CHAPTER VIILAWYER CHEW
Beforedoing our own breakfast stuff Poppy and I meandered to the barn and fed the big gander. All Mrs. Doane could give us in the way of gander grub was cornflakes in the package, but that seemed to fill the bill. And, to a point of nonsense, “fill the bill” is right! Boy, you should have seen that high-toned corn fodder evaporate when old peppy socked his molars into it! Part of the time the hungry fowl ate out of our hands. We let it do that, for, as I say, it was a swell pet.
“If only it could talk,” says Poppy, “and tell us where it came from.”
“A talking gander! You don’t ask for much.”
“A talking gander isn’t so much more freaky than a spotted gander.”
That was true, too. Certainly, I checked up on myself, in quick thought,Inever had seen a spotted gander before, nor had I ever heard of one.
As though it were wise to what we were saying back and forth, and wanted to help us clear up the mystery that hung over it, the gander waddled to thebarn door, sort of eager-like, then came back again. “Urk! Urk! Urk!” it said over and over, deep down in its long upholstered windpipe.
I looked at Poppy and laughed.
“What does ‘Urk!’ mean?”
No sooner had I said it than the gander again left us and waddled to the door. Then, having looked outside as before, it came back to us with more “Urk! Urk! Urk!” stuff.
But we were dumb. Whatever its secret was it couldn’t make us understand.
It was now up to us to sort of decide what we should do after breakfast. Of course, what we wanted to do, as I have said, was to stick around and solve the mystery. But we couldn’t very well do that without an invitation from Mrs. Doane. For it wasn’t our mystery.
“You said something about going to Pardyville to search for the granddaughter,” I reminded in the course of our talk. “So how would it be for us to suggest that to the old lady? Then, whether we found the girl or not, we could come back here and report.”
“No chance of us finding the girl in Pardyville, Jerry.”
“You think she isn’t there?”
“If she is, she’s hiding. That’s my idea now.”
“Hiding?” says I, looking at him. “What do you mean?”
“Evidently something unexpected bobbed up to cause her to change her plans about coming here. And instead of being stranded in Pardyville, as we thought last night before we got hep to the old man, she probably stayed there of her own accord.”
“And sent him back home with orders to keep his mouth shut, huh?”
“Something like that.”
“Then,” was the somewhat crazy theory that I now brought out, “it may have been from her that he got the spotted gander.”
“I thought of that. But from every side it’s a queer tangled mess. And least of all can I figure outwhythe girl should lug a gander to Pardyville with her.”
“It may be a pet of hers.”
“Possibly. But, if so, why didn’t she keep it? Why did she send it here instead of coming herself? And what was her object in planning a secret trip here in the first place?”
“The old man knows,” I waggled.
Poppy quickly picked that up.
“Old Ivory Dome! I’ll tell the world he knows—the old trickster!”
“Maybe we can pump him.”
“If you notice, Jerry, he does a lot oflisteningbut blamed little talking.”
I laughed, thinking to myself that the old man never had a chance to do much talking when his wife was around. Listening had gotten to be a sort of habit with him.
“It would be natural for us to think,” Poppy then went on, “that he was workingwiththe girl instead of against her. Yet he’s fooling his wife—we know that. So I can’t help but be suspicious of him, though I’d hate to think that he could be crooked enough to sell out his own wife’s people.”
“If he’s working with the girl, then the spy must be on her side, too,” I figured out, still of the opinion that the old man and the spy were linked together in their secret stuff.
“But why should the girl send a spy here?”
“She has old Ivory Dome working on the inside, and the other guy works on the outside.”
Poppy began to pull his hair.
“Goodnight! Some tangle, huh?”
“Yes,” says I, “and I want to stay here to see the finish. For I have a hunch that it’s going to be exciting. So let us offer to go to Pardyville, as I say. We may not get wise to any real stuff over there. But even so we can come back to-night. And to-morrow morning another excuse may bob up tokeep us here. If necessary we canmakeit bob up—clever little doo-dads that we are! See?”
Poppy grinned.
“Two souls with but a single thought,” he recited, “two hearts that beat each other. Lead on, kid. I’m with you till Niagara Falls.”
But I balked on doing the leading—that was his job, I said. So he set his planner to work.
“C. H. O. is closed,” says he. “Therefore, as I see it, the only thing for us to do, in case Mrs. Doane falls for our scheme, is to hoof it through New Zion to Neponset Corners, where we’ll strike C. H. P. It ought to be easy for us to catch a ride back to Pardyville, for with C. H. O. closed the other hard road will be crowded with cars.”
I let out a yip.
“Why hoof it,” I laughed, “when we have a perfectly good automobile to ride in?”
