Sort of summing up, I felt that I had a pretty good line on the tricky old man now. And I liked him the less for what I knew about him. Here he was taking it easy—and to that point faithful little old Ma undoubtedly had lugged his dinner and supper up to him on a tray!—while downstairs the innocent one was straining her eyes over a tangle of human hair to earn money to keep him in smoking tobacco.
Getting sight of us through the smoke screen, the two old gossips sort of rolled up their gab, as though they didn’t want us to know too much about their family affairs, though why old Goliath should act this way all of a sudden was a puzzle to me, for certainly, on the way out, he hadn’t been backward in spilling his grief to us.
Then Ma breezed into the room, jawing to beat the cars. Such a smoke! What would the curtains and bedclothes be like? Up went the window ... and out went old Goliath. Not out of the window, you understand, but out of the room.
We grinned at him as he swung past us into the hall.
“I guess,” he drawled, looking back with a comical twist to his face, like a spanked kid, “they wasn’t no false bottom to that story of the old man’s. She sure kin talk. They’s no ifs or ands about that. She’s what you call pur-ficient. An’ between rollin’ pins an’ this, I think, fur a life’s job of it, I’d prefer the rollin’ pins.... Wa-al, where do we bunk?”
“Jerry and I have the notion,” says Poppy—only it was his notion and not mine—“that we’d like to sleep in the dead man’s room. Mrs. Doane says we can. And she’s going to bring quilts and things for you to sleep on the floor in front of the door, if that’s agreeable with you.”
Ma was bustling around in the smoke house, getting ready to go to bed, so Pa was out of our reach for the night at least. However, it wasn’t important for us to talk with him right away, Poppy said. He had lost some of his sympathy for the old geezer, I guess. And I was glad of that. For it looked like a crazy stunt to me to show our hand to the tricky old man, as the other had suggested. He’d have us at a disadvantage then.
Eleven-thirty found us parked in our bedrooms for the night, Ma and Pa in their room halfway down the long hall, and the three of us in the “master’s chamber,” as the big room was called. A sweller bedroom I never hope to see. Say, it was more like a parlor than a bedroom. Boy, the carpet was so thick that it tickled our knees. And the bed alone must have cost a thousand dollars. It was some bed. Like a king’s. On top of the headboard was a fancy doo-dad—a sort of red-plush curtain, folded as slick and pretty as you please, with gold fringe. And there was more of the same plush stuff over the windows. The walls were laid out in big panels, and each panel was a separate picture worked into cloth. Tapestry—I guess that’s the right word to use. The ceiling was a big picture of dancing ladies wrapped in strings of flowers—and bu-lieve me, all those ladies did have on was flowers! That was an awful side-show for a man to lay in bed and look at, I thought, blushing. The chairs had biscuit cushions and toothpick legs. Further, there was a table, a swell dresser that matched the bed, a grandfather’s clock and a writing desk. Everything being new to us, it was an awful temptation to start snooping. For one thing, we thought, the desk might be crammed full of money! Of course, it wasn’t money that we could take—I don’t mean that—but it would be exciting to count it. Thousand-dollar bills, maybe. Millionaires do have thousand-dollar bills. Sure thing. And having died very suddenly, the rich man might not have remembered, as a last act, to send his money back to the bank. But we didn’t snoop, even though the thought came to us that among the packages of greenbacks in the desk we might find a private paper, or some such thing, that would clear up the crazy mystery. For Mrs. Doane hadn’t told us that we could open the desk. Anyway, we couldn’t have opened it if she had said so, for it was locked.
Poppy spent quite a bit of time examining the clock. For it was his idea that there might be a pair of hidden electric wires between the timepiece and the door. But he could find no wires. And we were dead sure, too, that there were no hidden springs in or around the door.
Helping old Goliath make up his floor bed, we tucked him in and then went to bed ourselves. The light was out now. And though I wasn’t scared, still, as I lay there in the dark, I had a queer feeling. I put my nose against the sheets. They smelt all right. And just because they were cold didn’t mean that they had been touched by dead hands. Sheets were naturally cold, I told myself. Yet somehow these sheets felt different. Sort of clammy-like.