I DON’T know what I expected when I heard that key turn in the lock and
knew that Hamish had at last succeeded in opening the door of the
hidden cupboard. I felt as I had ever since entering the room,
breathless and strangely excited. Of course Miss Rose’s remark about
the family skeleton had been just a joke. I did not expect to hear the
rattle of bones as the door swung outward and see a cadaverous figure
tumble onto the floor. But still I did expect something.
The door squeaked protestingly on its hinges as Hamish pulled it wide.
The room was utterly silent as we all gazed blankly on three wide
vacant shelves. Empty!
The silence was broken by a scream. It was Hattie May again. “Look!”
she cried. “It’s m-moving—the bottom—look!”
She was right. Slowly before our fascinated eyes, the board which
formed the base of the cupboard was lifting like the lid of a box.
Slowly from under it there was emerging—not a bony grinning skull—but
a face of flesh and blood. A head, nearly bald and a lined, leathery
face in which little beady eyes gleamed with mingled astonishment and
fury.
Hamish seemed to be the only one of us sufficiently in possession of
his senses to speak. “Well,” he said triumphantly, “got you at last,
didn’t I—you double-crossin’ rat!”
Then came Aunt Cal’s voice. “Gopher!” she cried, her tone odd and
uncontrolled.
The man did not answer. He was engaged in raising himself stiffly out
of the hole. He was dressed in sailor trousers and a sleeveless shirt.
As the bottom of the cupboard fell back into place he turned and glared
at Hamish. “So you’re the guy that’s been playin’ them smart tricks!”
he snarled.
“If you mean locking you in the cellar,” Hamish returned, “I figured
you’d be some annoyed. But the next time you peddle fake hair tonic——”
“It’s a good tonic,” snapped the little man. “I made it myself in
Brazil from a native receipt.”
“Yeah, but you had to get yourself a supply of wigs to make folks fall
for it!”
This exchange of repartee was interrupted by Michael. “Look here,” he
demanded, “what are you hiding in this house for? What are you after?”
The man turned on him sourly. “What business is that of yourn?”
“It’s my business!” Aunt Cal’s voice had regained its customary
authority. She had dropped onto one of the straight horsehair covered
chairs and was regarding the man with a strange tense look. “Where,”
she demanded, “is Carter Craven?”
Mr. Bangs—for of course it was he—seemed to notice her for the first
time. And there was recognition in his glance as he answered more
respectfully than he had yet spoken.
“Craven’s gone. Died in the Argentine last winter.”
There was a moment’s silence and then Aunt Cal asked tremulously, “You
were with him when he died?”
The other nodded. “And that reminds me,” he said, “he sent you a
message, said I was to come back and give it to you myself. Or if you
wasn’t here to get your address and mail it to you.” He began feeling
in the pocket of his trousers, presently bringing out a dog-eared bill
folder from which he extracted a dirty envelope.
“And why have you not given me this before?” Aunt Cal inquired as she
took the letter from the man’s hand.
He shrugged. “All in good time. I says to myself I’ll just take a look
round first and get the lay of the land like.”
Hamish eyed him fiercely. “So you opened the letter,” he accused “and
took out the part you thought interesting—the sheet that had those
measurements on it!”
Mr. Bangs shook his head. “Naw, Mr. Detective, you got me wrong. I
never opened the letter. I found that there paper—since you’re so
interested—with Carter Craven’s things after he died.”
“And that’s where you got the key to the house too, I suppose,” Michael
put in.
“Right, Buddy.”
“Anyway,” Hamish persisted, “you thought you were going to dig up a
neat little fortune out there in the garden, didn’t you? Well, you
jolly well got fooled!” He turned to the cupboard and drew out the key.
“If you’d dug in the right place—which you didn’t ’cause you were too
stupid—that was all you’d have found.”
Mechanically the man’s clawlike fingers reached out and took the key.
His glance strayed from it to Michael’s honest gray eyes. “Say,” he
asked wonderingly, “is this on the level?”
“That’s right,” Michael told him. “That’s all we found.”
“I suppose,” Hattie May spoke up pertly, “you expected to dig up the
blue emerald didn’t you?”
“What’s that?” He turned and looked at her. “No, sister,” he said
slowly, “I had all I wanted of the Blue Emerald!”
“What, you found it? You——”
The man nodded grimly. “Yeah, sister, we found the Blue Emerald—me and
Carter together. It was there just where the map said.”
“What map?” demanded Hamish.
Mr. Bangs shrugged. “Say, what is this?” he demanded truculently. “A
third degree or sunthin’?”
Aunt Cal, still clutching the unopened envelope close to her side,
spoke again unexpectedly. “The Blue Emerald was the gold mine I
suppose, the one Carter went to find after his father died?”
Mr. Bangs nodded. “Yeah, he found the map among the old man’s papers.
He put all he had or could borrow into her but”—he shrugged again—“he
might as well have thrown the money over the ship’s rail and it would
have saved us both a good sight of sufferin’.”
“A mine!” Hattie May said wonderingly. “The Blue Emerald was the name
of a gold mine! But—then—what _were_ you after? Why were you digging
up the garden?”
For a minute it seemed as if he were not going to answer. But Eve spoke
up quietly, “You were measuring the ground the very first day we came
here.”
