“As I say, the lawyer doesn’t want the granddaughter in the house. There’s something in the will, I think, that favors him if he can keep her away. So, learning from Ma that the girl was coming, he may have sent some one out to the big house to stop her.”
“Then the storm came up and the spy got his shirt tail wet, huh?”
“Yes, and a certain other guy whom you hang around with more or less got his shirt tail wet, too.”
“You’re sure,” I pinned him down, “that the spy wasn’t old fatty, himself?”
“Jerry! Don’t you suppose I can tell a hippopotamus from a rat?”
“All right,” I laughed. “We’ll take it for granted that the spy was Lawyer Chew’s hired man and not old hippo himself. And we’ll further take it for granted that the spy saw you in the storm and got scared out. But—as the goat says, how about old Ivory Dome? Where does he come in? We know about some of his tricks; and we know that he’s fooling his wife. I can’t make myself believe, though, now that we’ve talked it over this way, that he’s on Chew’s side.”
“Nor me,” says Poppy quickly. “I’d sooner think that he was working against Chew on the granddaughter’s side, though what his game is in playing ghost and slamming doors I can’t imagine. It seems to me, too, that he ought to be able to trust his own wife. And to that point, you’d naturally think that the woman would be at the head of any secret plans to help the granddaughter, instead of him.”
“Half the time,” says I, “I think he’s D-U-M-B, and nothing else but.”
“Here, too. Yet we caught him in tricks. So it’s all right for us to be suspicious of him. That dumb look of his may be just a sort of mask.”
“Say, Poppy,” I then laughed.