SIX PINK PEARLS
I didn’t go to Sunday-school the following morning. Mother said I
wasn’t to go anywhere in public till I got bleached out. She used
scouring powder on me and lemon juice and sweet cream. When she
completed her rubbing and scrubbing I was only a few shades outside of
my natural color.
“But your clothes are ruined,” she declared, looking them over with a
frown. “I can’t possibly get the ink out of them. Oh, Jerry! How can
you do such things?”
“It was an accident,” I defended, shifting my weight uneasily from one
foot to the other.
“Of course. But it seems to me you have more than your share of such
accidents. What will your father say?”
“Where is Dad?” I countered, running my tongue over my upper lip in
search of more cream.
“He drove to Ashton to see about his insurance. There was a fire in
the brickyard last night.”
“I know all about the fire,” I returned quickly. “I even know who
started it. That’s why I asked for Dad.”
She looked startled until I told her about our mysterious prowler. Then
she gave a scattered laugh.
“Jerry! What queer ideas you do get.”
“Queer ideas?” I echoed stiffly.
“To imagine that a mysterious man is trying to steal your cats.”
“But it’s so,” I persisted.
“Nonsense. More than likely it’s some boy trying to bother you.”
“It’s a man,” I declared.
“But why should a man try to get your cats away from you?”
“That’s the mystery. We don’t know why the prowler wants the yellow
cat. But it’s a cinch he started the brickyard fire last night.”
“Your father will have a good laugh when he hears this.”
I let my neck go stiff.
“All right,” I said, with a sharp bob of my head. “I won’t tell Dad if
I’ve got to be made fun of. But you just wait and see who’s right.”
When the boy came with the Sunday newspapers I rolled up the one that
had printed the professor’s cat farm advertisement and beat it for the
old mill. Peg was alone when I tumbled in through the door. He took the
news section while I buried myself in the funny pictures.
Presently he gave a gasp, as though he had run across something in the
newspaper that amazed him. I glanced up and found him staring into my
face.
“Here’s a big article about Mrs. Kepple,” he said.
“Our ten-dollar woman?” I inquired quickly.
He nodded and handed me the folded newspaper, putting a finger on the
article that had come under his attention.
When I saw the column heading I was so excited I could hardly read.
“_Mysterious Pearl Robbery_” is what stood out before my eager eyes
in big black letters. I quickly absorbed the news story, learning
therefrom that Mrs. Peter Kepple had been robbed of six pink pearls.
Valued at two thousand dollars each, the pearls had mysteriously
disappeared from a wall safe in her Chicago home. In describing the
pearls the article stated that they were of uniform size, unmounted,
and were considered remarkable in their unusual sheen and luster.
The thief, according to the newspaper, had seemingly left no clews
behind him. The police and detectives were baffled. Exactly what day
or hour the pearls had been lifted from the safe no one knew. Hurrying
to get her household in order for a lengthy absence, Mrs. Kepple had
only discovered that the gem case was empty when the representative of
a bonded safe deposit company called at her home to receive her jewels
into storage.
I was still buried in the absorbing article when the sound of squeaking
shoes carried to my ears. A moment later Red and Scoop trailed into the
mill dressed up in their Sunday clothes.
Peg promptly hoisted his big nose into the air and sniffed.
“Wough!” he cried contemptuously. “I smell perfume.”
“Ma made me use some of her toilet soap on my face,” Red confessed
sheepishly.
“You look sort of 99-98/100% pure,” grinned Peg.
“I didn’t want to dress up for Sunday-school but she made me,” Red
continued unhappily, giving his starched collar a vicious jerk. “Blame
it! How can any one expect a fellow to breathe with a thing like this
clamped on his windpipe?”
“If your ma wants to dress you up like a preacher she ought to buy you
some nice pink pearls for shirt studs.”
I could tell from this remark that Peg was itching to startle the
newcomers with an account of the pearl robbery. So I let him go ahead.
When he ran out of wind I offered to read the article aloud. It
concluded with a reference to the rose-colored cat that had escaped my
attention on the first brief reading.
“The unfortunate owner of the stolen pearls, as is well known along the
North Shore, has the distinction of possessing the most valuable cat
in Chicago, if not in the entire country. This remarkable feline, Lady
Victoria, has secured for her mistress many coveted beauty prizes, and
it has been reported that Her Majesty is valued at no less than five
hundred dollars.”
“A lot of newspaper bunk,” snorted Scoop, when I concluded. “That alley
cat win beauty prizes? Bah!”
“Yes,” followed up Peg, “if the cat we chloroformed is a prize-winner,
like the newspaper says, Red here is entitled to a beauty medal the
size of a washtub,” and he gave us the wink.
“Hey!” scowled Red, going stiff and scrappy. “How do you get that way?”
I joined in the laugh that followed.
“Anyway,” I put in, tossing the newspaper aside, “it’s a cinch ‘Her
Majesty’ won’t pull down any more beauty prizes.”
