“It isn’t you he’s thinking about, dearie,” said Mrs. Martin. “He’s afraid about the gun.”
Very likely that was true. Mr. Martin had indeed lost some faith in Westy’s ability to keep his promise where a gun was concerned, but his confidence in his son had not diminished to a point where he believed Westy would invade that forbidden closet. Probably Doris expressed her father’s mental state accurately enough when she said later to her mother, “He isn’t afraid that Westy will break in, he’s afraid that the gun will break out. The rifle has got father’s goat as well as somebody or other’s deer.”
“You shouldn’t use such slang, dear,” said Mrs. Martin gently.
The dungeon to which the rifle had been consigned was one of those holy of holies to be found in every household. Mr. Martin had always been the exclusive warden of this mysterious retreat.
As a little boy, Westy had supposed it contained a skeleton (he never knew why he thought so) and that all his father’s worldly wealth was there secreted in an iron chest of the kind which has always been in vogue with pirates. Later, when he had learned of the existence of banks he had abandoned this belief and had come to know (he knew not how) that the closet contained books which had undergone parental censorship and been banned from the library shelves. Doris had never regarded this closet with the same reverential awe that Westy had shown for it; she said it was full of moths and that its forbidden literature was easily procurable through other sources.
But ever since Westy and Roy Blakeley had tried to peek in through the keyhole of this closet to discover the skeleton there, the son of the house had looked upon it as a place of mystery. And though it had lost some of the glamor of romance as he had grown older, he knew that whatever was in it never came out. It was a tomb.
CHAPTER XVIII
A RAY OF SUNSHINE
Mrs. Martin gave Westy about ten minutes to regain his poise and then followed him to his room where his open trunk stood in the middle of the floor. Westy was sitting on the bed and the oilcloth cover of his departed rifle lay like a snake upon the pretty bedspread. It was evident that when he had gone to his room to get the gun in obedience to his father’s demand, he had removed the cover to gaze at his treasure before handing it over. Mrs. Martin lifted the limp thing and hung it over the foot-board.
“I’m going to ask him to put the gun in it,” Westy said wistfully.
“I don’t think I would, dearie,” said his mother, sitting down on the bed beside him. “I think I just wouldn’t say any more about it; let the matter drop. If you speak to him again he will only flare up. Doris says she thinks some ancestor of his may have been killed by a rifle back in the dark ages; some cave man, that’s what she says. And she thinks the fear of guns is in your father’s blood. He’s very nervous about such things, dearie.”