"I don't care," says Vee. "I think it would be great fun to go."
As for me, I didn't mind, one way or the other. I'd seen this Andres Zosco party plenty of times, ridin' back and forth on the train. He'd even offered to pick me up in his limousine and give me a lift once when I was hikin' up from the station. And I must say he wasn't just my idea of a plute movie producer.
Nothin' imposin' about Mr. Zosco. Hardly. Kind of a dumpy, short-legged party, with a round smooth face, sort of mild brown eyes, and his hair worn in a skinned diamond effect. You'd never take him for a guy who'd go out and buy a Hudson River steamer and blow it up just for the sake of gettin' a thousand feet of film, or put on a mob scene with enough people to fill Times Square like an election night. No. He was usually readin' seed catalogues and munchin' salted peanuts out of a paper bag.
It was early last spring that he'd bought this Villa Nova place, a mile or so beyond the Ellinses, and moved out with the bride he'd picked out of his list of screen stars. I don't know whether he expected the Piping Rock crowd to fall for him or not. Anyway, they didn't. They just shuddered when his name was mentioned and stayed away from Villa Nova same as they had when that Duluth copper plute, who'd built the freak near-Moorish affair, tried the same act. But it didn't look like the Zoscos meant to be frozen out so easy. After being lonesome for a month or so they begun fillin' their 20 odd bedrooms with guests of their own choosin'. Course, some of 'em that I saw arrivin' looked a bit rummy, but it was plain the Zoscos didn't intend to bank on the neighbors for company. Maybe they didn't want us crashin' in either, as Mr. Robert suggests.
You couldn't worry Mrs. Robert with hints like that, though. She's a good mixer. Besides, if she'd made up her mind to play that new pipe organ you could pretty near bet she'd do it. So inside of three minutes she had us loaded into the car and off we rolls to surprise the Zoscos.
Villa Nova, you know, is perched on the top of quite a sizable hill, with a private road windin' up from the Pike. As you swing in you pass an odd-shaped vine-covered affair that I suppose was meant for a gate-keeper's lodge, though it looks like a stucco tower that had been dropped off some storage warehouse.
Well, we'd just made the turn and Mr. Robert had gone into second to take the grade when I gets a glimpse of somebody doin' a hasty duck into the shrubbery; a slim, skinny party with a plaid cap pulled down over his eyes so far that his ears stuck out on either side like young wings. What struck me as kind of odd, though, was his jumpin' away from the door of the lodge as the car swung in and the fact that he had a basket covered with a white cloth.
"Huh!" says I, more or less to myself.
"What's the matter?" asks Vee. "Seeing things in the moonlight?"
"Thought I did," says I. "Didn't you, there by the gate!"