CHAPTER XVIIIN QUARANTINE
Boy, were we ever excited! And did we ever feel like yipping out a string of “Hip-hip-hurray-for-our-side” stuff! For now, as you can see, we had the cat by the tail. And soon it would be eating out of our hands—meaning the whole cat, of course, and not just its tail.
Yes, sir, clever little sleuthing doo-dads that we were, we had the goods on old “Mr. Ghost.” And to think that the mysterious “spook” was the one man in the tangle whom we hadn’t even suspected! However, that wasn’t anything against our work. For not the slightest thing had bobbed up to hint to us that the family doctor wasn’t in Europe, as everybody in the neighborhood believed.
Here is the dope as we had it spread out in our minds now: To solve the secret that clouded the millionaire’s death, and probably to please the dying man, the loyal family doctor had hidden himself for a year in the closed house. There was deep mystery in his actions, of course, but he would clear that up. Sharing certain unusual secrets with thedead man, and an enemy of the scheming lawyer’s, he had kept in touch with the granddaughter, and now was working with her, to fix it so the lawyer couldn’t do any cheating stuff.
It was puzzling, of course, to understand why the hidden man, in his friendly work, had slammed doors to scare the two old people away, when the granddaughter, whom he was helping, had sent them here. But that wasn’t anything. Maybe a queer broken brain, before it turned cold, had given the hider his orders. Certainly, the “queer smell” was easily explained. Every time the man went through the hall he had left a trail behind him, just as I had noticed the smell when he was roosting on my barrel coop.
But more puzzling than anything else—contradictory, even—was old Ivory Dome’s swat on the head. You can see what I mean. If the two men and the girl were secretly working together, why had one of the men soaked the other as though he wanted to lay him cold? And that stormy night, why had the hidden one left the house, of which he seemed to have secret ways of getting in and out? Further, where did the crazy gander come in under the new order of things and who really had it?
Bu-lieve me, we were on our toes now for the strange doctor to show up. Not that we expectedto corner him with our dope. But we had a hunch that the time was come for him to drop his game of hide and seek and put all the cards in plain sight on the table. That probably was why he was coming here this morning.
Gimlet eyes that always were creeping around in search of “something!” We’d find out now what that “something” was, for it had been found—the secret of the millionaire’s death had been solved. We were dead sure of that.
But it wasn’t to be our luck to see the strange doctor that morning. And how we missed him, when he called at the big house, was a crazy mess, and goes to show how Fate can make a monkey out of a fellow and change his soup into sour vinegar.
There was a door to this room that we were in, with a heavy self-catch on the outside. And swung shut by the wind, which had come up with the sun and now was twisting the whole sandy countryside out of shape, we seemed to be as completely imprisoned as though our “cage” had been made of steel instead of heavy boards.
“Well, I’ll be jiggered!” came Poppy’s much-used expression, when he found that the door had latched itself on the outside, where we couldn’t reach it.
“Phew!” I gagged, holding my nose with one handand feeling around in the dark with the other. “Open the ventilator—quick!”
“The ‘ventilator’s’ closed, Jerry.”
“Go on!”
“Honest. I can’t budge it.”
I laughed then. I thought it was a good joke on us. For I neverdreamedthat we couldn’t jimmy the latch and quickly get out. But we learned in the next twenty or thirty minutes that the man who had hung this door had put it up for keeps.
Still, wehadto get out. For having broken one of the filled bottles in kicking around in the dark, the gaggy drug smell was getting thicker every minute. We tried throwing our double weight against the door. That made it crack. Pretty soon we were panting from the hard work, with the sweat doing canal stuff down our necks. But we kept on. And finally the door went down, with the two of us sprawled on top of it like a pair of four-legged octopuses.
Cooling off for a minute or two, we ran to the house, where Ma Doane met us mysteriously at the kitchen door.
“Sh-h-h-h!” she breathed, with a finger to her thin lips.
Poppy let out his neck toward the inner rooms.
