A SCREAM IN THE NIGHT
In putting the gander in our room, was it the “ghost’s” scheme to sort
of show us how helpless we were in the big spooky house? Not liking
the way we were messing around in his secret affairs, and finding out
things, as to-night, was he trying to scare us out?
Thoughts like these soon dried up our shivers. For we knew, all right,
who the “ghost” was. Yet it puzzled us to understand how the old man
could do so much “mystery” stuff without his wife catching on. She must
be an awfully sound sleeper, we concluded.
As an excuse for getting old Goliath up, we told him that some one was
in the house. But I don’t think he understood half what we were saying
to him. He was too sleepy. Then we went into the hall, where we met Ma
on her way to the kitchen with an empty hot-water bottle. She probably
didn’t mind parading around in front of us boys in her nightgown, but I
took it from her actions that it kind of embarrassed her to put on the
show in front of old Goliath.
“Oh, dear!” she cried, glad, I guess, that we were there to listen
to her further troubles. “I don’t know but what one of you boys had
better run downstairs and telephone for the doctor. For I’m having the
_awfullest_ time with poor Pa. It’s that tobacco smoke. He’s sick to
his stomach.”
Some more of the old man’s trickery, was our natural thought.
“When was he taken sick?” inquired Poppy. “After he got up?”
“After he _got up_? Laws-a-me! I can’t _get_ him up. That’s the
trouble. I tell him he’ll feel better if he goes outside for a spell.
But, no, he won’t listen to me.”
“And hasn’t he been out of bed at _all_?” pressed Poppy, in a queer
voice.
“No. He just lays there and groans. Nor has he let up a single instant
since I went to bed with him.”
“Well, I’ll be jiggered!” cried the tangled leader, looking at me.
At Ma’s orders we lit the kitchen stove and warmed some water,
which she poured into the rubber bottle. With this on his stomach,
the sufferer gradually quieted down. Nor could we make ourselves
believe, as we stood over him, that his sickness was put on. There
was real misery in his voice. And his wrinkled face was a sort of
yellowish-white, like old piano keys. Such a look couldn’t have been
manufactured for the occasion. We knew that.
Poppy and I were sort of up a tree, as the saying is. Pa’s stomach ache
had upset the whole works for us. If the old man had been in his room
all evening, as his wife said, then some one else had been secretly
in the house. For certainly the gander couldn’t of itself have opened
and closed doors. No, it had been brought here. We couldn’t doubt that
for a single moment. And sort of putting Pa out of the tangle for
the present, and suspecting the spy, we began to wonder, in growing
uneasiness, if, after all, there hadn’t been more deep _purpose_ back
of the crazy stunt than we had first imagined.
“What beats me,” says the leader, as we earnestly talked the matter
over, “is the easy way the spy slips in and out of the house. Locked
doors are the same to him as open doors. And he seems to be wise to
every little move we make. For instance, if his work is all on the
outside, as we suspected last night, how could he have known that we
were sleeping in the dead man’s room?”
“It sure is some tangle,” I waggled.
“I’ll tell the world. And _you_,” he pointed at the gander, “are the
biggest tangle of all.”
“Urk! Urk!” came throatily.
“Wa-al, I swan!” old Goliath came out of a nap. “Where did that beast
come from?”
“It belongs in the barn,” says Poppy. “And if you can manage to keep
awake for a few minutes longer, to help us take it back, we’ll reward
you with a beautiful celluloid stove poker.”
I had a lot of new stuff in my head as I followed the others to the
barn. As the leader had said, no part of the tangle was any queerer
than the gander itself. It had been brought to the big house for a
secret purpose, and furthermore it had been carried to our room for a
purpose. But was this really an act of the enemy, as we had suspected?
To take the view that the unusual gander was a sort of mouthpiece of
the crazy mystery, wasn’t it possible that some one, more completely
hidden to our eyes than the spy, and more helpless than we suspected,
was trying, in a sort of blind, stumbling way, to lead us into a
solution of the mystery through the almost human-acting bird itself?
