Falling Stones
Picking up the old lady in his arms (and now she appeared to be
reviving), Harry Pangborn, preceded by Sim and Betty with flashlights
gleaming to show the way, started for the stairs. The others followed,
Arden and Sim bringing up the rear.
Suddenly from behind them sounded a grating, rumbling noise. They turned
in surprise and some fear, just in time to see several stones fall out of
the old chimney that was part of the fireplace above. The chimney had its
foundation on the bottom of the cellar.
Out toppled the loose stones, falling with a crash that brought nervous
screams from Terry and Dorothy.
“What happened?” Harry called back, pausing with his burden.
“Looks as if the old place were falling apart,” Dick answered. “The
chimney is crumbling. Perhaps we had too hot a fire on the hearth. I
guess we’d better get out of here.”
“That chimney will never fall!” declared Granny Howe. “It was built to
last forever, and will, unless it’s torn down. There is no danger.”
Arden paused to flash her light within an opening revealed by the falling
stones. It was a smooth recess in the great stone chimney, not a rough
aperture such as might happen by accident if some of the stones had
merely crumbled away. It was only the few small outer stones, what,
virtually, constituted a door to the hidden chamber, that had toppled
away revealing a secret place.
And a hiding place it was, as Arden discovered a moment later when her
light flashed and gleamed upon a small metal box within.
“Oh, look! Look what I’ve found!” she cried. “It’s a metal chest hidden
away.”
“Bring it upstairs and we’ll have a look!” called Harry.
Arden put her hand in and grasped the box. But it resisted her first
effort to wrench it out.
“I’ll help you,” offered Dick.
Together they pulled, and the box came forth. It was about a foot long,
eight inches in width and about six in depth. It was closed by a heavy
brass padlock.
Their first care, on reaching the warm and light room where the Christmas
party had come to such a strange end, was to put Viney down on an
improvised couch and give her some hot coffee. She had regained her
senses, but a great fear and wonder seemed to be upon her.
“Have they—have they gone?” she faltered.
“Who?” asked Granny.
“Those real ghosts—the ghosts I used to be myself.”
“Viney, have you been up to ghost tricks here in Sycamore Hall?” Granny’s
voice was stern.
Viney Tucker looked up, more defiant now. She was rapidly recovering from
her fall, which was not so much of a fall as a slide down a smooth wooden
chute. It wasn’t the ash-chute, but one forming part of a secret passage,
as they learned later.
“Yes,” Viney confessed, “I was the ghosts. But I’ll never be one again. I
did it to save the Hall for you, Hannah. I remembered the old stories of
Nathaniel Greene and Patience Howe. And when I found you were going to be
cheated out of the money you should have had for the sale of this
property I decided to stop it from being demolished if I could. So I
secretly made a red cloak, and from a masquerade costumer in a distant
city I got the Continental soldier’s uniform. I hid them away here in the
chest. At times I would slip in here and scare the workmen, by pretending
to be either dead Patience on the bed or the tramping soldier, with a red
rag around my head and my hat pulled down over my face. It worked, too!”
she said, not a little proudly.
“Yes, it worked,” admitted Harry. “Especially the screams coming up out
of the fireplace. You are a good screamer, Mrs. Tucker.”
“I always was,” she admitted with a grim smile. “Though I didn’t know it
was you in the house that day. I thought it was one of the workmen. But I
meant no harm. I just wanted to delay the tearing down of this place. I
was always hoping the missing papers would be found.”
“Well, I think they have been,” Arden said. “Let’s open the box that I
found when the stones fell. I wonder what caused them to fall out and
open the hiding place?”
“It might have been the heat, as Dick suggested. We had a pretty hot
fire,” said Harry. “Though the concussion of Mrs. Tucker’s slide down the
chute and the vibration caused by something slamming up in the closet may
have done the work. At any rate, let’s see what the box holds.”
A heavy poker served to break the lock, though Betty said it was a shame
to destroy such an antique. But they could not wait to get a locksmith.
And when the lid was raised, there, covered with much dust, were a number
of legal-appearing documents. Harry glanced hastily through them.
“Well, I think this settles everything,” he said. “You won’t need the
advantage of any long court delay, Mrs. Howe. These deeds, copies of
wills, and other papers, will easily prove, I think, your title to this
place, and the money paid for it by the Park Commission can now be
released to you and your relatives.”
“Viney shall have her share!” exclaimed the happy old lady.
“I don’t want any, Hannah! I only played ghost for you. I didn’t want
anything myself.”
