“K-k-kroak!”
The grinning eyes looked into mine.
“Would you like to hear him say it in Yiddish?”
“I’d like to make a meal of his fried legs,” I returned.
“You can have him,” the other offered. Then, without another word, he let himself down limb by limb, scooting in the direction of town, a mile away.
Scoop gave a queer throat sound and came out of his thoughts.
“That’s the new kid,” he said.
“You talk like you know him.”
“I know of him. He belongs to the new family [[6]]in the old Matson house. Ricks is the name on the mailbox. There’s a man and a woman and this boy in the family—only the woman is a Miss Polly Ricks, and not the boy’s mother. The mother is dead, I guess.”
Then my chum told me how his pa was the administrator of the Matson estate; and, of course, it was through Mr. Ellery, a Tutter storekeeper, that the new family had rented the long-vacant house where Mr. Matson, a queer old man, had been murdered for his money. It is a lonely brick house on the edge of town. The front yard is full of pine trees, just like a cemetery. And when the wind blows the pines whisper strange stories about the murder and about the vanished body.