And if we kept a close eye on the gander, in the barn, wouldn’t we be
likely to soon find out who the hidden one was?
This thought was new to both of us. And Poppy jumped at it when I
sprung it on him. Here was our scheme now: We’d lay low in the barn,
close to the gander, and then, at the least suspicious sound from the
spotted fowl, we’d flash our light. In that way neither friend nor
enemy could come into the barn to get the gander for further secret
stuff without us seeing him and thus learning who he was. More than
that, we had a clever little trapping scheme, as you will learn.
There was a barrel here, and a clothesline. And how easy it would be,
we planned, for one of us to hide in the barrel and do a trick with the
rope through the bunghole. We worked out all of the details. Then the
leader and I drew cuts to see who would have the bunghole job, for the
barrel was seven sizes too small for old Goliath. Anyway, we couldn’t
have trusted him alone. He was too much of a sleepy-head.
I got the short straw. That made me “it.” But I didn’t get _into_ the
barrel. To sort of make it safer for me, I scrooched and let Poppy put
the barrel over me, which gave me a neat roof. Then he tied the rope
across the doorway and threaded the loose end into the bunghole.
“Now, don’t forget, Jerry. You’re to let the rope lay flat. I’ll be in
the haymow with the flashlight. And if I hear any queer sounds down
here, on goes the light. See? I’ll yell if I see anybody beating it for
the door. Then you yank on the rope for dear life.”
“And mister geezer gets tripped up, huh?”
“That’s the dope.”
“But suppose he’s a friend, as I say.”
“Well, we aren’t going to kill him. And I have a hunch that if we don’t
stop him this way he’ll skin out as quickly as an enemy. For he’s
trying to keep in the dark. So do your stuff with the rope. And old
Goliath and I will be on top of him before he quits spinning.”
The giant grumbled sleepily as he followed the leader up the ladder
into the haymow. Such monkey-work, he said, just to keep a gander from
being stolen. If it was such a _precious_ gander, why didn’t we take it
to bed with us? What was the sense of losing all this sleep for nothing?
But pretty soon the grumbling voice died away. And how very quiet the
barn was now! Like a tomb. Yet there was plenty of racket where I was,
for the barrel acted like a sounding board for my galloping heart.
THUMP! THUMP! THUMP! That’s the way it sounded in my ears. Not that I
was scared, though. I just didn’t like being alone.
Squatting under a barrel isn’t the most comfortable job in the world,
let me tell you. I soon found that out. My bones began to ache. Nor did
squirming around help very much. I thought of Poppy, stretched out on
the haymow floor with his face in the ladder hole. How comfortable for
him! Somehow I always did manage to get the unluckiest jobs.
_What was that?_ A floor board had creaked. As though some one had
gently put his weight on it. _There!_ A footfall. No doubt of it. More
footfalls. Each as easy and as guarded-like as you please.
Then deep silence. The deadliest and awfullest silence I ever had
known. What was the matter with Poppy? Why didn’t he flash the light?
Had he and old Goliath both gone to sleep? It would seem so.
The gander hadn’t made a peep. So I knew it was still on its roost. Why
didn’t the man grab it, I thought. I wanted him to. Then maybe it would
squawk loud enough to wake up the gallery. Poppy sure was a peach to go
to sleep at a time like this. What I’d tell _him_.
_Phew!_ Of all the funny smells. I got my nose closer to the bunghole.
Some kind of a drug-store smell, I told myself.
The roof creaked over my head. And what do you know!--the man was
sitting on top of my coop now. It was _him_ I had smelt. Putting a
finger through the bunghole, I found that I could touch his leg. But
you can bet your Sunday shoes that I didn’t touch him very hard. I
guess not.
Ma had told us about “queer smells” in the house. On the dead man, too.
