Mrs. O’Mally’s nervousness had now completely gone away. For she saw, all right, that she was perfectly safe in our hands. And I wish you could have seen the joy in her wrinkled face when we told her about the happy days that lay ahead of her, with no cucumbers to worry about, oodles of jack in the bank, and even old stiff-neck Pennykorn bowing to her respectfully as she gasolined down the boulevard in her ten-thousand-dollar Rolls-Royce.
Our talk then turned to old Mr. Weckler. And drawn into the conversation, the pickle woman told us things about the Weckler family that not only surprised us but sent our minds off on a new line of speculation. The daughter, it seems, had eloped with a nephew of the old river pirate. Nathan Weir, Mrs. O’Mally went into details, had carried a bad reputation. That is why Mr. Weckler, with proper pride in his family, had refused to accept the man as his son-in-law. But the girl wasn’t to be stopped. And now that so many years had passed away since she last had been heard from, it was generally concluded, as Mother had mentioned, that the runaway was dead, after a probably unhappy married life.
But here was the point that walloped Poppy and I between the eyes: A relative of the Weir family by marriage, Mr. Weckler had been struck down by the same man who was now searching for the pirate’s hidden treasure, though as yet seemingly without success. Could it be, then came the exciting thought, that some motive deeper than intended common robbery had taken the one-armed treasure hunter to the house of our “silent” partner? Or, to express the same thought in another way, could it be that old Mr. Weckler, through his unhappy connection with the Weir family, was somehow or other mixed up in the secret of the hidden treasure, as it had been put away by his son-in-law’s rascally uncle?
And how strange, too, was our further thought, that we should be drawn into this “cucumber” mystery at the very time when we had turned our attention to cucumber pickles. First had come the “Pickle Parlor” idea, through which we had become associated with Mr. Weckler. Then, for reasons still unknown to us, but now under speculation, a housebreaker, whom we had every reason to believe was the one-armed treasure hunter, whose chief interest, outside of cat strangling, was gold cucumbers, had strangely strewn cucumber pickles all over Poppy’s cellar floor. At the time we had vaguely thought it was our “diamond” ad that had attracted the peculiar lawbreaker to the house. But now we wondered, with tangled minds, if, instead, the man hadn’t marked us because of our associations with Mr. Weckler, whose house, as you know, had later been broken into. Then, in the “cucumber” chain, had come the discovery of the gold cucumber in the flower bed, followed quickly by the story of the pirate’s cucumber mold. Including Mrs. O’Mally in the tangle, whose specialty was cucumbers, it was a befuddling “cucumbery” mess, to say the least.
The clock boomed away at intervals as it climbed the hill to the midnight peak. Then, at a quarter of twelve, just as Mrs. O’Mally was in the middle of a story in which an old lady in Ireland, who in drinking out of a pan of milk in the dark had swallowed a frog, we heard the familiar tap! ... tap! ... tap!... Getting on our tiptoes we ran from wall to wall. Then, unable to locate the sound, we ran down cellar, Poppy leading with the flashlight, me next, then Mrs. O’Mally, then the big yellow cat. Tap! ... tap! ... tap!... We went from wall to wall. But to no success. For the sound came through one wall as distinctly as through another. The four walls, in fact, seemed to carry the sound, like a charged telephone wire.
Out of luck, as I say, we went back upstairs. The clock struck twelve. The ghost hour! I was peculiarly uneasy for a moment or two. I always feel that way at midnight. Then a sound came out of the cellar that literally turned me into an icicle—a sound so hideous and so awful that you, too, I think, had you been in my shoes, would have been completely scared out of your wits.
Poppy flashed by me.
“The cat!” he cried, and throwing open the cellar door he tumbled pell-mell down the stairs. Again that awful blood-curdling, choking, gasping cry cut my ears. And then, as though the deadly machine had completed its fearful work, the cellar was plunged into silence.
Knowing that the cat killer had secretly entered the cellar, to the death of her cat, Mrs. O’Mally fell helplessly into a chair. Her lips moved. But so great was her fright—I might say her horrified fright—that she could make no sound.
My own voice, as I called my chum’s name, sounded faint and squeaky. “Poppy!” I called again. Then, as my legs began to lose their icy anchors, I managed to get to the head of the cellar stairs. “Poppy!” I called a third time.