BEHIND THE MOON
Well, with all of Poppy’s cleverness, the wonder to me is, as I look
back, that fatty was fooled. For he wasn’t a dumb-bell. Yet, to our
good luck, he never caught on. And if ever you saw a disappointed face
it was his, which showed plainly enough that he knew how the will read.
Mrs. Doane was buzzing around like a bumblebee. It was “dearie this”
and “dearie that.” And when “dearie,” in walking up and down the
room, got out a compact and powdered “her” nose, I thought I’d die.
Everything looked _so_ natural, “she” purred--only it was more of a
squeak than a purr.
Having tried without success to get his mother on the telephone, young
fatty primped in front of the hall mirror, to make himself pretty, and
then sidled up to the “heiress” on the sofa.
“How did you know it was me?” he blushed.
“Oh!... I’m a mind reader,” and the sick-calf look that the “heiress”
gave him out of the corner of “her” eyes almost turned my stomach. But
fatty thought it was sugar and cream.
“Are you going to be here very long?” he inquired eagerly.
“Pos-sibly.”
“Say, can I--I-- I mean,” it finally tumbled out, “can I have a date
some night soon?”
“I’d love to, if--”
“If what?”
“If your mama will let you.”
“Huh! I don’t have to ask _her_ to go out on a date.”
“No-o?”
“I’m sixteen.”
“_Sweet_ sixteen.”
“Gee!” says fatty, in clover.
“I suppose you’ll be getting married ... soon.”
“I guess I’d marry you, all right,” the fortune hunter blurted out, “if
I had a chance.”
“Silly!”
“It’s funny my father doesn’t come.”
“Hasn’t he been here at all to-night?”
“No.”
“And grandpa’s will hasn’t been read?”
“No.... Say, you won’t forget, will you?”
“About the date?”
“Sure thing.”
“Oh!... I’ll never forget _that_.”
“And you know what you said,” reminded the fast worker.
“What?”
“About me--me-- You know.”
“Getting married?”
“Sure thing. Maybe we will, some day.”
“Little me and little you?”
“I guess you’re making fun of me now.”
“How could I?”
“I’m not little.”
“I think you’re cute.... Does your nose always look that way?”
“A hornet stung me.”
“You poor dear! If Aunty wasn’t looking, I’d kiss it for you.”
Fatty almost fell off the sofa.
“Say--” he gurgled. “Say-- Let’s go out and sit in the hall.”
“Would you try to kiss me in the dark?”
“I would if I got a chance.”
“When you’re with the girl you love, you want to be _brave_ and take a
chance.”
“Say, you aren’t like most girls.”
“I know that, all right.”
“But I like you the better for it.”
“You might not like me so well, if you knew _everything_.”
“Have you got another fellow?” came hastily.
“Oh, no! You’re the only lover I ever had.”
“I _do_ love you.”
“Of course.”
“There’s something about your voice that seems familiar to me.”
“I probably whispered to you in your dreams.”
“I’ll dream about you to-night, all right.”
“You might not, if you knew _everything_.”
“Why do you keep saying that?”
“Oh, I just want to tease you.... There, the clock struck midnight.”
“I guess you’re lucky.”
“In having you for a ... friend?”
“Yes ... sure thing. But that isn’t what I meant.”
“No-o?”
“You’re lucky that you got here just when you did.”
“Why?”
“Don’t you know about the will?”
“Grandpa’s will?”
“Sure thing. He was going to cut you off if you hadn’t got here before
midnight. I heard my father tell my mother.”
“And now ... what do I get?”
“Everything.”
“And what do _you_ get?”
“Nothing.”
“But you’ve got _me_.”
“I wish we were older.”
“Why?”
“We’d get married right away.”
“And my money would be your money, wouldn’t it?”
“Oh!...” fatty quickly covered up, “I wasn’t thinking of _that_.”
“Of course not!”
“But we can be engaged. I think my father would like it.”
“How romantic. Can’t we elope, too?”
Here the loud slamming of the kitchen door ended the little comedy, and
who should come steaming into the house but old road-roller, himself.
Say, was he ever _mad_ after his imprisonment in the barn. Nor was he
fooled a single instant by Poppy’s disguise.
“So it’s _you_?” he thundered, yanking the wig off.
The fat kid’s eyes almost popped out of his head.
“Say-- Say--” Then his face got red.
“I don’t suppose you’ll want to keep that date ... now,” purred Poppy,
who can take his medicine with a grin.
“I’ll punch your head!”
