UNDER THE BED
Scoop and Peg were bitterly angry over our arrest and imprisonment in the lock tender’s attic bedroom. Red was scared. I was neither angry nor scared, but worried.
What gave me that feeling was the unhappy thought that it wouldn’t please Mother and Dad a little bit to learn, upon my return home, that I had been picked up twice in daily succession by the law. To be arrested, even when one is innocent, is something of a disgrace. Jails and prisons are things that any right-minded boy should keep away from. I was sorry now that I had been led into the greased-pig trick. I realized, when it was too late, that we had made a foolish blunder in trying to get funny with the law.
Upon the appearance of the talkative, warty-nosed man, my worries had taken a scattered, anxious turn. I had the feeling that the evil-minded one had a hidden purpose in coming here. I didn’t believe his crazy story about being born on [[154]]an island in the Pacific Ocean. And he wasn’t half as anxious to get the job of tuning the lock tender’s piano as he let on. He was after something else. His exaggerated piano-tuning talk was just a blind.
Were we the “something else”? Did our presence in the house, as prisoners, have something to do with the hidden purpose of his visit? This was not a comfortable thought to me. Involved in the theft of the Liberty Bonds (we still held to the thought that the evil pair had stolen the bonds from their hiding place on the island and that the other thief was waiting near by with the booty) he plainly was a dangerous man. More than that he was a deep man, as the saying is. His flowery put-on conversation with the lock tender coupled with his acting had proved that. I had no desire to come under his power, either as a friend or an enemy. I was afraid of him. I wished with all my heart that he was a thousand miles away.
As I wrote down in the concluding paragraph of the preceding chapter, there was a stovepipe hole in the floor of our prison. And the entrance of the two men into the house had found us on our stomachs on the floor with our noses hung over the hole’s edge. It wasn’t a big hole—not [[155]]more than six inches in diameter. And to see into the lower room we had to bring the tops of our heads together, each one sort of pushing forward to hold his place.
The Harmony Hustler, as he had elected to introduce himself into the house as a part of his hidden scheme, let on that he was awfully tickled at sight of an old-fashioned square piano that stood in one corner of the sitting room. He sort of patted it here and there, even on its big round legs, as though he was wildly in love with every part of it, calling it a “magnificent old instrument—a patriarch of piano art,” and a lot of other silly truck like that.
“I don’t know,” the lock tender spoke up, “if you kin play a tune on it or not. Fur a rat got in it last winter an’ made a nest in it. An’ one day the ol’ cat she got a whiff of mister rat an’ got in whar the varmint was, an’ then, let me tell you, they was some action. By gum, I never heerd sech a whangin’ an’ a bangin’ an’ a discordin’ in all my born days. They was bass notes an’ sopranny notes an’ rat whiskers an’ cat fuzz flyin’ every which way.” The speaker paused to spit through the doorway. “The ol’ cat she licked. Yes, sir, by gum, she jest naturally cleaned that ol’ rat’s bones as slick as a polished darn needle. [[156]]Smart cat, mister. She hain’t furgot ’bout that ol’ rat, nuther. No, sir. Every day or so she gits in the pianny an’ goes thumpin’ up an’ down the strings. As I tell my neighbors, the fust thing I know I’ll have a cat pianny player an’ kin start up a side show an’ git rich. Purty slick idea, hey? Hee! hee! hee!”
The Harmony Hustler gave himself a sort of vague look.
“How—aw—quaint and interesting, sir.”