The roof creaked over my head. And what do you know!—the man was sitting on top of my coop now. It was him I had smelt. Putting a finger through the bunghole, I found that I could touch his leg. But you can bet your Sunday shoes that I didn’t touch him very hard. I guess not.
Ma had told us about “queer smells” in the house. On the dead man, too. Was this the same smell, I wondered. One thing, I knew it wasn’t the dead man himself. For whoever was sitting on my barrel was a whole lot huskier in weight than a ghost. Besides, I had touched him. And you can’t touch a ghost.
More footfalls! And louder ones this time. Some one else had come into the barn. Oh, if Poppy would only flash the light! What was the matter with that kid, anyway?
The man with the drug-store smell wasn’t on the barrel now. He had slid down. And suddenly the barn was filled from top to bottom with the awfullest scream you can imagine. The scared-to-death kind of a scream. Boy, did my hair ever stand on end. Then I heard something else—a dull thump on the barn floor.
“Jerry!” yipped Poppy out of his bed in the moon. “Yank the rope—quick! The flashlight won’t work.”
Well, I yanked. I yanked good and plenty, let me tell you. But I guess I was too late. For nothing skidded into my rope. So, after a few seconds, I tipped the barrel over and got on my feet.
Poppy had seen me jiggle the crippled flashlight to make it work. And I could imagine that he was shaking it now to beat the cars. Pretty soon he got a connection. And did a light ever look so good to me as then. Oh, boy!
Scrambling down the ladder with the light in his hand, the leader looked to me to be all arms and legs. Farther up I could see old Goliath’s slow feet. The light made a round puddle on the floor. It had found something and stopped. Something white and long.
“It’s Mr. Doane,” cried the leader, bending over the body. “Some one knocked him out.”
Yes, sir, the long white thing on the barn floor was old Ivory Dome himself. He was in his nightshirt, exactly as I had seen him the night before in the kitchen. And his face was covered with blood. But he wasn’t dead, as I first thought.