Might it have been that which Margie Garrison whispered to the girl behind her? “Oh, I know where there’s lots of it—Van Dorian’s ruin.” She might have said something like that.
Was anybody looking after the Van Dorian, ruin?
CHAPTER XIX
IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT
Emerson had still an hour before the arrival of the last train at Bridgeboro. He knew that his people would not be concerned until after that. Stranger to boys though he was, he had a certain self-reliance. Perhaps this was the result of his lonely habit of life. He was also thoughtful. It was only the flaring, rough and ready qualities of scouthood that he lacked; and the boy talk.
In Bridgeboro he went into the only place which was open, the Union League Club, of which his father was a member. Here he telephoned to Doctor Harris and said that Walter was with the scouts, searching the woods. He did not say combing the woods. They thanked him and promised not to worry about the busy hero. Emerson mentioned that he was going toward Little Valley on this same business but did not say why.
He then went up Main Street into Ashburton Place and thence to the Little Valley road. He looked singularly unlike a scout in his natty, conventional suit and shallow-crowned, telescoped hat.
His walk seemed to match his way of talking, although one could not possibly say anything worse about it than that it was a gentlemanly walk. Yet boys walked behind him and crudely mimicked him. It seemed strange for him to be upon such an errand. It was unlike the adventurous quest of the scouts in this, that it had originated wholly in his mind. Oddly enough, it was evolved from a trifling incident observed in school.
Soon he was beyond the last house in Bridgeboro and outside its boundaries. The Van Dorians had been a penurious race and when they died they seemed to have taken the village with them.
But the Van Dorian mansion, destroyed many years before by fire, seemed reincarnated into a thing of picturesque beauty, where it sat well back from the road, its jagged ends of masonry and broken turrets softened by the poetical hand of time and covered with a winding robe of ivy. Small wonder if this old ruin were thought of by one who had been reminded of the romantic English ivy.
But no one would ever have thought of Emerson Skybrow climbing about those broken walls and exploring the littered interiors which lay open to the starlight. He entered through an irregular gap in the masonry which probably had once been a doorway of the old stone mansion. Here was a spacious unroofed interior level with the outer ground. A rank profusion of weeds poked up through the rotted remnants of flooring and all but covered the crumpled masses of copper which had once been part of the roof.