Some more of the old man’s trickery, was our natural thought.
“When was he taken sick?” inquired Poppy. “After he got up?”
“After he got up? Laws-a-me! I can’t get him up. That’s the trouble. I tell him he’ll feel better if he goes outside for a spell. But, no, he won’t listen to me.”
“And hasn’t he been out of bed at all?” pressed Poppy, in a queer voice.
“No. He just lays there and groans. Nor has he let up a single instant since I went to bed with him.”
“Well, I’ll be jiggered!” cried the tangled leader, looking at me.
At Ma’s orders we lit the kitchen stove and warmed some water, which she poured into the rubber bottle. With this on his stomach, the sufferer gradually quieted down. Nor could we make ourselves believe, as we stood over him, that his sickness was put on. There was real misery in his voice. And his wrinkled face was a sort of yellowish-white, like old piano keys. Such a look couldn’t have been manufactured for the occasion. We knew that.
Poppy and I were sort of up a tree, as the saying is. Pa’s stomach ache had upset the whole works for us. If the old man had been in his room all evening, as his wife said, then some one else had been secretly in the house. For certainly the gander couldn’t of itself have opened and closed doors. No, it had been brought here. We couldn’t doubt that for a single moment. And sort of putting Pa out of the tangle for the present, and suspecting the spy, we began to wonder, in growing uneasiness, if, after all, there hadn’t been more deep purpose back of the crazy stunt than we had first imagined.
“What beats me,” says the leader, as we earnestly talked the matter over, “is the easy way the spy slips in and out of the house. Locked doors are the same to him as open doors. And he seems to be wise to every little move we make. For instance, if his work is all on the outside, as we suspected last night, how could he have known that we were sleeping in the dead man’s room?”
“It sure is some tangle,” I waggled.