The other didn’t need an encyclopedia to get that.
“What!” he squeaked. “Start out in Ivory Dome’s old junk-pile? You’re crazy.”
“It’ll be fun.”
“But it’s all smashed up.”
“I have a hunch,” I hung on, still grinning, “that we can make it run.”
“Hot dog!” then came from Poppy, who knows real fun when he sees it, and away he scooted for the road.
So far as we could see, the old junk-pile hadn’t been made any junkier by its tip-up. Putting the straight four back on its wabbly legs, we twisted the engine’s tail and away it went—the engine, I mean, and not its tail—as sweet and pretty as seventeen rusty windmills trying to out-skip each other in a hundred-mile gale. It was a perfectly gorgeous racket. The envy that would shine in the other kids’ green eyes, I thought, all swelled up with pride, when they saw us—and heard us!—on the road! Oh, baby! We had the world by the tail.
Handy around machinery, including wheelbarrows and bicycle pumps, Poppy soon got the hang of things. And I let old greasy nose fiddle this and twiddle that to his heart’s content. He was tuning it up, he said—only he didn’t say it, he yelled it.
Here old Ivory Dome percolated into the landscape.
“Wreck it fast,” he screeched in Poppy’s ear.
The tuner straightened.
“What?” he yelled back.
“Wreck it fast,” the old man screeched again.
“What do you want me to do,” came the greasy grin, “go at it with an axe?”
Well, I thought I’d die. For old Poppy is as funny as a yard of pickled pollywogs when he gets that crazy look on his face. Say, he’s a scream.
“Why spoil a perfectly good axe?” I yipped, to help keep up the fun.
This “axe” talk, though, didn’t jibe with the old man’s thoughts.
“No, no,” he screeched, sort of teetering around and waving his arms. “Wreckit fast.Wreckit fast.”
Poppy gave up then.
“He doesn’t want you towreckit,” I caught on. “He’s yellingbreakfast.”
So we saved the engine further immediate suffering by turning off the switch and went in to breakfast, where we managed heroically to get on the outside of four dozen fried eggs, more or less, and the husky end of a hill of bacon. There was other stuff, too—a swell breakfast, let me tell you. Talking and cooking were sort of twin talents with “Ma” Doane, as we now called her. Our tasters put us wise to that, all right.
During the bacon-and-egg vanishing contest we heard about “Ma’s” dream, which sort of explained why her mind, usually so jammed full of worry, was now taking things easy. She believed in dreams, it seemed. And in this particular dream she had seen “Miss Ruth” in a pansy garden. Pansies, of course, were good luck. So everything was all right. More than that, the dreamer had been handed eight pansies.
“Which means,” the dream was made clear to us, “that Miss Ruth is coming on the eighth of the month, which is to-day, instead of on the seventh.”
Poppy got my eyes and grinned. The big monkey! He can be as crazy as the next fellow when he tries.
“I had a dream, too,” he laughed. “I dreamt that I was picking hairy pumpkins, and when I woke up I had Jerry by the topknot.”
“That’s nothing,” says I, not to be outdone. “In my dream I was a horse buyer. But I turned you down, kid, on account of your long ears. Hee-haw! Hee-haw!”
But our clever little act was wasted. For Ma wasn’t listening to us at all. In her superiorDanveretiquette, or whatever you call it, she was giving poor Pa “Hail Columbia” for guzzling coffee out of his saucer.
“I see,” she then yanked the conversation around to us, “that you boys know how to run Pa’s car.”
“We made a special study of snails in school,” I grinned.
“Laws-a-me!” came the quick laugh. “Isn’t that thecraziestname? Some boys painted it on the car as a joke—it wasn’t us who did it. I wanted Pa to paint over it, for having the dignity of aDanverit embarrassed me to travel through the country in a four-wheeled billboard. But Pa’s ambition is aboutas thin as his wits, so the name never was painted out.”
Then, to our surprise, and before we could get around to speak on the subject for ourselves, the little old lady asked us outright if we would delay our hitch-hike for a day and drive the old car to town to meet the afternoon train. She was afraid to let Pa start out alone, she explained; nor did she want to go herself, having a lot of work to do. If we would go, she concluded, sort of begging us, it would be a big accommodation to her, and always and forever she’d remember the kindness and feel grateful to us.
Well, as you have a kind of hunch, Poppy and I didn’t lose any time saying “yes.” I guess not. So it was quickly arranged, with no objections from Pa, who sat taking things in with his usual intelligent look, that we were to start right after breakfast.