“Is the doctor here?” he inquired eagerly, though in a careful voice.
“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” and the housekeeper quietly closed the doors leading into the adjoining rooms. Facing us, I saw now how big her eyes were. “I don’t want your friend to hear me,” she explained, meaning old Goliath, “for I find that he runs and tells everything in the sick room. And Pa isn’t to know about this until to-night, so the doctor said.”
“Know about what?” came quickly from Poppy.
“That all he’s got is the hives and indigestion. You see, Lawyer Chew is liable to bring the sheriff here any minute to put us out. And when Dr. Madden learned of the predicament I was in, he and I together worked out a scheme to temporarily keep the lawyer away.” The gray eyes sort of twinkled now. “The doctor isn’t quite ‘sure’ about Pa’s case. See? And to be safe—for it might be very contagious, you know!—he tacked up a quarantine sign on the front door. So now, if the sheriff comes, we have only to show him the sign and tell him to scoot.”
“Hot dog!” laughed Poppy, thinking of how old fatty would huff and puff in his defeat. “Where is the doctor, Mrs. Doane?—upstairs?”
“Oh, he’s gone.”
For an instant the leader looked blank.
“Gone!” he squeaked.
“He didn’t stay here more than ten or fifteen minutes.”
“But we thought he had come to clear up the mystery.”
“I don’t think he knows half as much about this mystery as you boys imagine.”
Poppy looked at me.
“Shall we tell her, Jerry?”
“I think we ought to,” I waggled.
This talk stirred up the woman’s curiosity.
“You boys act as though you have a secret,” she leaned forward.
“Not only one,” laughed Poppy, “but a whole case of ’em.” Then he added, with a curious look at the woman: “Didn’t your smeller put you wise to anything about the doctor, Mrs. Doane?”
“Mysmeller? What do you mean?”
“Didn’t you notice that his clothes had a sort ofqueersmell?”
“No-o,” came with a slow shake of her head.
“And you didn’t smell anything on him that made you think of—of something else?”
The same answer was given.
“What do you know about Dr. Madden,” the question was then put to us, “that you should speak of him so queerly?”
But Poppy wasn’t ready to answer that yet.
“And you’re positive,” he hung on, “that the doctor’s clothes didn’t have a queer smell?—a sort ofdrug-storesmell?”
“I didn’t put my noseonhim,” came stiffly, “but I smelt nothing when I stood beside him.”
Poppy dropped that point.
“All right. We’ll take it for granted that he had on other clothes.... Did he say anything about the granddaughter?”
“Yes. I think he was disappointed not to find her here.”
The leader gave me a quick wink.
“But if he and the girl aren’t mixed up together, as I told you last night, how did he know she was coming here? You say it’s a secret.”
“Why!...” the woman stared. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“You say he was disappointed not to find the granddaughter here,” Poppy went on. “Do you mean he wassurprised?”
“Ye-es. He acted both surprised and disappointed—almost troubled, in fact. And from words that he dropped offhand I got the impression that he wanted to talk with her about something important. I told him that so far as we knew she was hiding in Pardyville. And thinking I might corner him, and thus prove the truth of your theory, I says: ‘Possibly,Doctor, you knowwhereshe is hiding.’ But all I got was a stare of surprise. ‘I wish,’ says he earnestly, ‘that I did know where she is. For it is very important that we find her to-day. And taking your tip, I shall drive over to Pardyville myself and see if I can locate her.’ Then we put up the quarantine sign and he drove away.”
Poppy wasn’t so sure of himself now.
“And you really believe, Mrs. Doane,” says he, puzzled, “that the doctor is dumb on where the girl is?”
“Remembering his earnest words and actions, I cannot doubt it for a moment.”
We then told the woman about our discovery in the barn. And while we were talking, the sound of hoofs and steel buggy wheels came to us from the graveled drive, as on the preceding day. Running to the front door, we got a glimpse of young fatty, driving his father’s rig, while on the small half of the seat sat a tall, rangy man with a mean-looking star pinned on his vest.