“I’ll feel safer if you keep away from him.”
“He’s a nice old gentleman,” I defended, “even if he is kind of queer, with a graveyard voice. Besides,” and here I winked at Dad under the flipping end of the wash rag, “the invitation comes from Lizzie, too.”
“Nonsense!” Mother sputtered, picking at a [[228]]spot on the back of my neck with her finger nail.
“Tell me again,” Dad said, “about the ‘friendly ghost.’ I didn’t quite catch on from your story how the old gentleman worked it.”
I complied, explaining how Mr. Garber had been in Tutter on business the afternoon when we had chased the Strickers away from our boat. Starting for home in the evening, in his rowboat, he had been driven under the bridge by the storm. The rowboat had contained a white oilcloth, used in rainy weather, to keep the boat dry, and he had wrapped this about his shoulders like a shawl. Coming to our scow he had heard the Strickers on board telling how they were going to smash up our stuff. Having seen us hard at work that afternoon, and realizing how we would feel in the loss of our stuff, he had boarded the scow from the canal to drive the others away. With his dripping white hair and white shawl he had looked not unlike a ghost, and at sight of him the Strickers had run away in fright. The following day, on another rowboat trip to Tutter, he had overheard us talking about him, calling him the “friendly ghost,” so, when given another chance to help us, having detected the Strickers’ rope, he had signed the note in fun with the name that we had given him. [[229]]
Dad laughed at the conclusion of my long explanation.
“Some adventure, I’ll tell the world!”
Well, to wind up my story, I will further explain that the girl’s grandfather and uncle were twin brothers, so much alike in appearance that the gardener never had suspected that the injured man that he had found in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor was his employer’s brother, struck down by his evil companion, and not the retired banker, himself. Nor had the police suspected the truth of the matter. As for us, never having seen the grandfather to know him, it wasn’t surprising, in the moment of his appearance in charge of the scow, that we had mistaken him for the other man.
But the girl knew that the tillerman was her grandfather and not her uncle. And you should have seen the way she flew into the old gentleman’s arms when we boarded the big boat.
The story that the unnerved grandparent gave us in his emotional reunion with the younger relative was rather vague and sketchy. And to this day I don’t know whether, in his wild flight from the log house, he knew that his brother had been struck down or not. However, that is not an important point. [[230]]