“Trickery!” stormed the lawyer. “Base, degrading trickery.”
“How about yourself?” Poppy slung back.
“Shut up! And more than that, pack up--the whole caboodle of you--and
git out of here.”
“That’s it, Pa. Kick ’em out. For they threw hornets at me. And water,
too.”
“They’ll suffer for this!”
“Maybe not as much as you think,” Poppy stood his ground. “For we’ve
got the goods on you, Mr. Lawyer Chew. A diary that we found here tells
how you coaxed Mr. Danver to make a new will. You lied to him, too. He
asked you to write to his granddaughter, but you never did. And the
law’ll fix you for that.”
“Silence!”
“Poof!” Poppy snapped his fingers under the fat nose. “You can yell
your head off, you big bag of wind, and you can’t scare _me_.”
“Git out of here!”
“Go for him, Pa. Throw him out.”
“Um ...” came a drawl from the door, and in swung old Goliath. “Jest
try puttin’ that boy out, or the tother one, either,” says he, rolling
up his sleeves, “an’ see what happens.”
“Who are you?” came the further thunder.
“_Me?_” and the giant posed like an old fool. “I’m jest little Red
Riding Hood.”
“Are you the man who carried me to the barn?”
“Yep. An’ if Poppy says the word, I’ll carry you to the front door an’
chuck you clean into the road.”
Here another voice spoke up.
“Stop!--all of you,” cried Mrs. Doane, and the tired, defeated look on
the woman’s thin white face hurt me like a knife jab. “I’ve come to the
end of my rope.” She turned to Chew. “You have won out. I’m sorry. And
I shall forever hold it against Corbin Danver for disinheriting his
own kin. There were a few things here that I wanted myself,”--the poor
old soul wiped her eyes--“but I can get along without them. What hurts
me worse is Miss Ruth’s loss. She asked me to come here, and I did,
and I’ve done everything I could to find her, and to help her. Now,
I’m--I’m sick and weary of it all. I’m going to bed. If the rest of you
want to go to bed, you’ll find plenty of rooms. In the morning I’ll
pack up my things and go home.... Good night.”
Well, that sort of put an end to the scrap. But I’m not so sure that
old Chew wouldn’t have dumped us out of the front door, all right, if
it hadn’t been for Goliath. Yes, the giant saved us ... and afterwards
we remembered it!
Poppy and I felt pretty sick as we crawled into our bed in the big
room. It was galling to us to have old Chew win out. Of course, we
hadn’t lost anything ourselves. But we were on the granddaughter’s
side. And her loss was our loss, sort of.
Tap! ... tap! ... tap! ...
Jerked out of a crazy dream, I sat up in bed and rubbed my eyes. The
gander! It had tapped that way to get into the house. How well I
remembered that night! And now it was tapping again. Somewhere in the
big room.
Excited, I got Poppy up. And between us we traced the sound to one of
the fancy cloth wall panels. As I have written down, these panels were
pictures. And in this particular picture there was a big yellow moon.
What was it the diary had said? The hidden staircase behind the moon!
There was a secret door here. And if we could open it, the mystery
would be over.
Poppy told me then, in a low excited voice, why he had been measuring
the room that afternoon. He had suspected that the wall before us was
too thick to be natural. Now, in quick measuring, both in the big room
and the one next to it, we found that there was a four-foot secret wall
chamber here.
And the way to get into that hidden room, where the gander was still
tapping, was through the “moon” picture. We felt all over the wall for
a hidden spring. Then we pressed the moon itself--and out swung the
whole panel!
“Urk! Urk!” says the spotted gander, acting tickled to see us. “Urk!
Urk!” and as though to guide us, it turned and started up a flight of
winding stairs, flying from step to step.
We followed it, using our flashlight, which showed us that the stairs
went down, as well as up. I don’t mind telling you that I kept pretty
blamed close to the leader. It was a spooky adventure, let me tell you.
Where was the gander taking us? What was there up above? Was it a peril
of some kind? And surprised by us in its secret den, would it jump at
us and try to kill us, as it had tried to kill old Ivory Dome in the
barn? You can see what our thoughts were like.
Coming to the top of the stairs, which had taken us almost to the roof,
we found ourselves in a little room, which we learned afterwards was a
secret part of the big attic. Here we found a cot. And sound asleep on
the cot was a _girl_. The prettiest girl I’d ever seen in all my life.
The granddaughter! We had found her hiding place at last! But who could
have dreamed that the hiding place was _here_?