The sheriff had his eyes on us now. But though he saw what we were doing, he didn’t give us away. It tickled him, I guess, to see smarty get it in the neck.
“One, two, three,” says Poppy, and down went the water and the hornets, only the water, being the heaviest, hit the fat target first. Doused from head to foot, young fatty gave a gurgle like a staggering bull when the nest pancaked on his dome. He knew, of course, that it was a trick. And looking up to see where the water and nest had come from, he found twenty-seven million homeless hornets swooping down at him in vengeance. One old gladiator, who could pump his wings faster than the others, made a swish with his sword, ramming it clear through the upturned pug nose. Then, boy, oh, boy, did hunky ever howl! He took to his heels, swinging his arms over his bean like a drunken windmill. But he wasn’t fast enough to get away from another old lunker, who stabbed him six inches deep in the tight part of his pants. With one great and mighty howl, the runner jumped clear over a nine-foot bush. Anyway, it was a bush.
HE TOOK TO HIS HEELS AS TWENTY-SEVEN MILLION HORNETS SWOOPED DOWN AT HIM.
Poppy Ott and the Galloping Snail. Page [192]
Closing the window, we scooted downstairs.
“Laws-a-me!” laughed Mrs. Doane, getting her eyes on our empty pail. “Was it you boys who threw the water? I never saw anything so funny, and so appropriate, in all my life. And those hornets!” Then, grimly: “My only regret is that it wasn’t Lawyer Chew, himself, who got it, instead of his son.”
It was going to eleven o’clock now. We had dinner an hour later, then Poppy and I fixed up the door in the barn as best we could, for we had no right to smash it down and go off and leave it that way.
We did a lot of talking back and forth as we worked. But I don’t know as I need to write it all down. You know everything that we knew. And probably the things that puzzled us are puzzling you. It was a big disappointment to us that we had missed seeing Dr. Madden. In spite of our discoveries in the barn, Mrs. Doane didn’t believe that he was deep in the mystery. But we did. It wasn’t anything that he hadn’t smelt druggy when he made his morning call. Clean clothes and a bath could have fixed him up O. K. As for acting worried over the “lost” granddaughter, that could have all been put on. Or even if he didn’t know where she was, that in no way left him out of the tangle. Not by a long shot. Wherever the girl was, or whatever her secret ideas were in hiding—on him, possibly, as well as on the rest of us—he had yet to tell why he had hid himself in the closed house for a whole year.
He would be back in the evening, he had told Mrs. Doane. Sure thing, he would be back! Just as Poppy had said in dishing out his theory, it was the hider’s scheme, in having solved the mystery of the millionaire’s death, to spring a surprise when the will was read. So now, as you can imagine, we were crazy for night to come. For we wanted to find out why the dead man’s loyal friend had hid in the lonely house, with queer-smelling drugs all around him, and what he had uncovered.
Poppy took it into his head to do some more sleuthing in the upper rooms, hopeful, I guess, that he would pick up a clew in the way of a cuff link, or something like that, as usually happens in detective stories. I saw that he didn’t need me, and going downstairs to help Mrs. Doane, who was sweeping and dusting for dear life, so that everything in the house would be spick and span for the big party that night, I found her at the telephone.