Poppy, of course, couldn’t tell her that he had a hunch that the gander had been sent here for a secret purpose. For Pa would get it in the neck then. We knew a lot of things that we had to kind of tuck away under our caps.
Here we caught the sound of hoofs and steel buggy wheels in the graveled drive. Was it the granddaughter? Poppy and I thought so. And a flash of disappointment came over us. What we wanted to do was to show our stuff as young detectives. And it would turn everything upsidedown for us, as you can see, if the granddaughter now stepped in to clear up the mystery. Yet we were curious to see her. That was natural. And in the general stampede for the front door, to welcome the newcomer, Ma Doane was not more than a foot or two ahead of us.
But it wasn’t the granddaughter. It was a man—a big fat man. Boy, you should have seen how he filled the sagging seat of that spraddle-wheeled buggy. His stomach stuck up so high in front that he had to look around it, unable to see over it. Of course, I don’t mean that exactly—but you get me, I guess. The point is that the man had started to grow out at the belt line when he had stopped growing up and down, and now instead of using an ordinary fifty-inch belt to hold up his pants he bought engine belting by the rod, more or less.
Nor was he fat just in one place. His neck was fat, what little there was of it. And his face! Oh, boy! He had fourteen chins and his jowls hung down like apples in an apron. The corners of his big mouth hung down, too, sort of grim-like. Bulldog stuff. We couldn’t see his eyes—they were buried in fat—but I had a hunch that they were a sort of grayish-green, like a hungry cat’s.
The human elephant, or whatever you want to call it, had gotten out of the buggy, after a lot of twisting and grunting, and leaving the fagged-out, drooping-eared horse to sort of regale itself on the leaves of a lilac bush, was now waddling toward the house. Watching him, all I could think of was a dressed-up duck. No, I won’t say that he reminded me of a goose, for I don’t want to disgrace the Admiral by putting that hunk of human lard in the goose class. The Admiral was a true friend of ours, as you will learn, and this over-weight geezer, as you will learn, too, was nobody’s friend except his own.
Yah, you guessed it. Lawyer Chew, the big guy in Neponset Corners—mayor, chief of police, church deacon, school director, banker, street commissioner and last, but not least, money lender—had arrived in the capacity of family lawyer to kick us out and lock up the house.
CHAPTER VIII
ALL ABOARD FOR PARDYVILLE
“Who is it?” says Poppy, as the waddler tried out his weight on the porch steps. “Mark Tidd, Sr.?”
“Search me,” says I, wondering if the heavy watch chain that the over-fed visitor carried around on his vest front, like a young suspension bridge, was solid gold. If it was, he must be a millionaire, I thought.
“It’s Lawyer Chew,” the woman told us in a low voice.