I started to shiver. I don’t know why, unless it was like having a man die in front of me, sort of. Things like that get the best of a boy. But after a minute or two I was all right again. I told Mrs. Doane about the accident and the whispering voice. Then we ran upstairs to find Poppy and get the diary out of the clock.
CHAPTER XIX
THE DIARY IN THE CLOCK
We found Poppy in the big bedroom, doing detective stuff with a yardstick. But whatever his job was, he dropped the work in a hurry when I told him about the whispering voice on the telephone.
Everything was dark inside of the big floor clock. So we got the flashlight, which was working again, the leader having cleverly touched it up. The light helping us to see, we found a leather-covered book in the very bottom of the clock, sort of tucked away in a dark corner. It had D-I-A-R-Y printed on it in gold letters, and under the printing was the dead man’s name.
“Corbin Danver’s diary!” cried Mrs. Doane, acting as though she was afraid to touch the book. “Is it right for us to read it?” she held off, in her nervous way.
“From what Jerry tells us,” says Poppy, “I take it that we’ve got to read it. For if Miss Ruth is liable to lose out on getting this property, as Dr. Madden said, we want to help her—that really was his idea in calling us up. And how can we help her unless we know what the mix-up is all about?”
That was talking horse sense, all right. So we took the diary to the window, for better light, and got busy on it, finding that it went back more than twenty years.
The most of the writing, we found out, in skimming through the book, was sort of unimportant. So, instead of telling you everything, word for word, I’ll pick out just the mystery stuff.
Stopping in Africa on a trip around the world, a traveling companion of the millionaire’s had picked up a fatal jungle disease, like leprosy, and had been buried there.
“I find myself wondering,” the rich man wrote in his book, “if I, too, might not contract this fulsome disease. Poor Travis! Would that I had been able to trek his body back to civilization.... I shall watch my hands carefully for any sign of those fatal white blotches.”