I told him what had happened to me. I told him how miserable I felt with the soot in my eyes and nose and mouth and ears. There was pecks of it down the back of my neck, I told him, and bushels of it clinging to my clothes.
He said he was sorry for me. But I could tell from the tone of his voice that he was giggling to himself. Well, to that point, I guess that I would have giggled if he had been the unlucky one to get into the soot.
Thump! thump! thump! The spy was at work [[138]]directly below us. There was need for caution. The wonder was that I hadn’t been heard before this. For I hadn’t landed quietly at the bottom of the chimney. Two skinned knees and a skinned nose gave testimony to that.
Moving stealthily to the door that opened onto the stairs, we squinted down. His candle stuck in an ink bottle, the old man was standing on a box tapping the stone wall with a hammer. In the flickering light he seemed to be more shabby and more hairy than ever. A wolf! That is what he was—a two-legged wolf. As we watched him, he tapped over a space two yards square. Marking the spot, he moved his box, beginning work on a new square. Plainly he was going over every inch of the mill wall in a systematic search for the puzzle maker’s hidden fortune.
Did he have a clew to the money’s hiding place? Did he know to a certainty that the money was cemented into the stone wall? I wondered to myself as I watched him.
If the money were in the wall, he would be sure to find it sooner or later. We had bragged to Mrs. Kelly and the granddaughter that we wouldn’t let the uncle get away from us with the hidden fortune. But now I was suddenly uneasy in the thought that he might find the money ahead [[139]]of us and escape us. It would be hard to keep track of him every minute.
“ ‘Ten and ten,’ ” Scoop whispered in my ear. “Do you see anything down there, Jerry, that looks like ‘ten and ten’?”
“No,” I breathed.
“ ‘Ten and ten.’ Um.… Let me have your flashlight. I’m going to look around. Keep your eye on him, Jerry.”
Ten-twenty-thirty minutes passed. I could hear Scoop tiptoeing around the office. But I didn’t turn my head to see what he was doing. For the spy needed constant watching. Our goose would be cooked, as the saying is, if he came upstairs and surprised us.