Poppy and I felt pretty sick as we crawled into our bed in the big room. It was galling to us to have old Chew win out. Of course, we hadn’t lost anything ourselves. But we were on the granddaughter’s side. And her loss was our loss, sort of.
Tap! ... tap! ... tap! ...
Jerked out of a crazy dream, I sat up in bed and rubbed my eyes. The gander! It had tapped that way to get into the house. How well I remembered that night! And now it was tapping again. Somewhere in the big room.
Excited, I got Poppy up. And between us we traced the sound to one of the fancy cloth wall panels. As I have written down, these panels were pictures. And in this particular picture there was a big yellow moon.
What was it the diary had said? The hidden staircase behind the moon! There was a secret door here. And if we could open it, the mystery would be over.
Poppy told me then, in a low excited voice, why he had been measuring the room that afternoon. He had suspected that the wall before us was too thick to be natural. Now, in quick measuring, both in the big room and the one next to it, we found that there was a four-foot secret wall chamber here.
And the way to get into that hidden room, where the gander was still tapping, was through the “moon” picture. We felt all over the wall for a hidden spring. Then we pressed the moon itself—and out swung the whole panel!
“Urk! Urk!” says the spotted gander, acting tickled to see us. “Urk! Urk!” and as though to guide us, it turned and started up a flight of winding stairs, flying from step to step.
We followed it, using our flashlight, which showed us that the stairs went down, as well as up. I don’t mind telling you that I kept pretty blamed close to the leader. It was a spooky adventure, let me tell you. Where was the gander taking us? What was there up above? Was it a peril of some kind? And surprised by us in its secret den, would it jump at us and try to kill us, as it had tried to kill old Ivory Dome in the barn? You can see what our thoughts were like.
Coming to the top of the stairs, which had taken us almost to the roof, we found ourselves in a little room, which we learned afterwards was a secret part of the big attic. Here we found a cot. And sound asleep on the cot was a girl. The prettiest girl I’d ever seen in all my life.