“Sure, ’tis welcome ye are to what I’ve got,” came heartily from the generous woman. “An’ ’tis glad I am, too, for your company. For with secret doors in me cellar an’ a vicious prowler without, ’tis no safe place for a lonely ould widdy. Look at me! ’Tis still tremblin’ I be from the fright that gripped me when I heard ye on the front porch. For, thinks I, ’tis no one but that creepin’ cat killer, himself—bad luck to his murderin’ soul!”
“Has he been here again, Mrs. O’Mally?”
“Niver a sound have I heard from him since ye left. But ’tis the constant feelin’ I’ve had that there’s eyes.”
I knew what she meant. For it was those same hidden eyes that had put the shivers in me on the way to the bridge.
Having been up all night, Poppy and I were dead tired, as you can imagine. But dizzy as I was from lack of sleep, I had no intention of turning in until I had seen the underground chamber. So, leaving Mrs. O’Mally and Uncle Abner to frisk the extra beds into shape, the leader and I, with our new chum, skinned down the cellar stairs. Then, having opened the secret door—and I might explain here that the only reason why the door had escaped us in the first place was because the chimney base was built squarely in the middle of the cellar floor—we next corkscrewed down the winding stairs. As Poppy had said, it was like going down a peculiar well. Coming to the room where Tom had gotten the “bump on the bean,” as he now grinningly expressed it, I zigzagged here and there, hoping to feast my eyes on some of that wonderful “pirate” truck that we had talked of. But the only “weapons” in sight were Tom’s pick and an old mule collar. Nor were there any skeletons.
“What makes you so sure,” says Poppy, when we had made the rounds, “that the treasure is walled up in this room?”
“That’s what Grandpa Weir told us.”
“Did he see it put away?”
“No. But he said we’d find it here.”
Poppy swung the pick.