Scooting along in my bare feet I made no more sound than a cat. Nor did I stir up any racket on the back stairs. Suddenly, though, as I came to the bend in the stairs, I stopped short. Talk about slamming on the brakes! Boy, I skidded seventeen feet with locked wheels. Smell the rubber. Phew! There was a light in the kitchen. A moving light. Its reflection on the wall ahead of me, where the stairs turned, is what had stopped me.
It wasn’t Poppy. I knew that. As for Mrs. Doane and her cuckoo husband, they were in bed. Seemingly, I thought, with a queer feeling not easy to explain, I had tumbled into an entirely new part of the mystery!
Was it the ghost? If so, then the spy in the storm was a second party, of whom we knew nothing, for certainly, as my good sense pointed out, the man couldn’t be in both places at once.
I suddenly was sort of suffocated under the weight of the growing mystery. It seemed so—so sort of tremendous. A spy outside, with the rain beating down on him (though evidently he didn’t notice it or mind it) and a “ghost” inside! How many more people were there, I wondered, in the crazy hidden tangle? And whether they were working together, or against each other, what was their secret purpose? Property! That must be it. In his grave less than a full year, his will about to be read, greedy hands were already reaching out in the dark, in evil schemes, for the dead house-owner’s property. That’s the way it is when some rich men die. And Corbin Danver, the housekeeper had told us, had been a millionaire.
I don’t think that it’s any discredit to me that I sort of dropped Poppy out of my mind at this point. He was able to take care of himself, was my quick decision, seeing that I had other work to do. Not being dumb, he’d begin to wonder when the signals stopped. He’d go slow. And that would make him safe. In a pinch, he could take to long legs, and outside of Spider Whickleberry and myself, if there’s anyone who can fan legs any faster than old Poppy, I don’t know who it is, though usually he runs at things instead of away from them.
Yes, the leader was safe enough, I concluded. And to that point, he might even be safer than me! For here I was, not twenty feet from the ghost, and wanting to go on, to see who the “spook” was, there was no telling where I might end up. Instead of the leader getting laid out cold, it might be little dew-drop!
STOOPED OVER, HE WAS DOING SOMETHING TO THE LOCK OF THE KITCHEN DOOR.
Poppy Ott and the Galloping Snail. Page [65]
But here was my chance; I hung on doggedly. I wasn’t going to back down. For how would Poppy feel toward me to learn that I had hid from the ghost in a closet? No, instead of backing up, the thing for me to do, I realized, getting out all my grit, was to go farther down the stairs, even around the bend. Then I could see into the kitchen.
So down I went, slowly you may be sure, and on tiptoe. I was at the bend now. Another step; two steps. I could see a man in a long white nightshirt—ghostly enough, all right! Stooped over, he was doing something to the lock of the kitchen door.