RENFRO FINDS THE MYSTERY MAN.
Like a patrol of victorious soldiers, the Boy Scouts in khaki, with
the big turkeys perched on their shoulders, entered the Hall domain
from the alley entrance. Jimmy’s decisive “Halt!” brought them all
to attention--all except the turkey, on the head of which was the
responsibility for the alley episode, and he flapped his wings and
started all the other turkeys to doing likewise.
There was no law in all the list of the manual which told how to
control a recreant turkey. So Jimmy forgot his dignity as a patrol
leader and clutched one of the birds by the neck. She screamed no
longer. But her big wings flapped, her body twisted, and even her tail
seemed to go into convulsions.
Convulsions which caught Mary Dugan’s attention as she passed by the
window with a bowl of thousand island dressing in process of completion
for the salad for the Hyacinth Reading Club now in session in the Horn
library. The bowl went into the kitchen table, and Mary Dugan out thru
the back door, across the porch, and right into the midst of the group.
“The saints be praised!” Mary Dugan forgot what she called “The Horn
Decorum” and reverted to her own home ways. “And now that you’ve
surprised me by winnin’ ’em all on a Monday here you’re goin’ to choke
’em to death before I can have the pick of the one I want to cook.”
She flew to the big garage door, threw it open, and gave stentorian
orders, “Here,--put ’em in here--let ’em roost in peace till I’ve
finished my supper. Then I mix ’em a bit of dough for refreshment
followin’ a soldier party.”
She bowed to the boy scouts and opened the rear gate for their
departure as soon as the turkeys were inside the garage and the big
door swung shut again. Her gesture was imperative. With Jimmy hastening
them on, they did not mark time but did “double quick” steps down the
town’s best alley.
Then Mary Dugan looked at Renfro, “There be only five,” she accused
him. “You don’t mean to tell me all them boys let a turkey get loose.”
“No, Mary,” Renfro was impatient. “It was really a salvage article in a
worth while conflict. But I’ll tell you all about it and how I happened
to get them so soon and everything--new clues and all,” he promised,
“only I’m late as the dickens with my route now and there’ll be a dozen
complaints and I have to go.”
Now whatever else could be said of Mary Dugan the fact remained that
she was always a good scout and without another question she swung open
the alley gate once more, watched Renfro through it and shouted down
the alley after him. “There be three kinds of cake and striped ice
cream for the reading club. I’ll save all kinds for you.”
Again Renfro chose an alley route through town. It was the quickest
way to reach Washington Street and the drug store. Once there he saw
something unusual. All the packages of papers except his own were gone.
Swish! That was the sound of tearing the paper which bound them. Clash!
They were going into his bag. And clatter--he was off down the street
to the front porch of his first customer.
Up one street, around a corner into another, and back and forth on it
he went. It was dark, the thaw predicted by the weather man had set in
early in the afternoon, and there were places where it was so slippery
from the melting ice that he had to walk very slowly and carefully. He
did not complain. Old Grief had become the first rung of his ladder to
success. And a mighty good rung she had been.
At the corner, nearing the Wier house, Renfro brushed against a
stooped, old woman of the type usually seen around pawn shops and
cheap restaurants. She was carrying a lot of bundles, but it was not
these Renfro noticed. Around her neck with both ends flapping free and
showing plainly in the glow from the light in the middle of the corner
intersection was the peculiar looking scarf the old man whom he had
passed outside the sandwich shop last Friday night had worn.
“Humph!” Renfro laughed at his own exclamation days later. But he was
too amazed then to say anything else. It was possible for two people to
have as odd scarfs as were these, but hardly possible he thought. And
then--well then, he decided to do a little investigating.
He sauntered a little farther down the street, stepped behind a
tree and watched the old woman journey slowly down Washington
street--still more slowly, and still more slowly, but always in the
same direction,--the one taken by everyone of the queer looking
individuals who journeyed out to the big old house, which everyone said
was haunted--everyone except Captain Pete who declared that claim all
tomfoolishness.
Renfro looked back to his own surroundings. He was directly across the
street from Judge Wier’s house. The blinds were drawn to the bottoms
of the windows. The afternoon papers had said that Mrs. Wier was very
despondent again. There had been no letter from Helen that day. She had
declared that she knew the child was dead and wished that she too would
die.
The man in the county jail had been questioned and sweated, and sweated
and questioned, but still stuck to his original statement that he knew
nothing about the kidnaping. Though the chief of police declared that
it was a foolish waste of time the detectives were off on the trail of
his confederates.
“And Helen’s not two miles from this very spot,” Renfro declared
vehemently to himself. “And perhaps she is suffering though she wrote
that she wasn’t. Well, I’m going out to the shack and the big house
tonight and I’m not going to come home until I know something much more
definite than anything I’ve seen up to this time.”
He half ran to finish the remaining few houses on his route, then
hurried down the road, crashed across the orchard and down to Captain
Pete’s little cabin. Once he heard a queer suspicious noise in the
undergrowth just beyond the orchard, but he felt sure it was Lang Tammy
come to jump on him and play a game of tug-of-war with his paper bag.
Near the cabin he stopped a minute to listen. He looked around the
corner. Everything was quiet. He stopped, listened intently and then
heard voices. Two men, talking in rather loud tones as if they were
having an argument. Something sounded like the thwack of a fist on a
table and then Renfro walked to the cabin door.
He knocked with a decisive, determined air. Captain Pete called out,
“Who is there?”
But Renfro answered with another knock, more determined than the first.
He heard the growl of a dog and then stopped as if some one had choked
the creature into silence. And then he did a veritable tattoo of knocks
on the big, heavy door.
And stamping angrily across the floor Captain Pete came to open it. The
heavy door jerked on its hinges with the force of an angry host and
Captain Pete’s grizzled face seemed to fill the door way but not quite--
For back in the shadow of the room sat a man, stooped over something--a
man who was heavy set and short and who looked exactly like the
stranger, whose shadow Renfro had seen so often on the curtain of the
window at the big house across the deserted orchard and lane of Captain
Pete’s domain, again on the coming out of the back of the restaurant
stand and several times on Washington Street.
“I told ye I didn’t want the paper,” Captain Pete growled.
Then Renfro did the thing which surprised Captain Pete too much for
him to realize in time to object to what he was doing. He stepped into
the room, around the table and up to the stooped, old man, “Would you
like to have a sample copy of The Globe?” he asked.
The question, the boy so near him and everything, seemed to frighten
the old man out of his self possession. He shifted his feet, shook his
head and then raised it enough so that Renfro could see his eyes, and--
ABOVE THEM THE OTHER HALF OF THE MISSING EYEBROWS.