IN QUARANTINE
Boy, were we ever excited! And did we ever feel like yipping out a
string of “Hip-hip-hurray-for-our-side” stuff! For now, as you can see,
we had the cat by the tail. And soon it would be eating out of our
hands--meaning the whole cat, of course, and not just its tail.
Yes, sir, clever little sleuthing doo-dads that we were, we had the
goods on old “Mr. Ghost.” And to think that the mysterious “spook”
was the one man in the tangle whom we hadn’t even suspected! However,
that wasn’t anything against our work. For not the slightest thing had
bobbed up to hint to us that the family doctor wasn’t in Europe, as
everybody in the neighborhood believed.
Here is the dope as we had it spread out in our minds now: To solve the
secret that clouded the millionaire’s death, and probably to please
the dying man, the loyal family doctor had hidden himself for a year
in the closed house. There was deep mystery in his actions, of course,
but he would clear that up. Sharing certain unusual secrets with the
dead man, and an enemy of the scheming lawyer’s, he had kept in touch
with the granddaughter, and now was working with her, to fix it so the
lawyer couldn’t do any cheating stuff.
It was puzzling, of course, to understand why the hidden man, in his
friendly work, had slammed doors to scare the two old people away, when
the granddaughter, whom he was helping, had sent them here. But that
wasn’t anything. Maybe a queer broken brain, before it turned cold, had
given the hider his orders. Certainly, the “queer smell” was easily
explained. Every time the man went through the hall he had left a trail
behind him, just as I had noticed the smell when he was roosting on my
barrel coop.
But more puzzling than anything else--_contradictory_, even--was old
Ivory Dome’s swat on the head. You can see what I mean. If the two men
and the girl were secretly working together, why had one of the men
soaked the other as though he wanted to lay him cold? And that stormy
night, why had the hidden one left the house, of which he seemed to
have secret ways of getting in and out? Further, where did the crazy
gander come in under the new order of things and who really had it?
Bu-lieve me, we were on our toes now for the strange doctor to show up.
Not that we expected to corner him with our dope. But we had a hunch
that the time was come for him to drop his game of hide and seek and
put all the cards in plain sight on the table. That probably was why he
was coming here this morning.
Gimlet eyes that always were creeping around in search of “something!”
We’d find out now what that “something” was, for it had been found--the
secret of the millionaire’s death had been solved. We were dead sure of
that.
But it wasn’t to be our luck to see the strange doctor that morning.
And how we missed him, when he called at the big house, was a crazy
mess, and goes to show how Fate can make a monkey out of a fellow and
change his soup into sour vinegar.
There was a door to this room that we were in, with a heavy self-catch
on the outside. And swung shut by the wind, which had come up with the
sun and now was twisting the whole sandy countryside out of shape, we
seemed to be as completely imprisoned as though our “cage” had been
made of steel instead of heavy boards.
“Well, I’ll be jiggered!” came Poppy’s much-used expression, when
he found that the door had latched itself on the outside, where we
couldn’t reach it.
“Phew!” I gagged, holding my nose with one hand and feeling around in
the dark with the other. “Open the ventilator--quick!”
“The ‘ventilator’s’ closed, Jerry.”
“Go on!”
“Honest. I can’t budge it.”
I laughed then. I thought it was a good joke on us. For I never
_dreamed_ that we couldn’t jimmy the latch and quickly get out. But we
learned in the next twenty or thirty minutes that the man who had hung
this door had put it up for keeps.
Still, we _had_ to get out. For having broken one of the filled bottles
in kicking around in the dark, the gaggy drug smell was getting thicker
every minute. We tried throwing our double weight against the door.
That made it crack. Pretty soon we were panting from the hard work,
with the sweat doing canal stuff down our necks. But we kept on. And
finally the door went down, with the two of us sprawled on top of it
like a pair of four-legged octopuses.
Cooling off for a minute or two, we ran to the house, where Ma Doane
met us mysteriously at the kitchen door.
“Sh-h-h-h!” she breathed, with a finger to her thin lips.
Poppy let out his neck toward the inner rooms.
