THE MYSTERIOUS SOAP MAN
We watched the rickety buggy until it had disappeared in the direction
of town in a cloud of dust.
Tom was the first one to speak up.
“I was asleep at the switch,” he said, talking more to himself than to
us, “not to have suspected it.”
Scoop turned quickly.
“Not to have suspected what?” he inquired.
“Last Friday noon,” our new chum told us, “that man came to our back
door peddling books. And that same night some one tried to steal the
talking frog. Don’t you see the connection, fellows? The soap man is a
spy of Gennor’s. That’s why he’s hanging around here, peddling books
one week and soap the next. His peddling is just a blind.”
We were excited.
“For almost two weeks,” Tom told us, “the sway-backed horse has been
stabled in the deserted mill. I saw it there and wondered whose animal
it was. But I never connected it with the book agent or suspected that
its owner, a spy of the enemy’s, was hiding in the upper part of the
mill, watching our house.”
Scoop was thinking.
“Posselwait,” he murmured, repeating the soap man’s name. “Ajax
Posselwait. Um....” He started down the road under a sudden idea. “Come
on, fellows,” he grinned. “We’ll go over to Mrs. Kelly’s house and sell
her some Bubbles of Beauty.”
I laughed when he said that. For Mrs. Kelly, who lives in the country,
is one of the plainest-looking women you can imagine. She has a fat,
freckled face and red hair. Her husband, an old friend of Dad’s, was
killed in a runaway the year I started to school.
“Do you think you can make her beautiful?” I inquired, grinning at our
leader.
“I can’t see how we can possibly fail,” he laughed, “with such
wonderful soap to use on her as this.” He squinted into one of his pink
boxes and smelled of its contents. Then he added, serious: “Selling her
beauty soap, though, is the least important part of our errand. What I
want more than her money is a chance to peep into the old Matson
Bible.”
This recalled to my mind that the murdered puzzle maker and Mrs. Kelly
had been related, which explains how the family Bible had come into her
possession, together with a number of other things that had belonged to
the old man.
“What do you want to read her Bible for?” I inquired, puzzled to
understand our leader’s motive.
“Well,” he countered, “if the miser had a brother, there would be a
record of it in the family Bible, wouldn’t there?”
“A brother?” I repeated.
“Jerry, didn’t you notice anything familiar about the soap peddler?”
“No,” I said.
“Then you better have your eyes tested,” grunted Scoop. “For he looks a
lot like old Mr. Matson. The same thin face; eyes set close together.
Don’t you remember how the old puzzle maker looked?”
I did remember, for the miser had been dead but two years. And now that
Scoop had directed my thoughts to it, I could acknowledge to a distinct
resemblance between the soap peddler and the dead man. Certainly, I
checked off in my mind, the two men had the same kind of shifting,
close-set eyes.
“But the soap man’s name is Posselwait,” I said, bewildered.
“It’s no trick,” said Scoop, “for a man engaged in crooked work, as
this man is, to change his name.”
“You think his real name is Matson?”
“It isn’t impossible. Certainly he looks enough like the dead puzzle
maker to be his brother.”
“Why do you call the murdered man a puzzle maker?” Tom spoke up.
“Because,” informed Scoop, “puzzle making was his hobby. A queer old
duck, he liked to stump people with original conundrums and puzzles. He
was smart about it, too. Just before he was murdered he made a ten-ring
wire puzzle that no one could solve but himself. Pa tried it. So did
Jerry’s pa and half of the men in our town. It was some puzzle, I want
to tell you! After the old man had been murdered, people tried to find
the ten-ring puzzle. But it had disappeared along with the old man’s
money. And it hasn’t been seen or heard of to this day.”
“Maybe,” said Tom, using his thinker, “the puzzle had something to do
with the murder.”
Scoop stared, his jaw sagging.
“Why!... No one ever thought of that!”
“Queer,” I spoke up, still bewildered, “that the murdered man’s brother
should be a spy of the Chicago manufacturer’s. Maybe we’re mixed up on
that point.”
“Not on your life,” waggled Tom. “I know that the soap man is a spy.
For if he isn’t, why should he be hiding in the old mill?”
I shrugged.
“Search me,” I said.
“His main reason for being in the neighborhood,” Tom went on, sure of
himself, “isn’t to make women beautiful. Not so you can notice it! The
spiel he gave us about his wonderful soap was bunk, and nothing else
but. He can’t string me. For I know that it takes more than soap to
drive away warts and things. His soap may be good, but it won’t do all
of the wonderful things that he claims for it.”
Scoop grinned.
“We can find out how good the soap is by using it on Mrs. Kelly.”
“If it makes her beautiful,” I laughed, “we ought to get a dollar a
cake for it.”
“Easy,” waggled Scoop, his eyes dancing.
