MRS. O’MALLY’S PECULIAR FRIGHT
Our state geographies tell us that thousands of years ago the valley
in which our town is located was the channel of a gigantic river that
carried off the huge overflow of the Great Lakes. As I understand it
Niagara Falls wasn’t doing business in those dim and distant days. It
would be interesting to know just why the overflow stream got tired of
the old channel and started a new one. And, to that point, what a bully
sight the old stream must have been. Certainly, if it were as deep as
our sandstone bluffs are high it was _some_ river.
To-day the farmers raise corn on what used to be the bed of the big
river. It is from this rich “bottom land,” as we call it, that the
Tutter Canning Company gets the most of its sweet-corn supply. And it
was into this farming section, so familiar to us, that Poppy and I now
turned our noses to see about buying cucumbers.
Going south on River Street as far as the river itself, a sluggish
shrunken stream as compared to what it used to be, we turned to the
right into a dirt road. The river on one side of us and the cornfields
on the other side were mostly hidden by horse weeds three times our
height. Pretty tall horse weeds, huh? Well, if you ever come to Tutter
in the summer time I’ll show you some pretty tall corn, too.
After a walk of two miles or more on the dusty dirt road we came
within sight of a two-story stone house. Not only was it a very old
house, with walls two feet thick, as I very well knew, but it was
queer-shaped, with a steep roof. High above everything else was a
chimney that for size had it on any house chimney for miles around. It
was six sizes too big for the work it had to do, but, of course, having
been built when the house was put up it never had been changed.
It was to this lonely country place that Mrs. Cora O’Mally had moved
when her Tutter house burned down, which fire I remember well, for
that was the night I swallowed a button that had gotten into my bag of
peppermint candy by mistake. As the insurance had run out on her house,
the widow couldn’t rebuild. But when the Tutter people heard that she
was planning to move into the old Weir house in the river bottoms, a
place that had been deserted for years and, in consequence, was almost
a wreck, money was quickly raised with which the house had been fixed
up. I might say here that a certain young gink by the name of Jerry
Todd had helped to smash the old doors and windows. For an old-time
deserted house always attracts boys. And of this particular house a lot
of queer stories were told. Holdups; bloody battles; even murder. In
fact, a number of superstitious people, believing in ghosts, said at
the time Mrs. O’Mally moved into the old house that she was foolish. It
was no place to live, they declared.
To show you how a hard-working woman can fix up a place, the yard, as
we saw it to-day, was grassy instead of weedy, with beds of blooming
flowers sprinkled here and there. Vines performed on strings at the two
porches. And another larger vine with sharp fingers had clawed its way
up the stone wall to the roof.
Mrs. O’Mally was in her big cucumber patch back of the house. We could
see her broad-brimmed straw hat. There were smaller bobbing hats, too,
which told us that the pickle woman, as she was called in Tutter, had
already put a number of young pickers to work.
“Unfortunate indeed is the aged body who has to raise cucumbers for a
livin’,” she straightened and drained the sweat from her blistered face
as we stopped beside her. “’Tis hard work,” she added, with a deep,
weary sigh. “An’ the wonder to me is that me ould back doesn’t give out
entirely.”
“You surely have enough of them,” laughed Poppy, looking over the big
patch, now in its third year.
“Enough, did ye say? Sure,” came the tired smile, “I could fill all the
pickle jars in New York City an’ Chicago put together. There’s hundreds
of bushels. An’ with the job of pickin’ ’em, ’tis mighty glad I am,”
she beamed at us in her kindly way, “to have the help of two more b’ys
of your size.”
I told her that instead of having come to pick for her, as I had
done the first summer she lived here, we had come to buy. As pickle
manufacturers we might want thirty or forty bushels, I said, talking
big. And having ordered four bushels as a starter, at two dollars a
basket, we followed her to the house and wrote out a check.
“You haven’t told me,” says she curiously, sipping a glass of cold
water, “who’s goin’ to do the picklin’ for ye.”
“Aunt Jemima,” laughed Poppy, who, I might say, having but recently
come to Tutter, never had been in the stone house before.