“Is the doctor here?” he inquired eagerly, though in a careful voice.
“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” and the housekeeper quietly
closed the doors leading into the adjoining rooms. Facing us, I saw
now how big her eyes were. “I don’t want your friend to hear me,” she
explained, meaning old Goliath, “for I find that he runs and tells
everything in the sick room. And Pa isn’t to know about this until
to-night, so the doctor said.”
“Know about what?” came quickly from Poppy.
“That all he’s got is the hives and indigestion. You see, Lawyer Chew
is liable to bring the sheriff here any minute to put us out. And when
Dr. Madden learned of the predicament I was in, he and I together
worked out a scheme to temporarily keep the lawyer away.” The gray eyes
sort of twinkled now. “The doctor isn’t quite ‘sure’ about Pa’s case.
See? And to be safe--for it might be very contagious, you know!--he
tacked up a quarantine sign on the front door. So now, if the sheriff
comes, we have only to show him the sign and tell him to scoot.”
“Hot dog!” laughed Poppy, thinking of how old fatty would huff and puff
in his defeat. “Where is the doctor, Mrs. Doane?--upstairs?”
“Oh, he’s gone.”
For an instant the leader looked blank.
“Gone!” he squeaked.
“He didn’t stay here more than ten or fifteen minutes.”
“But we thought he had come to clear up the mystery.”
“I don’t think he knows half as much about this mystery as you boys
imagine.”
Poppy looked at me.
“Shall we tell her, Jerry?”
“I think we ought to,” I waggled.
This talk stirred up the woman’s curiosity.
“You boys act as though you have a secret,” she leaned forward.
“Not only one,” laughed Poppy, “but a whole case of ’em.” Then he
added, with a curious look at the woman: “Didn’t your smeller put you
wise to anything about the doctor, Mrs. Doane?”
“My _smeller_? What do you mean?”
“Didn’t you notice that his clothes had a sort of _queer_ smell?”
“No-o,” came with a slow shake of her head.
“And you didn’t smell anything on him that made you think of--of
something else?”
The same answer was given.
“What do you know about Dr. Madden,” the question was then put to us,
“that you should speak of him so queerly?”
But Poppy wasn’t ready to answer that yet.
“And you’re positive,” he hung on, “that the doctor’s clothes didn’t
have a queer smell?--a sort of _drug-store_ smell?”
“I didn’t put my nose _on_ him,” came stiffly, “but I smelt nothing
when I stood beside him.”
Poppy dropped that point.
“All right. We’ll take it for granted that he had on other clothes....
Did he say anything about the granddaughter?”
“Yes. I think he was disappointed not to find her here.”
The leader gave me a quick wink.
“But if he and the girl aren’t mixed up together, as I told you last
night, how did he know she was coming here? You say it’s a secret.”
“Why!...” the woman stared. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“You say he was disappointed not to find the granddaughter here,” Poppy
went on. “Do you mean he was _surprised_?”
“Ye-es. He acted both surprised and disappointed--almost troubled,
in fact. And from words that he dropped offhand I got the impression
that he wanted to talk with her about something important. I told him
that so far as we knew she was hiding in Pardyville. And thinking I
might corner him, and thus prove the truth of your theory, I says:
‘Possibly, Doctor, you know _where_ she is hiding.’ But all I got was
a stare of surprise. ‘I wish,’ says he earnestly, ‘that I did know
where she is. For it is very important that we find her to-day. And
taking your tip, I shall drive over to Pardyville myself and see if I
can locate her.’ Then we put up the quarantine sign and he drove away.”
Poppy wasn’t so sure of himself now.
“And you really believe, Mrs. Doane,” says he, puzzled, “that the
doctor is dumb on where the girl is?”
“Remembering his earnest words and actions, I cannot doubt it for a
moment.”
We then told the woman about our discovery in the barn. And while we
were talking, the sound of hoofs and steel buggy wheels came to us from
the graveled drive, as on the preceding day. Running to the front door,
we got a glimpse of young fatty, driving his father’s rig, while on the
small half of the seat sat a tall, rangy man with a mean-looking star
pinned on his vest.