But we hadn’t, as you will learn by reading on.
In a way we had made a mess of things. We had let the enemy get the talking frog away from us; and we had fumbled in recovering the murdered puzzle maker’s hidden fortune. Of course, if we were to believe Deacon Pillpopper, the ten-ring puzzle had a certain money value. But it wasn’t what we had expected to find. Far from it. Moreover, the puzzle was useless to us without the directions for working it. We couldn’t do a thing with it.
In going to bed that night we agreed that there [[193]]was no need to stand guard. For most certainly we had seen the last of the enemy’s spies. And that meant that we had seen the last of the ghost.
I was tired and went promptly to sleep. It seemed to me that not more than ten minutes had elapsed when a whispering voice told me to get up. The clock on the lower floor struck midnight.
“There’s some one at the kitchen door,” Scoop told me.
Having been awakened ahead of me, Peg and Tom were standing in a puddle of moonlight that came through the bedroom window. Half asleep and half awake I got onto my feet.
“I went to the kitchen to get a drink,” Scoop told us. “I didn’t bother to light a lamp. I heard footfalls on the porch. Then the doorknob turned.”
We went noiselessly down the stairs, more bewildered than frightened. And sure enough, as Scoop had said, some one was trying to push our key out of the lock of the kitchen door.
I crept to a near-by window, detecting the ghost on the porch. A startled cry sprang to my lips. And thus warned of our presence in the kitchen, the prowler glided swiftly from the porch into the shadows. [[194]]
Scoop ran into the sitting room and threw up a window.