VAN
Larry, keeping after Joel as well as he could, found him at the head of the back stairs, and gesticulating wildly to "Hurry, you're slow as a snail. Hush, she'll hear you!"
"Who?" cried Larry, breathlessly, as he gained his side.
"Never mind, come along." He hauled him on and into Mother Fisher's room, dashing up to the closet, turned the key with a click, and flung wide the door, "Why, he isn't here!"
"Who?" cried Larry, forgetting all about Van, and not knowing whom he was expected to see.
Joel's teeth were chattering so that he couldn't answer. "He's got out," he managed to say.
"Who?" Larry crowded up closer and peered fearfully into the closet depths.
"Why, Van," cried Joel, impatiently; "oh, well, he's got out some way. Come on," and he turned to go.
"Van!" exclaimed Larry, faintly.
"Yes, I told you so. I shut him up."
"Oh, I thought you meant in your closet," said Larry, the mad race remaining uppermost in his mind to the effect of crowding out other things that now began to assert themselves. "Well, then, he's here now."
"Phoo, no, he isn't," declared Joel, waving his fingers convincingly; "you can see for yourself. Somebody's let him out, and he's locked the door to cheat me."
But Larry was not to be convinced. "He is, I know he is," leaning forward the better to peer around within the closet.
"Take care," warned Joel, who had good reason to know Van's capabilities along that line, "maybe he's hiding in the corner, and he'll tweak you."
At this Larry, who also had occasion to know Van quite well, bounded back quite suddenly, saying, "I see a shoe sticking out," and pointing to it.
"Oh, that's Mamsie's," said Joel, determined not to believe. Then the moment he had said it he remembered that Mother Fisher's shoes were always kept in the shoe-box over in the corner. "We'll give it a pull," he said, doing his best to speak carelessly, which Larry proceeding to do, out came the leg attached which clearly belonged to Van. But it was limp, and lay just where it was dropped with a thud on the closet floor.
Joel, with his heart thumping so he could hardly breathe, sprang into the closet, twitched away Mother Fisher's long black silk gown, seized Van where he lay under its folds, and got him outside to lay him flat on the carpet.
"He's dead, I guess," said Larry, cheerfully.
"Get some water," screamed Joel, "and open the window;" meantime he slapped Van's hands smartly together and called him to open his eyes, and this not succeeding, he ran over to Mother Fisher's medicine closet, rushed back, and in his trepidation emptied a whole bottle of something all over the white face.
"That's no good," said Larry. The window now being open, he advanced with a water pitcher whose contents he promptly distributed in the same way. "See what you've done; that's castor oil."
