“It may be a pet of hers.”
“Possibly. But, if so, why didn’t she keep it? Why did she send it here instead of coming herself? And what was her object in planning a secret trip here in the first place?”
“The old man knows,” I waggled.
Poppy quickly picked that up.
“Old Ivory Dome! I’ll tell the world he knows—the old trickster!”
“Maybe we can pump him.”
“If you notice, Jerry, he does a lot of listening but blamed little talking.”
I laughed, thinking to myself that the old man never had a chance to do much talking when his wife was around. Listening had gotten to be a sort of habit with him.
“It would be natural for us to think,” Poppy then went on, “that he was working with the girl instead of against her. Yet he’s fooling his wife—we know that. So I can’t help but be suspicious of him, though I’d hate to think that he could be crooked enough to sell out his own wife’s people.”
“If he’s working with the girl, then the spy must be on her side, too,” I figured out, still of the opinion that the old man and the spy were linked together in their secret stuff.