“Neither Dr. Madden nor Lawyer Chew?”
“No, sir, nor nobody else. Them things people don’t make pets of.”
What was Poppy’s idea, I wondered, in asking all these questions. Did he imagine that there was something crooked in the millionaire’s death, and that the lawyer and doctor, living in the same town, were mixed up in some evil scheme to get the dead man’s property?
Those boring eyes! Somehow the memory of our meeting with the man in the buggy gave me the creeps. Could it be, I further asked myself, that the doctor had known that we were heading for the big house, many of whose secrets undoubtedly were open to him. And didn’t he want us there? Yet the man’s eyes were naturally queer, old Goliath had told us. They seemed always to be looking for something. Looking for what? Did the something, whatever it was, connect up with the millionaire’s sudden death? And had the search for the mysterious something taken the dead man’s medical friend to Europe?—and this, within a day or two after the funeral?
Poppy, too, had inquired about pets. Did he have the crazy idea that there was some secret connection between the returned doctor and the puzzling spotted gander? And, further, did my chum think that the gander, granddaughter and doctor were secretly mixed up together to a sort of common end?
Crickets! Maybe they did connect up, was my jumping thought. For certainly, as we knew, they all had come into the neighborhood at about the same time—taking it for granted that the granddaughter wasn’t more than twenty miles away.
Another thing, as the family doctor, the man with the thin face and eagle eyes knew why the millionaire had died; or, to put it another way, he knew what had caused the rich man’s sudden death. The question was, did Lawyer Chew know, too?
CHAPTER XIII
POPPY’S AMAZING THEORY
After he once got the hang of things, old Goliath wasn’t such a fearfully punk driver. I’ve seen worse. Shortly after meeting Dr. Madden we very nicely tried to rainbow over a tree. And turning into the graveled drive at the big stone house we put on another sort of dizzy loop-the-loop stunt—two wheels up and two wheels down. But what was that? Nothing to crab about.
Poppy looked at his watch when we got out of the car and stretched our legs.