A few moments later they were standing under the twisted chandelier listening to the faint rattle of its many crystal pendants. Nann made a suggestion: “Let’s each take a turn in selecting some place to look for the deed, shall we?”
“Oh, yes, let’s,” Dories seconded. “That will make sort of a game of it all.”
Dick held the flashlight out to the older girl. “You make the first selection,” he said.
Nann took the light and, standing still with the others under the chandelier, she flashed the bright beam around the room. “There’s a broken door almost crushed under the sagging roof.” She indicated the front corner opposite the one by which they had entered. “There must have been a room beyond that. I suggest that we try to get through there.”
But Dick demurred. “I’m not sure that it would be wise,” he told her. “The roof might sag more if that door were pulled away.” They heard a noise back of them and turned to see Gib making for the entrance. “I’ll be back,” was all that he told them. When, a moment later, he did return, he beckoned. “Come along out,” he said. “There’s a way into that thar room from the outside.”
He led them to a window, the pane of which had been broken, leaving only the frame. They peered in and beheld what had been a large bedroom. A heavy oak bed and other pieces of furniture to match were pitched at all angles as the rotting floor had given way. Dick stepped back and looked critically at the sagging roof, then he beckoned Gib and together they talked in low tones. Seeming satisfied with their decision, they returned to the spot where the girls were waiting. “We don’t want you to run any risk of being hurt while you are with us,” Dick explained. “We want to take just as good care of you as if you were our sisters.” Then he assured them: “We think it is safe. Gib showed me how stout the cross-beam is which has kept the roof from sagging farther.”
And so they entered the room through the window. For an hour they ransacked. There was no evidence that anyone had been in that room since the storm so long ago. “Queer, sort of, ain’t it?” Gib speculated, scratching his ear. “Yo’d think that pilot fellar’d a been all over the place, wouldn’t yo’ now?”
“Let’s go back to the front room again and let Dori choose next for a place to search,” the ever chivalrous Dick suggested.
A few seconds later they again were under the chandelier. Dories, as interested and excited now as any of them, took the light and flashed it about the room, letting the round glow rest at last on the huge fireplace. “That’s where I’ll look,” she told the others. “Let’s see if there is a loose rock that will come out and behind which we may find a box with the deed in it.”
Nann laughed. “Like the story we read when we were twelve or thirteen years old,” she told the boys. But though they all rapped on the stones and even tried to pry them out, so well had the masonry been made, each rock remained firmly in place and not one of them was movable.