But how strange, to go deeper, that he had been so close to us when we least suspected it! Still, on that point, all of his actions had been strange. In many ways he was as mysterious as a shadow, itself.
A cat-strangling machine! Ugh! The poor cat had been given no chance at all. But if the mystery of how he did his cat strangling had thus been cleared up to us, we had yet to learn why he did it.
Having upset the Sunday School, we decided that it was a good place to keep away from. So that was one Sunday that the church didn’t get our two dimes. Our plan now was to see what information we could pick up at Mrs. O’Mally’s house. And as we had a long dusty walk ahead of us on the bottom road, we hurried home and changed our clothes.
“I haven’t told you,” says Poppy, when we were headed for the river, “about my talk with Mrs. Clayton. She was awakened, she said, by a cat scream—as she describes it, a most hideous scream. Thinking that the house cat was in trouble, she started downstairs, but as Mr. Weckler was ahead of her on the stairs she went back to bed. Just as she was dozing off she heard a cry; then something fell. She almost fainted, I guess, when she saw what had happened in the library. And as soon as she could, of course, she got Doc on the telephone.”
“Did you tell her that Peter is dead?”
“Yes. And I took her outside and showed her the grave, so that she could tell Mr. Weckler about it when he got up.”
I thought then of our early-morning work. Bill had wondered whether or not the cat had been strangled before the attack on the old man or afterwards. We knew now, from what Mrs. Clayton had told Poppy, that it was the cat’s death cry, itself, that had gotten the awakened owner out of bed. Yet the puzzling question still hung before us: Why had the housebreaker killed the cat? What had been his object? Having invented some kind of a fearful cat-strangling machine, was it a mania of his, or whatever you call it, to go around killing harmless cats? And, if so, did he sometimes pick off bigger stuff than cats? Boys, for instance, or even grown men? Of these thoughts, I had the sudden shivery feeling that Poppy and I, as treasure hunters, had best watch our “P’s” and “Q’s.”
Coming within sight of the old stone house at exactly twelve o’clock, the leader suddenly was reminded of something.
“Say, Jerry, I haven’t told you yet about the bad news.”
That was so! In the morning’s excitement I had forgotten all about it. But I wasn’t particularly worried.