I was told later that I blushed like a beet. Well, I won’t deny that. What boy wouldn’t blush, let me ask you, to learn suddenly that a girl he never had seen before had been wearing his corduroy pants around the country, leaving telltale patches in barbed-wire fences?
I had good occasion to blush, let me tell you! [[103]]
CHAPTER XI
THE BIBLE’S SECRET
I was introduced to the strange girl. But I don’t remember what I said or what she said. For I was sort of confused.
Later on I came to realize how very pretty she was, with laughing black eyes, saucy bobbed curls and pink cheeks. Her name was Frances Matson. Her father, Mrs. Kelly told us, an only child of the puzzle maker’s, had quarreled with his parent, the girl’s grandfather, and had run away from home when he was nineteen. Since then, over a period of twenty years, nothing had been heard of him until very recently.
“Just before the ould gintleman met with his awful death,” the woman went on, “he came here, as though he had a premonition of what was goin’ to happen to him, and told me for the first time about the quarrel that had separated him from his son, Harry. He was wholly to blame, he confessed, and cried about it, great, big tears, tellin’ me how stubborn he had been and how sorry he [[104]]was now. He wanted his son to come home again. And he asked me, as his cousin, to write to all of our relatives to learn if any of them knew anything about the missin’ one’s whereabouts. He hadn’t kept track of his relatives, he explained, and didn’t know where to write to, himself. Then he mentioned his advanced age. He wasn’t likely to live much longer, he said. He had felt himself breakin’ down of late. And he gave me a written order so that in case of his sudden death. I would have a right to hold his furniture and household goods until his son had been located. He trusted me, he said, and depended on me. I told him, in sympathy, that I would do my best to find his boy for him. He wanted Harry to heir his property, the brick house that he lived in and the ould mill. He had money, too, he told me, hidden away. In the event that his son wasn’t found within ten years, the estate was then to be divided among his relatives, but no part of it, he instructed bitterly, not so much as a penny or a pin, was to go to the rascally twin brother, Peter.”
The speaker paused to get her breath.
“And he told me in conclusion,” she went on, “that I was to preserve the family Bible and let no one have it except his son, least of all the twin brother, who, accordin’ to his story, was the [[105]]blackest black sheep that ever disgraced a respectable family. And no sooner had he said this than a wild look came into his eyes and away he ran, out of the house and down the road, as though Satan himself was hot on his heels, I knew then that the things that I had been thinkin’ about him were true: He was the next thing to crazy. A week later I went to town, stoppin’ at his house. He didn’t answer when I rang the bell. The door was unlocked. I went in … the kitchen floor was covered with blood.…”