“Sounded like a door,” says Poppy.
“I know it’s a door. And I suspect that it’s the door of the chamber where Miss Ruth’s grandpa died. But what makes it slam? And always when the clock strikes ten! It does that every night. As I told Pa the second time it happened, there’s something queer going on in this house—something that neither he nor I can understand. Miss Ruth isn’t coming here in a mere whim. She has a reason. Has she learned why her grandpa left her the keys of this house? Does she know what is in the will, which is to be read here Wednesday night? Certainly, when she gets here, and I expect her any minute now, I hope that she tells me the truth. For if there’s anything I hate it’s to be around people who have secrets. Me?—I never had a secret in all my life. I don’t believe in secrets. And that is one reason why I set my foot down when Pa wanted to join the Masons. I wasn’t going to have him know things that I didn’t know.”
Poppy was sitting beside the telephone. And when it suddenly jingled he jumped as though he had been shot.
“Laws-a-me!” cried the woman nervously. “I wonder what now?”
CHAPTER III
THE SPOTTED GANDER
The ghost theory is bunk. Every big kid knows that. Ghosts? Pooh! Who could be crazy enough to believe in ghosts? That is what we say back and forth, the big kids I mean, when the sun is doing its dinner-time stuff, high in the sky, and the nearest cemetery is six miles away.
But what happens when a white cow makes goo-goo eyes at us over a moonlit cemetery fence? Oh, boy! How we can cut the dust then. The only kid who ever beat me in a race like that was Spider Whickleberry, and his legs are so long that he modestly uses his pa’s white duck trousers for basketball pants. And even then the pants aren’t any too long for him!
Me believe in ghosts? Well, I should sa-ay not! But, to own up, what was the big thought in my mind right now? Ghosts, and nothing else but. Yes, sir, as crazy as it may seem to you, I actually believed in my excitement that there was a ghost in the upper part of the house. And what more likely than the ghost of the man who had died here?
At first sight the lonely house had struck me as being queer. Not only in its unusual size, as it had towered in the moonlight, but in its desolate location, as well. Truly, had been my thought, no one but a queer-minded man could have wanted such a place.
Now I wondered if the dead man’s secrets were living after him. It would seem so. Br-r-r-r! Certainly, I told myself, the elderly spook had a nice gentle way of letting us know that it was on the job! I wondered further if the door slamming, so sharp and businesslike, wasn’t a gentle little hint for us to evaporate.