Silvia worried so much about what might happen to him en route that after dinner I motored to Windy Creek with some tourists who had stopped at the hotel in passing.
I called up long distance and after some delay got in communication with our house. Ptolemy himself answered and assured me he had arrived all “hunky doory”, that Huldah, who was out on an errand, was “hunky doory”, and that the kids were all “hunky doory.” In fact, his cheerful tone indicated that the whole universe was in the beatific state described by his expressive adjective.
I was really ripping mad at his taking French leave and so giving Silvia cause for her anxiety, but I forbore to reprimand him by word or tone, lest he get even by “coming back” literally. I did tell him how the loss of the note for twenty-four hours had caused a general excitement, but he felt no remorse for his share in the situation, blaming Diogenes entirely and bidding me “punch the kid’s face” for unpinning the note.
On my return from Windy Creek I was fortunate enough to fall in with a farmer who lived near the hotel. He was driving some sort of a machine he called an autoo. He was an old-timer in the vicinity and related the past, present, and pluperfect of all the residents on the route. I had a detailed and vivid account of the midnight visitor of the haunted house.
“I’d jest naturally like to see what there is to it,” he said. “Not that I am afeerd at all, only it’s sort of spooky to go to a lonesome place like that all alone. If I could git some one to go with me, I’d tackle the job, but I vum if every time I perpose it to anyone they don’t make some excuse.”
“I’m on,” I declared. “I don’t dread ghosts near as much as I do some living folks I know.”
“Right you air,” chuckled the old man. “If you say so we’ll go right off now jest 114 as sure as shootin’. We may be ghosts ourselves tomorrow.”
I assured him I was quite ready to encounter the ghost, so he jubilantly turned the machine from the road into a grass-grown lane. We zigzagged for some distance and then got out and went on foot through a grove. The moon and the stars were half veiled by some light, misty clouds, so that the little house didn’t show up very clearly, but as we came to the top of the hill, we saw something that shook even my well-behaved nerves.