In ordering the housekeeper back to bed, Doc mixed up some kind of dope to settle her nerves. And then, when everything was quiet in the house, he waddled into the library and thumbed through the ’phone book for a number.
“It’s time now,” says he, “to call in the law.”
An open window showed how the unknown robber had gotten into and out of the house. Going outside we found heel prints under the window. Here, too, our flashlight picked up the carcass of Mr. Weckler’s yellow cat. Stone dead, Poppy said. Running ahead, he followed the escaping robber’s tracks in the soft grassy earth. Coming to a flower bed, around which I now vaguely remembered that a heavy wire had been strung, I saw him drop to his knees. For the robber, it seems, striking the knee-high wire in his flight from the house, had gone kerplunk! on his snout into the flower bed. The imprint of his right hand showed plainly, but, strange to say, there was no left-hand imprint.
The silence of the sleeping street was broken by the rattle of a flivver. Then a shaft of light cut across the yard in a sweeping circle. Bill Hadley having arrived, I started forward to meet him with the story of our discoveries. But a cry from Poppy stopped me.
“Jerry! Look! Here’s money that flew out of the robber’s pocket. Fifty cents and three quarters. Here’s a knife, too. And here’s something else.” There was a short silence. “Well, I’ll be cow-kicked! What do you know if it isn’t a cucumber! A gold cucumber!”
I was back in two jumps. A gold cucumber! What in time did he mean by that? I soon found out. For he had the object in his hand. A sort of pocket piece, about an inch long and as heavy as lead, it had been cast in the perfect pattern of a cucumber.
We knew now that the robber was one-armed; that for some strange reason he hated yellow cats; and that he had a particular interest in cucumbers.
CHAPTER XI
THE CAT KILLER
During the next hour Bill Hadley did a lot of noisy stomping around. For that’s his way of working. He has the idea, I guess, that it makes him seem important.
But so far as I could see no new clews were added to the ones that we already had picked up, except that he found out the truth about the dead cat. And right here comes a strange part of my story. Can you imagine a one-armed man strangling a cat? If a job like that were wished onto me I think I’d need six hands. For I know something about cats! How then had this geezer managed it one-handed? And awful as it was to think about, an act so inhuman as that, why had he done it?