“I wonder why she wanted to go through it from attic to cellar,” said Sahwah, shrewdly. “Could she have had some purpose? Migwan!” she cried, jumping up suddenly, “don’t you remember that she said, ‘How near that tree is to the window’? Could she have been thinking that it would be easy to climb in there? And when she asked how we ever moved about with all that furniture up there, you said, ‘We never come up here’! Don’t you see what we’ve done? We’ve given her a chance to look the house over and find a place where people could hide if they wanted to, and as much as told her that they would be safe up here because we never came up.”
Consternation reigned at this speech of Sahwah’s. The girls remembered the incident only too well. “I’ll never be able to trust anyone again,” said Migwan, near to tears, for she had conceived a great liking for the young woman she had known as “Miss Mortimer.”
“Do you remember,” pursued Sahwah, “how she took the pole of the raft and found out how deep the water was all along, and then afterwards she said to the man in the boat, ‘I told you it was deep enough.’ Everything she did at our house was a sort of investigation.”
“But it was only by accident that she got to Onoway House in the first place,” said Gladys. “All she did was ask me to tell her where she could get a team of horses to tow her to a garage. She didn’t know I belonged to Onoway House. It was I who brought her here, and she only stayed because we asked her to. It doesn’t look as if she had any serious intentions of investigating the neighborhood. She said she was in a hurry to go on.” Migwan brightened visibly at this. She clutched eagerly at any hope that Miss Mortimer might be innocent after all.
“How do you know that that breakdown in the road was accidental?” asked Nyoda. “And how can you be sure that she didn’t know you came from Onoway House? She may have been looking for a pretense to come here and you played right into her hands by offering to tow her into the barn.” Migwan’s hope flickered and went out.
“And the man in the barn,” said Sahwah, knowingly, “he might have come to look the automobile over and become familiar with the way the barn door opened, so he could get into the car and drive away in a hurry if he wanted to get away.” Taken all in all, there was only one conclusion the girls could come to, and that was that there was something suspicious going on in the neighborhood, and it looked very much as if the Venoti gang were hiding explosives in the empty house and were planning to bring something else; what it was they could not guess. At all events, something must be done about it. Nyoda called up the police in town and told briefly what they had seen and heard, and was told that plain clothes men would be sent out to watch the empty house. When she described the man who had called and used the telephone, the police officer gave an exclamation of satisfaction.
“That description fits Venoti closely,” he said. “He used to have a mustache, but he could very easily have shaved it off. It’s very possible that it was he. He’s done that trick before; asked to use people’s telephones as a means of getting into the house.”
The girls thrilled at the thought of having seen the famous anarchist so close. “Hadn’t we better tell the Landsdownes about it?” asked Migwan. “They are in a better position to watch that house from their windows than we are.”
“You’re right,” said Nyoda. “And we ought to tell the Smalleys, too, so they will be on their guard and ready to help the police if it is necessary.”
“I hate to go over there,” said Migwan, “I don’t like Mr. Smalley.”