He screwed up his forehead.
“Fellows, it doesn’t make any difference to us whether the soap will
make women beautiful or not. We’re going to peddle it just the same.
For we’ve got to keep an eye on the soap peddler until we get word from
Washington and know for sure that the talking frog drawings have been
registered and that everything is safe for us. By working for mister
spy as assistant beautifiers, we will be able to camp on his trail and
no questions asked. See?”
There was sense in that all right.
On our way to Mrs. Kelly’s house we came to the Pederson farm. Mr. and
Mrs. Orvil Pederson are Norwegians. When they talk English they get
their words twisted up.
“Well,” I grinned, “if we’re going to do any beautifying this morning,
we might as well start in here.”
“Sure thing,” laughed Scoop. He patted me on the back. “You’re a good
talker, Jerry. Go ahead and show your stuff.”
The other fellows followed me to the porch and I knocked, chesty-like,
on the kitchen door. Mrs. Pederson was cooking something that smelled
awfully good. It was a warm September day. When she came to the door
her face was two shades redder than a ripe tomato. Her nose was red,
too. She didn’t look very beautiful.
Taking a cake of Bubbles of Beauty from a box, I began:
“Mrs. Pederson, your face tells me that you haven’t been using the
right kind of toilet soap.” I showed her the cake in my hand. “This
kind of soap,” I told her, “will make you beautiful.”
“What?” she cried, in a shrill voice. “Is it so ugly that I am in my
face that you should come here to tell me about it in my own house like
a young smart aleck?”
I saw that I had made a bad start.
“I mean,” I said quickly, “that you will become even more beautiful
than you are if you will use our marvelous Bubbles of Beauty instead of
just ordinary toilet soap. Bubbles of Beauty,” I recited, “has taken
more warts from women’s noses than all of the automobiles and talking
machines in the world. It changes wrinkles into dimples; blemishes into
blushes; makes sallow skins pink.”
You see, I have a good memory!
“Mrs. Pederson,” I went on, getting in some of the soap man’s gestures
as I recited his street-corner speech, “let me ask you as a
disinterested friend, who has done the most for this country, Mr.
Edison or Mr. Pollywiggle?”
“Gallywiggle,” Scoop hissed into my ear.
“Mr. Ford,” I went on, “or Mr. Gallywiggle?”
My customer blinked her eyes and looked dizzy.
“Mr. Mortimor Hackadorne Gallywiggle,” I recited, using my hands, “the
president of our company, the friend of all human beings. The man who
has turned bushels of blemishes into barrels of—of——”
“Blushes,” prompted Scoop, and I could hear him giggling.
Mrs. Pederson opened the door. I thought that she wanted to take a
close look at my soap. So I held it out to her, telling her how it took
Mr. Gallywiggle, the friend of humanity, fifty years to learn how to
make. I told her how wonderfully beautiful she would be when she had
used the new toilet soap for a few days. I told her a lot of things. I
guess I told her too much!
Swish! Bang! Down came a broom on my head. It made me see seventeen
million stars. I was too dazed in the moment and too surprised to run
away. I was too dazed even to understand what she was screeching at me
as she jabbed me in the stomach with the broom. Scoop saved my life by
dragging me down the porch steps.
When I got my senses back, sort of, I was standing in the middle of the
country road.
“Anything knocked out of kilter, Jerry?” Scoop inquired, grinning.
“I’m about two inches shorter,” I said, feeling of my neck and kind of
screwing my head around.
“She gave you some awful wallops.”
I admitted it.
“She had no right to do it,” Scoop went on, his face darkening. “It
wasn’t fair. She might have been ladylike and told you to go away if
she wasn’t interested in your soap. Your ma and my ma wouldn’t have
done a trick like that. No ladylike woman would.... She needs a good
lesson,” he waggled.
“Go up to the door and scold her,” laughed Tom.
“Better than that,” said Scoop, “I’m going to turn the tables on her
and make her coax me to sell her a cake of my soap.”
I had a picture of him doing that!
“If you try it,” I said, “you better make out your will before you
start in.”
He grinned at me.
“Jerry, ol’ pal, I don’t want to hurt your feelings or knock on your
system, but I’ve got a hunch that your selling spiel needs polishing
up. It’s—— Well, to use the soap peddler’s expression, it isn’t
artistic. It lacks tact.”
That made me hot.
“I hope that she doesn’t get rheumatism in her arms,” I shot at him,
“when she starts after you with her broom.”
I watched him saunter down the farmhouse lane. Then I sat down on a big
rock and waited for Mrs. Goliath to get into high gear with her broom.
My head hurt something fierce. But I grinned, notwithstanding. Oh, boy,
how I grinned! He’d catch it. I was glad. For he was acting altogether
too chesty. He needed taking down a peg or two.