Monkey-face! I couldn’t get that out of my mind.
“When you get to town,” says I, “go around by the undertaker’s and pick out a coffin. For I’m going to get you.”
A few minutes later the car shot out of the yard in a cloud of dust.
“The scoundrel!” cried Mrs. O’Mally, white and trembling, but still mad enough to bite a tenpenny nail in two. “Me sign his paper? I’ll go to the poorhouse first.”
“You won’t need to go to the poorhouse,” says Poppy, “if we can find the pirate’s treasure.” Then he motioned to me. “Come on, Jerry. Let’s get busy.”
CHAPTER XIV
UNDERGROUND
Putting the Pennykorn gang out of our minds for the time being, Poppy and I again took up the peculiar puzzle of the one-armed cat killer. He sure was a big hunk of mystery, all right. The crazy things that he had done in Tutter you already know about. Less than three hours ago, after having followed us to the church, he had given us the slip in broad daylight. And here he was in the secret cellars of the pirate’s house pounding away with his tack hammer as unconcerned as you please, seemingly with as little fear of detection as he had shown at the church. Had he followed us here, too? Or had he left town ahead of us? We wondered.
What he was after, of course, in this secret work of his, was the balance of the hidden treasure. Having found one of the gold cucumbers he naturally wanted the whole caboodle. To believe Mrs. O’Mally’s story, he had been working here, like a hidden ghost, for a month or more. That he was still on the job, with a tap! tap! here and a tap! tap! there, as the old scout song goes, proved that the crafty pirate had put his treasure away in some peculiarly secure place. But where had the man gotten his clews to the hidden treasure in the first place? Further, where was the secret entrance to these mysterious underground rooms that enabled him to come and go in broad daylight without detection? And, most puzzling of all, considering his cat-killing mania, who was he?
With nothing in the cellar now except green cucumbers and silence, we were led to believe that the mysterious worker had gone off somewhere to take a rest. So we got busy and did some extensive wall tapping ourselves, with the big hope, of course, that we would be successful in locating a hollow section in the heavy masonry. But the guy who did the needle-sleuthing stuff in the haystack had an easier job than us. For those cellar walls sounded about as hollow as a butcher’s chopping block. The secret doors, it would seem, were a myth.
As I have written down, the cellar was deep and dungeon-like. It was full of creeping shadows, too. Shadows that had twisting octopus arms one minute and spider-like legs the next. I didn’t like it for two cents. I kept thinking of that iron jigger that had grabbed the poor cat. And other stories of murders believed to have been committed here ran through my mind. Sniffing, I could almost imagine that the dank air was heavy with the smell of blood. Like a slaughterhouse. However, when I told Poppy what I was sniffing about he said that it was a dead-rat smell, after which he went upstairs, in further wall tapping, but to no better success.