Shovels
I went into the kitchen and put through a fairly good batch of baking,
considering that I’d got a late start at it. I had intended only to
stir up a sunshine cake for supper; but when a thunder shower came,
washing everything cool and sweet, I opened the kitchen wide to it,
and made an angel cake out of the whites of the eggs, and baked a big
pan of ginger bread. Zinnia did the washing up; so I was all through
and frosting the cakes, when Miss MacDonald telephoned down to the
kitchen and asked me to go for a walk with her.
Between times, I’d roasted three chickens and got a salad in the
icebox. I wouldn’t need to turn a hand to supper for an hour; so I
told her that I’d like nothing better than a breath of the clean,
sage-seasoned air, and that I’d be ready in ten minutes. I gave Zinnia
a few directions, and went upstairs to change my shoes.
As I came down the front stairs, into the living-room, I saw Mrs.
Ricker coming up the steps to the porch. She was toting a big old
shovel; carrying it out in front of her, and carefully, right side up,
like it was a pancake turner and she had a pancake on it. I stopped in
my tracks. There are some connections that the mind refuses: President
Coolidge with a six-gun, for instance, or Chief Justice Taft with a
saxophone, or Mrs. Ricker with a heavy, dirty old shovel.
She stopped to turn sidewise and open the screen door with her foot,
and then she came straight along into the living-room, poking the
thing toward Miss MacDonald.
“I want you to look at this,” she said.
Miss MacDonald, all crisp in white linen, backed away a mite; but she
looked, as directed.
I came hurrying to look too. I don’t know what I expected to
see—nothing less than a dead scorpion; but, certainly, something more
than I did see: an old iron shovel with dirt on it.
“Well?” Miss MacDonald questioned.
“I was going to Martha’s grave when the shower came up. I stopped in
the cabin. This shovel, and another one, were inside the door there.
Look at that earth—it is fresh earth. Now I tell you, two people have
been digging around this place; and they were at it not longer ago
than yesterday, more likely this morning.”
“My word!” said Miss MacDonald. It seemed to me there was more
annoyance in her voice than there was interest or astonishment.
“Somebody,” I pronounced, “still believes that there is money hidden
around here.”
Mrs. Ricker nodded her satisfaction.
“But surely,” Miss MacDonald said, “around a farm, a ranch, that is,
around a place of this sort there must be a great deal of digging
going on. Gardens—vegetables, you know. That is—one thing and
another.” She fumbled it, like that.
“We don’t make garden here in July,” I told her. “The vegetable
gardens and greenhouses are about three miles away from where Mrs.
Ricker found the shovels.”
“To be sure.” She puckered her brows. “But—Mr. Stanley spoke of
fishing. Don’t the men dig worms for bait?”
“Anyone,” I told her, “who did bait fishing on the Desert Moon, would
be about as popular as an S.P.C.A. convention at a round-up. Likely
you’ll learn our ways, in time. Bait fishing isn’t one of them.”
While I had been getting this off my mind, Danny had come downstairs.
I guess we must have looked funny, the three of us, standing there and
staring at the shovel, which Mrs. Ricker was still holding as if it
were a pancake turner.
“But—what is it?” Danny inquired.
“It is a shovel,” said Mrs. Ricker.
“Yes, I know. But what about it?”
“It has fresh earth on it,” Mrs. Ricker explained. “It means that
someone is still hunting for something on this ranch.”
“I—don’t understand,” Danny faltered.
“You do, if anyone does,” Mrs. Ricker said, trying to make it sound
off-handish; but it did not.
To my surprise, Miss MacDonald answered, “I think that you are
mistaken, Mrs. Ricker. Miss Canneziano knows, I fancy, no more about
the shovel than you do.”
Mrs. Ricker’s face flushed. She carried the thing out and threw it
into the yard with a gesture of furious anger. When Miss MacDonald and
I passed her on the porch, she turned her head away and did not look
at us.
“If we hurry,” I said, “we’ll have time to walk to the cabin and see
the other shovel.”
“Bother the other shovel! We don’t want to hurry. Can’t we get down to
the stream, somewhere close here, and find a place where we can be
alone to talk?”
“Right down this path,” I answered, and started down it. She followed
me. For fifty yards or more neither of us said a word. I was too put
about to feel like talking.
Why should she have told me to “bother the shovel”? Why had she acted
so peculiarly about the shovels, anyway; choosing to assume that they
were unimportant? If, as I supposed she was thinking, Mrs. Ricker had
gone to the trouble to fix up those two shovels, and to carry one of
them in, to hoodwink us, that was important. I was sure in my own mind
that Ollie Ricker had not done that. If she had not, and if two people
were digging around the place, they were digging for something,
weren’t they? For what? For exactly what I had said—for money. Worms!
I must have made a sound that was suggestive of my disgusted
annoyance, for Miss MacDonald stepped up to walk beside me on the
narrow path.
“I am sorry,” she said, “that I have seemed so exasperatingly stupid:
but I know that those shovels are of no importance.”
“I don’t see how you could know that,” I said.
“I am sorry again: but I have promised not to tell you how I know it.”
“Not to tell me!”
“I meant, of course, that I had promised not to tell anyone. My
promise was made to Mr. Stanley. Since this has come up, I am sure
that he will allow me to break it and tell you later what it is that I
can’t tell you now.”
“Sam!” I said. I was mad all over. I had thought that, anyway, Sam was
open and above board with me.
“You’ll understand all about it, later,” she said. “Please don’t be
vexed. I have some really good news. First, the handwriting on the
checks, the photograph, and the note all tally accurately. That must
mean, that Gabrielle Canneziano wrote all of them. Next, I have worked
out the key to the code letter——”
“Lands alive!” I said, my astonishment and admiration getting the best
of my bad humor. “In this short time? Talk about wonders——”
“Not a bit of it. The code is so simple that I am surprised that
people, who have wits enough to use a code at all, would use it.
“The keys on typewriters, with a standard keyboard, are arranged, you
know, for the touch system of writing: a, s, d, f, g, so on. All that
this code amounts to, is taking the letters straight as they come
along: a, b, c, d; and so on. From the center line of letters, they
skip to the upper line, making the ‘q’ be a ‘j’ and from the upper
line down to the lower line, making the ‘z’ a ‘t.’ They use only the
letters on the keyboard, and the punctuation marks as they would
rightly be used. Generally they put a hyphen after the letter to be
capitalized, though occasionally they use the capital letter. It is so
childish that I fancy it is only a friendship code, and that it is not
used for matters of any real importance.”
“Then this letter is of no importance?” I asked.
“Not to the writer. Of vast importance to us, I believe. It explains
why the original letter was stolen, among other things. Here is one of
the copies that I made of it.”