“You shall have your share, Viney, and so shall Dick and Betty.”
“Oh, how wonderful it all is!” Betty murmured.
“Like a story book!” added Dick.
“And to think,” said Arden, “that if it hadn’t been for the little prank
of Dot and Harry all this would never have been discovered.”
“My part as a ghost wouldn’t have,” said Viney grimly, “for I was
planning to keep on scaring those men away if I could. I wasn’t going to
give up until the Hall was so torn apart I couldn’t work my tricks any
more. But I didn’t know anything about those hidden papers.”
“I guess no one did except the foolish man, now long dead, who hid them
there,” said Granny. “Oh, why didn’t he have sense enough to put them in
a bank or give them to a lawyer and then we wouldn’t have had all this
trouble!”
“It wasn’t really trouble, Granny!” laughed Sim.
“No, we’ve had a wonderful time!” agreed Terry.
“I suppose you did play tricks in this ghost masquerade, Mrs. Tucker,”
Harry said. “But how did you manage to get in and out of the house
without being seen—especially when there was snow on the ground.”
“I went in and out through a secret tunnel that ends here in an old wine
bin and outside in the smokehouse,” Mrs. Tucker said with a smile at the
girls, who had once surprised her in the place where hams and bacon were
cured.
“Oh, so you found the old secret passage, did you, Viney?” asked her
cousin. “I never could.”
“Well, I did!” Once more Viney smiled. “And I kept it secret. There are
two passages,” she went on. “One the tunnel and the other the chute I
fell down just now.”
“That’s a part of the mystery I don’t yet understand,” said Arden. “Why
did you come over here tonight? Was it to play a ghost when you knew we
were giving Granny a Christmas party?”
“Oh, no, my dear! I’d never do a thing like that, cross and cranky as I
know I am. Forgive me—but I’ve been so worried about Hannah going to lose
the inheritance she should have had. I came over here tonight, secretly,
as I always come, to save any of you from harm.”
“Save us from harm?”
“Yes. I thought some of you might take a notion to roam and wander around
the old house. I was afraid you would go in that closet through which a
person who knows the trick can slide down the smooth wooden chute to the
cellar. I was afraid lest someone might by accident work the spring of
the trapdoor and fall. But I was the one who fell.
“You see it’s this way. In the old days I suppose it was often necessary
for those who were enemies of the British king to escape in a hurry. So
Sycamore Hall, like many another old Colonial mansion, contained secret
passages. The one from the wine bin to the smokehouse is quite simple.
The other is more complicated. The closet has a false bottom. In it is a
trapdoor so well fitted into the floor that one not in the secret would
have difficulty in finding it. By pressing on a certain place in the
wall, the trapdoor opens, a person can jump or slide down the chute,
which is curved in such a way that no harm results from its use. Then the
trapdoor closes.”
“It didn’t close after you slid down tonight,” Harry said.
“I realized something was wrong as soon as I pushed the spring,” admitted
Viney. “Before I had hardly time to get into the chute, the trapdoor
closed and struck me a light blow on the head. But it must have sprung
open immediately afterward.”
“That’s probably what happened to Jim Danton,” said Arden. “Only he got a
severe blow, and the secret trapdoor remained closed.”
“Probably did,” admitted Viney. “I wasn’t there to see, but very likely
that man accidentally touched the spring and shot down the chute, getting
heavily struck by the trapdoor as he slid down. The wooden chute really
merges into the ash-chute at the lower end, so that’s why they thought
this Jim fell down the ash-chute. But he didn’t—he went down the secret
passage out of the closet.”
“No wonder it seemed like a real mystical disappearance,” said Arden.
“Tonight,” went on Viney Tucker, “when I feared some of you would roam
about the place, I slipped over here through the tunnel to lock that
closet door so you couldn’t get in. I heard footsteps up here. I looked
out in the hall and saw the two ghosts—ghosts whose parts I had often
played myself. I was so frightened that I screamed and ran back in here
to hide. I couldn’t understand it. Then in my fright I touched the hidden
spring and fell down the chute. But the trapdoor, through some defect,
closed down on me and then sprang open again. And that ends the mystery.
I suppose the tearing down of the Hall can now go on, and the chute and
trapdoor will be destroyed with all the other things. Well, I don’t care,
now that Hannah will get her money.”
“There is no further need for ghosts,” said Arden.
“Viney, I don’t know what to say to you!” exclaimed Granny. Her face was
serious but not for long. She laughed and added: “What will people think
when all this comes out?”