That sounds crazy, doesn’t it?—starting out in the morning to meet an afternoon train, and only twenty miles to go! But you haven’t followed us yet in the Galloping Snail! Bu-lieve me, what a fellow needed more than anything else in driving that mutilated old wreck, besides courage, was early starts.
Poppy and I, of course, weren’t fooled in the thought that we’d find the granddaughter at the Pardyville depot. Dreams were the bunk to us, “pansy” dreams included. Either the granddaughter, havingdropped into Pardyville on time, was now hiding there, to a secret purpose, or, to another view, had left there on the same day on a later train.
But here was our chance. You tell ’em, kid! On top of the fun of galloping around the landscape in the old four-wheeled boiler factory, without spending any jack of our own, we’d be back on the job, as Juvenile Jupiter Detectives, in time to clear up the mystery of the slamming door, and possibly a few other “mysteries” in which Pa undoubtedly had a clever little hand.
Breakfast over, Poppy got my ear as I staggered away from the table.
“That old geezer sure is a puzzle to me, Jerry. Either he’s all-fired deep, or, to the contrary, gosh-awful dumb.”
“What’s on your mind now,” says I, loosening my belt, “besides hair?”
“He knows that we’re starting out on a wild-goose chase. But did he as much as bat an eyelash? No, sir! All the time we were talking about the trip he sat there as blank in the face as a petrified billiard ball. I thought maybe he’d kick about letting us use his car, when the trip, as he knows, is all for nothing. But nary a kick, or anything else.”
“He wouldn’t dare to kick,” I grinned, “with Ma behind the scheme.”
“What’s that about ‘Ma?’” came a light voice over our shoulder.
“Say, Mrs. Doane,” Poppy then jumped into a question that he had for the little old lady, “did you find out anything about the gander?”
“Laws-a-me! I wish Icouldfind out where Pa got that gander.”
“Won’t he tell you?”
“He doesn’t remember. If I’ve asked him once I’ve asked him a dozen times. ‘Pa,’ says I, ‘wheredidyou get that gander?—now tell me.’ But I might just as well talk to a hitching post.”
“Did the man who died here have a pet gander?” was the way the leader further tried to dig into the mystery.
“What!Corbin Danver?No, indeed. As I recall, he hated geese the same as he hated sweet cucumber pickles and safety razors.”
“And the granddaughter said nothing about a gander in her letter to you?”
“Miss Ruth? Laws-a-me, child, whatareyou thinking about to ask such foolish questions? Do you imagine that the ganderbelongshere?”
Poppy, of course, couldn’t tell her that he had a hunch that the gander had been sent here for a secret purpose. For Pa would get it in the neck then. We knew a lot of things that we had to kind of tuck away under our caps.
Here we caught the sound of hoofs and steel buggy wheels in the graveled drive. Was it the granddaughter? Poppy and I thought so. And a flash of disappointment came over us. What we wanted to do was to show our stuff as young detectives. And it would turn everything upsidedown for us, as you can see, if the granddaughter now stepped in to clear up the mystery. Yet we were curious to see her. That was natural. And in the general stampede for the front door, to welcome the newcomer, Ma Doane was not more than a foot or two ahead of us.
But it wasn’t the granddaughter. It was a man—a big fat man. Boy, you should have seen how he filled the sagging seat of that spraddle-wheeled buggy. His stomach stuck up so high in front that he had to look around it, unable to see over it. Of course, I don’t mean thatexactly—but you get me, I guess. The point is that the man had started to growoutat the belt line when he had stopped growing up and down, and now instead of using an ordinary fifty-inch belt to hold up his pants he bought engine belting by the rod, more or less.
Nor was he fat just in one place. His neck was fat, what little there was of it. And hisface! Oh, boy! He had fourteen chins and his jowls hung down like apples in an apron. The corners of his big mouth hung down, too, sort of grim-like. Bulldog stuff.We couldn’t see his eyes—they were buried in fat—but I had a hunch that they were a sort of grayish-green, like a hungry cat’s.
The human elephant, or whatever you want to call it, had gotten out of the buggy, after a lot of twisting and grunting, and leaving the fagged-out, drooping-eared horse to sort of regale itself on the leaves of a lilac bush, was now waddling toward the house. Watching him, all I could think of was a dressed-up duck. No, I won’t say that he reminded me of a goose, for I don’t want to disgrace the Admiral by putting that hunk of human lard in thegooseclass. The Admiral was a true friend of ours, as you will learn, and this over-weight geezer, as you will learn, too, was nobody’s friend except his own.
Yah, you guessed it. Lawyer Chew, the big guy in Neponset Corners—mayor, chief of police, church deacon, school director, banker, street commissioner and last, but not least,money lender—had arrived in the capacity of family lawyer to kick us out and lock up the house.