A few rifled desks more or less meant nothing in the sleepy life of old Goliath, who already was snoozing in a heap on the floor. And after a few minutes, we, too, stretched out on the bed to get some rest. But we didn’t figure on going to sleep. After all the excitement it didn’t seem possible to us that we could. And to be ready in a jiffy, no matter what bobbed up, we kept our clothes on, even our shoes.
CHAPTER XVI
GETTING CLOSER TO THE SECRET
Are you all tangled up in the mystery now? Having read this far, is the cart, in your jumbled mind, pulling the horse? Or, having carefully chewed up and digested Poppy’s wild theory, together with the mess of stuff that led up to that theory, do you have similar fixed ideas about the millionaire’s death, to start with, and all the other more or less hitched-together things, including the granddaughter’s disappearance and the spotted gander?
What stumped Poppy and I right now was the sort of contradictory side of the crazy tangle. There was old Ivory Dome. Having surprised him in the kitchen, very “ghostlike” indeed in his long white nightshirt, we had jumped to the natural conclusion that he was back of all the “spooky” stuff that was going on in the house. But now we knew differently. The old man wasn’t the “ghost,” as we had suspected. He had secrets, of course. And maybe he knew who the “ghost” was. But it was plain to be seen, from what had just happened in the barn, that the two men weren’t pulling together in the same harness. For if they had been, one wouldn’t have knocked the other cuckoo.
No, whatever peril there was coiled up, serpent-like, inside of the queer house, and on its doorsteps, the old man, instead of being safe in his secrets, had as much to dodge as either of us. And, as I have written down in the tail end of the preceding chapter, it was our scheme to use this as a sort of crowbar to pry him out of his hole. We had a good excuse now to get after him, roughshod, if necessary, and make him tell what he knew. And remembering how he was tricking his wife with his pretended dumbness, largely to his own lazy comfort, we didn’t care a whangdoodle whether, like Mrs. Goliath, she cleaned up on him with a rolling pin or not. She couldn’t give him anything that he didn’t deserve.
Yet, until we had the true story, it was interesting to sort of speculate, detective-like, on his motives and hidden actions. There was his trip to Pardyville. Having been sent to town to get the expected granddaughter, he had come home, hours late, with a strange spotted gander, now the very center of the crazy tangle. Meeting the granddaughter, had she put him wise to the fact that there was a bigger hunk of peril in the queer house than either he or his wife had suspected? After his talk with her, did he know why the death-chamber door slammed every night at ten o’clock, and what made it slam? And was it due to a scheme of hers that he had lugged home the spotted gander? Had she given him the gander, in completing her plans to “disappear,” or had she told him where to get it, and why he should get it—further, why he should do all these things and keep his mouth shut, both on her secrets, as she had handed them over to him, and on her hiding place?
It was Poppy’s notion that Dr. Madden, in planning a sort of exposure, had sent for the girl, as her friend. So old Ivory Dome, in meeting the granddaughter at the depot, could very well have talked over certain plans with the returned doctor, too—might even have gotten the gander from the other man, in fact. If so, was it a sort of royal gander, or something like that? And having been brought to America by the doctor, was it considered a big feature in the hidden scheme that its owner was secretly working on?—a scheme, of course, in which old Ivory Dome, like the granddaughter, was playing an important part.
Good night! I’d be thinking next, was the way in which I checked up on my crazy thoughts, that the peculiar gander actually had something to do with the millionaire’s sudden death!
Getting back to more sensible stuff, I followed old Ivory Dome in my mind, from the time he had arrived with the gander until his sort of fatal trip to the barn. I couldn’t recall that he had made any fuss over the gander. And that sort of contradicted the theory that he had been told to bring it home, as important, and take care of it. If anything, he had sort of neglected it. Queer. One thing didn’t jibe with the other at all. And least of all could I figure out why the gander had been turned over to the old man if either the granddaughter or the doctor wanted to be sure of it.
In further spotting the dumb-acting one in the tangle, we had it on him that he had done two distinctly mysterious things since his return from Pardyville, not including the little side trip that had kept him on the road until ten-thirty: That same night he had slipped out of bed to unlock the kitchen door, craftily letting on, when caught by his awakened wife, that he was “sleepwalking.” And to-night he had repeated the stunt, getting as far away from his bed as the barn. Was he doing this midnight shirt-tail stuff at the granddaughter’s orders? If so, what was the big idea? Why did he have to wait until his wife was asleep to go to the barn? And what was there out back to draw him, in the first place? The gander probably. But why all the midnight secrecy? Further, had he been trying to get out of the house, to go to the barn, where the gander was, when I had seen him in the kitchen? Very likely. But the locked door had stopped him. And the reason why he had growled under his breath, when he heard his wife, was because he knew that all chances of doing any secret stuff that night were gone.