“A queer smell,” mused Poppy, recalling the housekeeper’s story, “footsteps in the dead of night, windows creaking in their slides.” Then he laughed. “I hope that the spook, whoever he is, puts on the whole show to-night.”
“Lock the door,” says I, “and push the dresser in front of it.”
“Cuckoo! We’d stand a fine chance of catching the ghost if we locked ourselves in. Do you suppose he’s going to smash the house down to get at us?”
“Then we aren’t going to lock the door?”
“Absolutely not.”
“That being the case,” I grinned, making a dive for the bed, “I know who’s going to sleep next to the wall.”
Settled cozily in bed, Poppy then began at the beginning of the mystery, as we understood it, and went over it step by step, the better, I guess, to sort of figure out what was liable to happen to us if we took a notion to work on it!
And listening, I became sort of fascinated. I thought of other mysteries that we had solved—the talking frog, the rose-colored cat, the Oak-Island treasure, the whispering mummy, the stuttering parrot. What a wonderful chance this was, I told myself, all worked up, for a clever little Juvenile Jupiter Detective to show his stuff.
First of all, in Poppy’s check-up, came the strange house itself. Why had it been built here? Or, to put the question another way, what had been Mr. Danver’s hidden purpose in building it here—a fifty-thousand-dollar mansion on a ten-cent farm? Was it to be alone? Possibly. Then in his lifetime he must have been a sort of recluse. It isn’t hard for a recluse to get kind of queer in his head, so we could safely conclude that the dead house owner had been queer. Therefore he was subject to doing queer things—could even have planned things to happen to a queer purpose after his death.
All right. That was that.