In a minute Tom’s knife was in his hand, and, quite forgetting everything else, he was hacking away at a point where another nail head showed.
“Putty on top to represent an old nail head, and wooden peg doing the business below,” he ejaculated. “I don’t believe there’s a bit of iron in the place.”
Tom dug at nail head after nail head, and each flew off. “Dorothy, it’s a wooden room,” he cried.
“Oh, really,” said Dorothy, in an entirely lifeless monotone.
“And there is the horse’s head out of that window. You must have been blind not to have seen it before.”
“We did see it,” I said testily. “But you’re so confoundedly impetuous you rush ahead before anybody can tell you anything.”
Tom paid but slight attention to my remarks. He was up on a window sill, prying with his knife. “I’ve got it,” he exclaimed finally in triumph. “Here’s the place where they hung the wooden shutters on with wooden pegs, and they painted and puttied them over when they took the panels down.”
He leaped down and started towards the other room. “I’m going to find out what the agent knows,” he called back over his shoulder.
Dorothy still stood by the window, the later afternoon sun making a golden halo of her somewhat rumpled hair. As I watched her, there seemed to be something a trace less energetic in her posture. She was leaning against the window and gazing fixedly outward. She did not notice me at all. For ten minutes we remained in a silence broken only when Tom returned, waving a dirty piece of paper triumphantly.