“Well what if I was?” he snapped. “I figured a man don’t set down
measurements on paper unless they mean somethin’.”
“Carter’s mind was always running on buried treasure,” Miss Blossom,
seated comfortably on the old sofa behind him, put in. “It was kind of
an obsession as you might say. I calculate he buried that key hoping to
fool somebody the way he’d been fooled so often.”
“But that doesn’t explain about the cupboard,” I cried. “If it was just
a—a joke, why did he have the cupboard covered up?”
Mr. Bangs honored me with a glance. Then turning to the spot from which
he had so recently emerged, he lifted up the false bottom again and
began fumbling about below. At last he drew out a long dusty brown
envelope, tied with red cord. “Reckon that’s the answer,” he said
tossing it across to Aunt Cal. “Guess Carter didn’t want that will to
be found till he was good and ready. He figured on comin’ back a rich
man!” He laughed hoarsely.
“If that wasn’t just like him!” Miss Blossom exclaimed. “I always said
he never destroyed that will!”
Aunt Cal was untying the envelope with unsteady fingers. Inside was a
sealed one. “Yes,” she said, “it is Uncle Judd’s will!”
“And Craven House is yours at last,” Miss Blossom gave a vast sigh of
satisfaction. “I always knew you’d get it some day but I was afraid it
might come too late for you to enjoy it. Dear me, if these children
hadn’t found that key and all——”
Hattie May, too excited to remember her manners, burst in here. “But I
don’t understand yet! I mean how Mr. Bangs—or whatever his name
is—how he happened to come popping out just at the moment Hamish
opened the door? Why, it was exactly like a jack-in-the-box!”
This characterization of his appearance in our midst seemed to tickle
Mr. Bangs for he grinned for the first time. “Yeah,” he agreed, “reckon
it did give you kind of a surprise. I’d been a-poundin’ on that trap
door for quite a spell after this smart detective guy locked the cellar
door on me.”
“Hamish dotes on locking doors on people,” his sister remarked. “It’s
one of his pet tricks!”
“The cupboard must open into that underground passage that Uncle Judd
had walled up years ago,” Aunt Cal remarked thoughtfully.
The man nodded. “Yeah, I remembered hearin’ talk of it. I poked around
and found the entrance to it under the cellar stairs, and this here
ladder between the floors. But it was dark as a ship’s hold down there
and I couldn’t get the trap door open. Then you opened the cupboard and
let in some light through the crack and I see where she was hooked
down. I reckoned I could manage this smart guy here without much
trouble—I didn’t figure on runnin’ into a whole tea party!” he
finished with a cackle.
“I suppose that was the passage you were hiding in the night the cops
searched the house for you?” Michael remarked.
The man shot him a sardonic glance but did not answer.
Aunt Cal got up. “I really think, Rose,” she said, “we should be
starting for home. It’s growing dark and we’ve had quite enough
excitement for one day.” She turned to the sailor and fixed him with a
stern glance. “I sincerely trust, Gopher,” she said, “that you will not
leave the neighborhood until I’ve had a further talk with you. I—I
naturally wish to hear more details of my cousin’s last days.”
The man did not answer for a moment. But there was an insistence in
Aunt Cal’s tone that was not to be disregarded. Perhaps he thought
that, since the game was up in any case, his best chance lay in
compliance. “Okay,” he said with another lift of his bony shoulders.
“I’ll hang round for a spell.”
As Miss Blossom’s little car rolled away down the hill, no one spoke
for a time. Eve and I were in the rear seat. Hattie May had gone with
Hamish in his car. It was with some difficulty that we had succeeded in
prying the latter loose from the man whom he considered his lawful
prisoner. What was the use, he insisted, of pulling off a capture if
you had to turn the fellow loose again?
But Aunt Cal’s wishes of course had prevailed and Hamish, still
grumbling, had been obliged to depart and leave the villain, as he
dubbed him, to his own devices.
As we turned into the main highway at The Corners, Miss Rose settled
back. “Well, it does beat all,” she said, “the mysterious ways
Providence does work. To think of that rascal Carter sealing up that
old cupboard with the will in it and going off to the ends of the
earth!”
“No, Rose, not a rascal,” Aunt Cal returned, “you mustn’t think of him
like that. It was just a—a kind of prank. He never meant to keep the
house from me for long, he says so in this note. You see I—I was away
out West at the time he left. I think it was just as Gopher said, he
wanted to come back a rich man——”
“And make you sorry you’d married Tom Poole instead of him,” put in
Miss Rose calmly. “That was just like him, always believing that money
was all that counted even in a love affair.”
“He says,” said Aunt Cal softly, “that he hopes I will forgive him
everything. I believe he realized—at the end—the mistakes he’d made.”
Miss Rose nodded. “Yes, Carter wasn’t a bad fellow at heart,” she said.
“And Mr. Bangs?” Eve asked hesitantly, “you knew him before, Aunt Cal?”
“Oh, yes. His real name is Gopher—Harry Gopher. He shipped as cook
with Uncle Judd for years and used often to be around town between
voyages. Uncle always said he was a rascal but he had a fondness for
him too. I shall have to see what can be done for him.”
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