Mrs. O’Mally’s face showed plainly enough that she didn’t know who
“Aunt Jemima” was.
“Don’t you remember,” I put in with a grin. “Aunt Jemima is the colored
lady who makes the swell pancakes. She’s going to work for _us_, too.”
That, of course, puzzled her all the more. But however curious she was
we couldn’t very well tell her the truth.
Though it was blistering hot in the sun the house was cool, largely on
account of its thick walls, I suppose. So, seated comfortably, we were
in no particular hurry to leave. Besides, not having forgotten that
Mrs. O’Mally usually kept a supply of swell cookies on hand, it might
pay us, I figured, to sort of stick around.
Suddenly something tipped over in the cellar. At the sound the woman
screamed, her hands clutching the front of her dress. And turning to
us, as white as chalk, I saw, too, that she was trembling from head to
foot. Scareder eyes I never expect to see.
“There’s some one down there,” I cried.
“The cat,” she says, getting quick control of herself. “Come,” she
seemed anxious to get rid of us. “Let’s go outside.”
“What the dickens?...” says Poppy, looking back at the house from the
dirt road. “Do you suppose she’s got a prisoner down there?--or that
some one is hiding in the house?”
“Maybe it was the old river pirate,” I joked.
“Who?”
“Old Peg-leg Weir.” Then remembering that he wasn’t posted on the
strange history of the old place, I explained: “He’s the man who built
the house in the first place. Didn’t you notice how queer it is?”
“I saw that it has unusually thick walls.”
“Yes,” says I, “and the farther down the walls go the thicker they get.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” I countered, “if you were a river pirate, and liable to be
surprised any minute by a posse, wouldn’t you like to have plenty of
secret doors to jump through?”
“Do you mean to say that there are secret doors in the cellar walls?”
“That’s the story.”
There was a doubting laugh.
“You’ll be telling me next that there’s a ghost, too.”
“Sure thing,” says I cheerfully. “That was what we heard.”
“Cuckoo!”
I then told my chum the complete story of the old house as the tale had
been handed down to me--how old Peg-leg Weir and his band had preyed
on the early river packets, from one of which they had taken a big
treasure in gold that was being brought up stream from St. Louis. Then
had come the death of the pirate chief, at the hands of an angry posse,
after which the band had been scattered.
The pirate’s treasure, I wound up, never had been lifted, but lay
exactly where its rascally owner had hidden it. There were secret rooms
under the queer house, I said, and hidden doors in the stone walls.
It also was reported that there was a hidden tunnel through which the
pirate and his band had carried their stolen gold from the river into
the secret cellars.
“But tell me,” says Poppy, sort of pulling the story to pieces in his
mind, “if this is all true, how does it come that the old house wasn’t
long ago torn down? For that would have proved or disproved the story
of the hidden rooms.”
“People were scared of the ghost.”
“Bunk!”
“On rainy nights,” says I, “is when it usually comes out. For it was on
a rainy night that old Peg-leg Weir was drowned.”
“Drowned? I thought you just said he was shot by a posse.”
“That’s _one_ story. The other one is that he was drowned in his bed.
You see,” I ran off into my usual nonsense, “he slept in the attic.
There was a knothole in the roof. And rather than have the rain beat
on his face as he lay in bed he shoved his peg-leg into the hole. The
rain swelled the wooden leg so that it stuck tight. And the leg being
hollow, the water ran down inside of it, as though through a spout,
and drowned him.”
“I’d as soon believe that story,” laughed Poppy, “as the other one.
Ghosts! Pooh! What we heard in the house wasn’t a ghost. Nor was it a
cat, either.”
“Maybe,” was my further nonsense, “Mrs. O’Mally has a new husband. And
she’s modestly keeping him out of sight.”
“Shall we break the news to Mr. McGinty?” grinned Poppy.
“I guess,” says I in good sense, “we’d better keep our mouths shut. For
whatever it was that we heard it’s none of our business.”
“What puzzles me,” says Poppy, “is the way the woman acted. The noise
wasn’t a surprise to her. Yet, if she knew what caused it, why was she
so scared?”
That _was_ queer, I agreed.