“There is no need for it to come out,” said Harry. “There is no need for
anyone except ourselves knowing that Mrs. Tucker was the ghost. As for
the old stories, they will always be told, I suppose—stories of Nathaniel
Greene and Patience Howe. But they will gradually die down when the Hall
is gone. So there is no reason why Mrs. Tucker need be exposed. We can
keep the secret among ourselves.”
“I think that would be best,” Granny said. “Oh, what a wonderful
Christmas this has been!” and again her eyes were suspiciously bright.
“Just wonderful! Thank you all, my dear friends. For it was you who
brought all this about. Thank you, so much!”
The fire was dying. The simple little gifts had been presented. The
candles were spluttering down into the sockets. It was growing cold. The
party was over.
Granny gave the precious papers to Harry Pangborn to keep for her. Then,
when Granny and her cousin, with Betty and Dick, had departed for the
little cottage, over the moonlit snow, just an hour before it would be
Christmas, Arden Blake and her friends left the old Hall.
“There’s only one thing I’m still puzzled over,” Arden said as they
gathered in Sim’s house to quiet down a bit. “Of course, I suppose we
all, at different times, suspected different persons of playing the
ghost—for we knew that’s what the mystery was—some tricky human. But at
one time I heard some talk as I was passing some men in the street, which
made me think Mr. Ellery might be the guilty one. Mention was made of a
man named Nick.”
“I think I can explain that,” said Harry. “I talked to Dick about it. It
seems that there were some rather valuable fittings, like hand-made
locks, closet hooks and other things, in the Hall that a contractor
would, very likely, save out to sell. Ellery was trying, as the boys say,
to double-cross Mr. Callahan and get some of these antiques. Nick was in
with him and once or twice tried his game with some cronies. But the
ghost scared them away as it did the contractor’s honest workmen. So I
think it’s all cleared up now.”
“Another mystery ended,” sighed Arden Blake. “I wonder if it will be the
last in our lives?”
“I hope not,” said Sim.
And Sim’s wish came true, as is evidenced in the succeeding volume of
this series to be called: _Missing at Marshlands_. That will be another
Arden Blake mystery story.
“Well, mystery or no mystery, I think it’s time we all went to bed,” said
Dorothy after much talk.
Harry looked at his watch. He held it up for the girls to see. The hour
was past midnight.
“Merry Christmas!” he cried.
“Merry Christmas!” echoed the girls.
Dorothy, with a characteristic mischievous gleam in her eyes, put a bit
of the “mistletoe” in her hair. And then, waving her hand at Harry, she
ran upstairs.
“I’ll catch you sometime!” laughed Harry.
And then, while faintly from the churches came the peal of the Christmas
chimes, the girls said goodnight to their visitor and to one another.
So was solved the secret of Jockey Hollow.
There was no longer any need for Viney Tucker to play the ghost.
Granny Howe removed such of her last belongings as she wanted to
preserve, giving some really valuable antiques to the girls and to Arden
the picture of Patience Howe. Harry asked for and was given the old brass
box in which were found the papers so long lost.
For the papers in the box Arden Blake’s eyes had lighted upon in the
chimney hole were the very ones needed to prove Granny Howe’s claim to
the money. It was not necessary for the Pangborn lawyers or the Park
Commission to engage in any involved proceedings.
The holidays passed all too quickly for Arden and her friends. They went
riding several times again, between Christmas and New Year’s and in that
week work was again started on tearing down the Hall. But no longer did
men rush out yelling that they had seen a dead woman on a bed, and no
more was heard the tramp of the soldier’s boots on the stairs.
All the ghosts had vanished. And with them vanished much of Viney
Tucker’s queerness. She let the better side of her nature show itself,
and now, when Granny had the girls in for tea, Viney joined them.
Arden and her friends had tea with Granny the day before the holiday
season ended. She thanked them again and again, for it was through their
instrumentality that everything had happened as it did.
“And to think,” murmured Dot as they left Granny’s little cottage, “that
we’ll soon be back at Cedar Ridge. Nothing ever happens there!”
“But think of all that did happen!” laughed Arden.
THE END
Transcriber’s Notes
--Silently corrected a few typos (but left nonstandard spelling and
dialect as is).
--Once corrected the doctor’s name from “Blasdell” to “Ramsdell”.
--Rearranged front matter to a more-logical streaming order.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Mystery of Jockey Hollow, by Cleo Garis