Was this the same smell, I wondered. One thing, I knew it wasn’t the
dead man himself. For whoever was sitting on my barrel was a whole lot
huskier in weight than a ghost. Besides, I had touched him. And you
can’t touch a ghost.
More footfalls! And louder ones this time. Some one else had come into
the barn. Oh, if Poppy would only flash the light! What was the matter
with that kid, anyway?
The man with the drug-store smell wasn’t on the barrel now. He had slid
down. And suddenly the barn was filled from top to bottom with the
awfullest scream you can imagine. The scared-to-death kind of a scream.
Boy, did my hair ever stand on end. Then I heard something else--a dull
thump on the barn floor.
“Jerry!” yipped Poppy out of his bed in the moon. “Yank the
rope--_quick!_ The flashlight won’t work.”
Well, I yanked. I yanked good and plenty, let me tell you. But I guess
I was too late. For nothing skidded into my rope. So, after a few
seconds, I tipped the barrel over and got on my feet.
Poppy had seen me jiggle the crippled flashlight to make it work. And I
could imagine that he was shaking it now to beat the cars. Pretty soon
he got a connection. And did a light ever look so good to me as then.
Oh, boy!
Scrambling down the ladder with the light in his hand, the leader
looked to me to be all arms and legs. Farther up I could see old
Goliath’s slow feet. The light made a round puddle on the floor. It had
found something and stopped. Something white and long.
“It’s Mr. Doane,” cried the leader, bending over the body. “Some one
knocked him out.”
Yes, sir, the long white thing on the barn floor was old Ivory Dome
himself. He was in his nightshirt, exactly as I had seen him the night
before in the kitchen. And his face was covered with blood. But he
wasn’t dead, as I first thought.
It was old Goliath who discovered that the gander was missing. But
just then neither Poppy nor I cared a whang whether the crazy bird had
skinned out of the barn of its own accord or had been stolen. What we
were thinking of instead was the old man.
Carrying him into the house, we washed the blood from his grizzled
hair, as it fringed his bald spot. The forehead high up had been
bruised, as though from a club swat. Doctoring the bruise as best we
knew how, and putting a bandage on it, we helped the vacant-eyed one
back to bed, where his wife, as we could see her through the open door,
was snoozing as peacefully as an over-fed kitten.
But she was out of bed the instant her eyes opened.
“Why!... What’s happened to Pa? Has he had another accident?”
“Hadn’t you missed him, Mrs. Doane?”
“Laws-a-me! Do you think I would have been lying here if I had _known_
that he wasn’t in bed with me? Has he been sleepwalking again?”
Poppy didn’t say anything. For that was better, he thought, than saying
too much.
“I knew he’d fall and hurt himself,” the woman ran on, to her own idea
of things. “Oh, dear! Such a man! Must I strap him in bed hereafter, as
they do with simpletons?”
Neither the leader nor I had asked the old man any questions about his
accident. Nor had he mumbled more than a word or two all the time we
were carrying him around and doctoring him up. For the most part he
just stared at us, as though his whole brain had been stunned. Maybe,
we thought, realizing that this was a much worse accident than the
first one, he wouldn’t have to pretend dumbness now. We hoped, though,
that the morning would find him all right again. Then we’d question
him, with Ma’s help. And certainly we ought to get _something_ out of
him. For he wouldn’t want to hang on to his secret if the rest of us
were liable to get what he got.
As though the night hadn’t been exciting enough for us, still another
surprise jumped at us when we got back to the big bedroom. The desk
was open! And everything in it had been carried away.
A few rifled desks more or less meant nothing in the sleepy life of old
Goliath, who already was snoozing in a heap on the floor. And after a
few minutes, we, too, stretched out on the bed to get some rest. But
we didn’t figure on going to sleep. After all the excitement it didn’t
seem possible to us that we could. And to be ready in a jiffy, no
matter what bobbed up, we kept our clothes on, even our shoes.