Gimlet eyes that always were creeping around in search of “something!” We’d find out now what that “something” was, for it had been found—the secret of the millionaire’s death had been solved. We were dead sure of that.
But it wasn’t to be our luck to see the strange doctor that morning. And how we missed him, when he called at the big house, was a crazy mess, and goes to show how Fate can make a monkey out of a fellow and change his soup into sour vinegar.
There was a door to this room that we were in, with a heavy self-catch on the outside. And swung shut by the wind, which had come up with the sun and now was twisting the whole sandy countryside out of shape, we seemed to be as completely imprisoned as though our “cage” had been made of steel instead of heavy boards.
“Well, I’ll be jiggered!” came Poppy’s much-used expression, when he found that the door had latched itself on the outside, where we couldn’t reach it.
“Phew!” I gagged, holding my nose with one hand and feeling around in the dark with the other. “Open the ventilator—quick!”
“The ‘ventilator’s’ closed, Jerry.”
“Go on!”
“Honest. I can’t budge it.”
I laughed then. I thought it was a good joke on us. For I never dreamed that we couldn’t jimmy the latch and quickly get out. But we learned in the next twenty or thirty minutes that the man who had hung this door had put it up for keeps.
Still, we had to get out. For having broken one of the filled bottles in kicking around in the dark, the gaggy drug smell was getting thicker every minute. We tried throwing our double weight against the door. That made it crack. Pretty soon we were panting from the hard work, with the sweat doing canal stuff down our necks. But we kept on. And finally the door went down, with the two of us sprawled on top of it like a pair of four-legged octopuses.