surely it was none of our servants. And Luke Shepard and Sammy and I were in bed in one room. The girls—Mr. Howbridge—Mrs. MacCall—”
“I guess,” said the old man, grinning, “that the lady and that lawyer man can be counted out of it. None of you brought a twenty-two rifle with you, anyway.”
“No.”
“That’s what the fox was shot with. Here’s the pellet,” and Ike brought the little flattened lead bullet out of his vest pocket. “If it hadn’t been a good shot—spang through the brain—’twould never have killed the fox. He had his head on one side, yappin’, and that bullet took him right.
“Now, better keep still about this. No use frightening the ladies. Girls an’ women is easy frightened, I expect. I’ll speak again to Mr. Howbridge about it. But this here dog—”
He shook his head over Tom Jonah’s shortcomings, while Neale ran away to wash his hands and face before appearing at the lunch table.
The children around the table were in something of an uproar. Mrs. MacCall and Ruth were obliged to be firm in order to quiet Sammy, and Tess, and Dot.
For Agnes, unable to keep anything to herself, had blurted out all about the lovely sled-ride the older ones had enjoyed. Immediately the three younger children decided that they had been cheated.
“We wanted to go tobogganing, too,” Tess declared.
“I just love sliding downhill,” wailed Dot.
“Huh!” sniffed Sammy Pinkney. “A feller can’t have no fun where there’s big fellers and big girls. They always put you down, and leave you out of the best things.”
“You shall go sliding tomorrow if the snow holds off,” Ruth promised.
“Why not this afternoon, Ruthie?” begged Tess.
“Sister’s got something else to do this afternoon. Wait until tomorrow,” the oldest Kenway replied.
“It’s snowing already,” muttered Sammy disconsolately.
There were a few flakes in the air. But it did not look as though any heavy fall had begun.
“I don’t see why we need to have you go with us to slide,” Tess said, pouting. “We go sliding without you in Milton.”
“This is different, Tess,” Ruth said firmly. “Now, let us hear no more about it! You will annoy Mr. Howbridge.”
Sammy winked slyly at the two little girls. “Just you wait!” he mouthed so that only Tess and Dot heard him.
“Oh, Sammy!” murmured Dot. “What’ll you do?”
“Just you wait!” repeated the boy, and that mysterious statement comforted Dot a good deal, if it did not Tess Kenway. Dot believed that Sammy was fertile in expedient. She had run away with him once “to be pirates.”
Before the meal was over, Hedden came in and bent beside Mr. Howbridge to whisper into his ear.
“Oh! Has he come back again? I wondered where he went so suddenly,” said the lawyer. “Yes. Tell him I’ll come out to see him as soon as I am through.”
Neale knew that he referred to M’Graw. Bright-eyed and interested, he bent forward to say to Mr. Howbridge:
“I just told Mr. M’Graw something that I guess you’d wish to know, too, Mr. Howbridge. May I go with you when you speak to him?”
“Certainly, my boy. There’s nothing secret about it—not really. We are only puzzled about a suspicion that we have—”
“That there was somebody in the house that ought not to be here,” whispered the boy.
“That’s it. How did you know?”
“I’ll tell you later,” returned Neale O’Neil.
Agnes was glaring at him in a most indignant fashion. It always angered the second Corner House girl if Neale seemed to have any secret that she did not share.
“What’s the matter with you?” she hissed, when Neale turned away from their host. “Don’t you know it isn’t polite to whisper at table, Neale O’Neil?”
“What are you doing it for, then?” he asked her, grinning, and would vouchsafe no further explanation of the secret between Mr. Howbridge and himself.
As soon as the lawyer arose from the table to go out to the kitchen to interview Ike, Neale jumped up to go with him. Agnes saw him depart with sparkling eyes and a very red face. She was really angry with Neale O’Neil.
The boy was too much interested in the mystery of the shooter of the fox and how he had got in and out of Red Deer Lodge to be much bothered by Agnes’ vexation. He and the lawyer found the old woodsman sitting in the servants’ dining-room where he had been eating.
“Well, sir,” he began, when Mr. Howbridge and the boy entered, “’twixt us all, I reckon we’re gettin’ to the bottom of this here mystery. Did I tell you I couldn’t find no place where the feller stood out there in the snow last evening to shoot that fox from?”
“No.”
“But it’s a fac’. Now you tell him, sonny, what you told me about what you found in the attic. I’ve been up and made sure ’twas so.”
Neale told the surprised Mr. Howbridge of the proved fact that the fox was shot from one of the attic windows.
“And ’twas a play-toy rifle that done it—a twenty-two,” said the woodsman, as though to clinch some fact that had risen in his own mind, if not in the minds of the others.
“Now, let’s figger it out. We got enough fac’s now to point purty conclusive to who done it. Yes, sir.”
“Why, Ike, I don’t see that,” observed Mr. Howbridge.
“But you will, Mister, in a minute or so,” declared the old man, nodding with confidence. “Now, look you: Whoever was in this here house and made that fire in Miz’ Birdsall’s sittin’-room, was here when your people came day before yesterday.”
“No!” ejaculated Mr. Howbridge.
“Yes!” repeated M’Graw with decision.
“But you found that key in your cabin, did you not?”
“Yes. But I tell you I’ve figgered that out. Whoever ’twas come here, got the key, come in here, opened the back door, and then locked the front door on the outside same as always.”
“But—”
“Wait! No buts about it,” interrupted the woodsman. “I got it figgered to a fare-you-well, I tell you. Now! The feller locked the front door, went back to my shanty and hung up the key, and then came back in by the rear door. See? He—ahem!—was in here when that man, Hedden, of yours, and the others, come.”
“But there were no footprints of human beings about the house in the snow.”
“That’s all right. The feller that built the fire upstairs had done all his walking around before the snow fell the day after I went to Ebettsville. Don’t you see? He didn’t leave here because his footprints would be seen, and he couldn’t lock the house up behind him if he did leave and make it look as though it had never been opened.”
“You are guessing at a lot of this!” exclaimed the lawyer, not at all convinced.
“No. I’m jest figgerin’. Now, this Neale boy here heard that shot fired upstairs that killed the fox. He went up this mornin’ and saw where the shot was fired from. I seen it, too. So the feller that opened the Lodge and that lit the fire was up there at ten or half past last evening, for sure.”
“Well?” murmured the lawyer.
“He didn’t go out during the night, or his footprints would have been seen by John this morning in the new-fallen snow.”
“That sounds right.”
“It is right!” said the old man vigorously. “Now we come to this here dog you brought.”
“Oh, yes!” cried Mr. Howbridge. “How about Tom Jonah? Surely if there had been a stranger about—one who stole food from the pantry—he would have interfered.”
“Mebbe he would. And mebbe again he wouldn’t. He’s a mighty friendly dog.”
“But he is a splendid watchdog,” interposed Neale O’Neil.
“That may be, too,” Ike said, quite unshaken in his opinion. “If anybody had come in from outside and undertaken to disturb anything, that old dog would probably have been right on the job.”
“I see your point,” Mr. Howbridge admitted. “But this person who came down from the garret must have been a stranger.”
“Now we’re gittin’ to it. Let’s figger some more,” said M’Graw, with a chuckle. “If you think hard, an’ figger close enough, I guess ’most any puzzle can be solved.”