“Ain’t that a fact,” agreed Scoop, following me in thought to the cat
grave on the crest of the adjacent hill.
“I have the feeling,” I added, “that there’s going to be a six-cylinder
shake-up in the Kepple family when they learn that their prize-winner
has kicked the bucket.”
“Let’s hope,” put in Scoop, with a shrug of his shoulders, “that we
don’t get damaged in the shake-up.”
Peg went thoughtful.
“We do a lot of guessing,” he said slowly, “and more than half of the
time we guess wrong. But I’m going to make the prediction that there’s
some unknown connection between the rose-colored cat, the stolen pearls
and the mysterious prowler. From the way the article reads I take it
that the cat was sent to us about the time the pearls disappeared.
That in itself strikes me as being more than a coincidence.” He let
this thought sink in, then added: “Possibly the cat buyer isn’t the
mysterious prowler, as we think. The newspaper mentions detectives.
Maybe the man who boarded at the farmhouse is a Chicago detective.”
Here Red gave a yip and jumped into the conversation.
“I know,” he cried. “The cat buyer is a detective, as Peg says, and the
prowler is the pearl thief.”
This was contrary to Scoop’s theory that the cat buyer was in reality
the mysterious prowler.
“Why should the thief hang around Tutter?” I put in, unwilling to
immediately accept Red’s view. “The newspaper says he got away with the
pearls. Why doesn’t he play safe and head for Mexico or South America?”
“I guess we know well enough why he’s hanging around here,” returned
Red. “He wants the yellow cat. Don’t you see, Jerry? The thief is
somebody who knows Mrs. Kepple pretty well. Not satisfied with hooking
the pearls he intends to steal her cat. Um---- I guess there’s a lot
of crooks who’d steal a five-hundred-dollar cat if they had a chance.
Doesn’t that sound reasonable?”
I told him his idea didn’t register with me at all. A hot argument
followed. Then Peg flagged my attention, pressing me with questions
bearing on the previous night’s adventure.
“And you say you didn’t get a look at the prowler’s face, Jerry?”
I shook my head “no.”
“And you don’t know whether the man is short or tall or skinny or fat?”
I squeezed my memory.
“He was a big man,” I said slowly. “Not fat, but well-built. Had he
been skinny I would have knocked him over when I rammed into him.”
“You had a good look at the cat buyer the afternoon we followed the
Strickers into the country,” proceeded the questioner. “Would you call
him a big man?”
“No-o,” I returned slowly. “He seemed more like a boy just growing into
a man.”
Peg’s black eyes snapped with satisfaction.
“Exactly!” said he, and turned to the others. “You’re right, Red. The
prowler and the cat buyer are two different men. And, that being the
case, what more likely than that one is a detective, as I say?”
“Nix,” scowled Scoop, unwilling to see his theory go down in defeat.
“The fact that we have the cat buyer’s cap is evidence that the man was
in the mill last Thursday night.”
Peg crossed the room and removed the gray cloth cap from its peg.
“I happen to know,” he said quietly, “that this isn’t the cat buyer’s
cap, as you imagine. When I was down town yesterday afternoon I met the
farmer’s wife on the street and she told me she had found a gray cloth
cap in the closet of the vanished boarder’s bedroom. Also the black hat
he wore the evening he disappeared from the farmhouse was his own and
not the farmer’s. You see, Scoop, you guessed wrong. I intended to tell
you all the woman said but I forgot about it in the rush of fixing the
ink trap.”
Scoop’s chestiness went punctured and he shut up. He’s a good pal, and
I like him a lot, but I can’t say was I sorry to see him get tripped
up. A fall now and then lets him know without us telling him that he’s
just as likely to stumble over his own feet as we are to stumble over
ours.
“Come along,” he growled to Red, “it’s Sunday-school time.”
Left alone, Peg and I went deeper into a discussion of the mystery.
But the more we talked about the affair the greater became our mental
confusion. If the prowler were indeed the pearl thief, why was he
risking his liberty to get possession of the yellow cat? Suppose he
were arrested in the act of stealing it. The police would search his
pockets and find the stolen pearls. That would mean a jail sentence for
him. Easy. Why then did he invite a situation that was so likely to
bring about his downfall?
Peg said it was the five hundred dollars. I argued in return that Lady
Victoria wouldn’t be worth five hundred dollars to the thief because he
couldn’t sell her. If he tried that he would be arrested.
And if the vanished cat buyer were a Chicago detective, as Peg still
contended, why did he work so mysteriously in the dark, instead of
coming to us openly to enlist our support? Where was he hiding out? Who
sent him the telegram from the state capital?
“To-morrow,” reflected Peg, “is the day Mrs. Kepple arrives at the
Walkers Lake Sanitarium. Let’s hope she’ll have an answer to the
riddle.”
This concluding reference to the owner of the rose-colored cat recalled
to my troubled mind the tragic outcome of Scoop’s operation. And
anxiety settled deeper about me as my thoughts probed the future.