CHAPTER XVII

IN THE OLD MANSE

The black parrot’s crashing escape from the Cap’n’s bedroom had left us dumb and dizzy. In planning our night’s work we hadn’t expected any such developments as this. In fact, we hadn’t thought of the missing parrot at all. Certainly, it never had occurred to us that the parrot was in any way connected with its master’s scare. We had thought of almost everything else _but_ the parrot.

Our first scattered conclusion was that the mysterious bird was indeed possessed of uncanny powers and could thereby come and go of its own free will. But we quickly got away from that crazy belief. The bird hadn’t gotten into the bed of its own accord, we sensibly agreed. Some one had put it there.

But to what purpose? Yes, _why_ had the parrot been hidden in the bed? Had the Cap’n been secretly marked for death, like the old seadog in _Treasure Island_? And granting that either old Caleb or the unknown spy was back of the evil scheme, was it the belief of these two men, or one of them, that the black parrot would fatally voodoo its master when he got into bed?

I shivered at the thought of it.

“What’s the matter, Jerry?” says Peg, watching me.

“That was some narrow escape for me,” says I.

“Fishhooks!” says he, laughing.

“I suppose,” says I, stiffening, “that _you_ would have let the parrot bite your leg off, hey?”

“Why not?” says he.

I didn’t say any more to him then. I wasn’t going to let him think that I believed the voodoo story if he didn’t. But just the same I watched my chance and gave my bare legs a careful once-over. And I’ll tell you truthfully that it was a big relief to me to find that the parrot hadn’t drawn blood on me with its bill. Now I was safe. Whether the voodoo story was true or not I had nothing to fear.

“It,” says Poppy, thinking. “We thought the Cap’n’s ‘it’ was a ghost. But now we know it was the black parrot.”

“We _think_ it was the parrot,” says I.

“There’s no doubt about it in my mind.”

“But why didn’t the old man say ‘parrot’ instead of ‘it’?”

“I can’t answer that question any more than I can answer a dozen others concerned in the mystery.”

“And don’t forget,” says I, “that he said he had seen ‘it’ at the foot of the bed--he didn’t say ‘it’ was _in_ the bed.”

“What puzzles me,” Scoop spoke up, “is who brought the parrot here. If there’s crooked work going on, I can’t make myself believe that old Caleb is at the bottom of it. For we know how thick he is with the Cap’n. And in close friendship like that he wouldn’t be likely to scheme against the other one.”

Poppy had been listening attentively.

“Sometimes,” says he, “a good man is _made_ to do evil things.”

“What do you mean?”

“Old Caleb may be a helpless tool of the other man.”

“The spy?”

“Sure thing.”

“Aw!...” says Scoop. “I’d sooner think the spy was working alone.”

“It gets my goat,” says Poppy, after a moment, “that we can’t capture this man. We’ve been close to him--we’ve even seen him in the dark--yet he always gets away from us. He could belong in the moon for all we know about him.”

“Don’t let that worry you,” says Peg. “For we’re going to get him in the end.”

“Yes,” says Poppy, sort of dogged-like, “we’ve _got_ to capture him. We’ve got to do that in order to clear Pa’s name.”

Scoop had gone to the broken window.

“To-morrow,” says he, wanting to do the square thing by our old friend, “we’ll all chip in and buy the Cap’n a new window glass. For we’re sort of responsible for this accident.”

We took turns standing guard throughout the balance of the night. But nothing happened. And at seven o’clock we went home to breakfast.

While we were replacing the broken glass that morning the Stricker gang meandered into sight.

“Window washers,” says Bid, getting a wrong idea of our work.

“Flunkies,” says Jimmy Stricker, turning up his nose at us.

“Cap’n Tinkertop’s pets,” says another one of the smart Alecks.

Bid got real brave and put a foot into the alley.

“Hello, Poppy,” says he. “Did you have a nice time in the barn the other night?”

“We picked out a barn for you,” says Jimmy, “because we thought you were a donkey.”

“Hee-haw! Hee-haw!” says Bid. Then he came closer. “Say,” says he, in pretended earnestness, “do any of you guys with strong backs and weak minds know where I can borrow a good wheelbarrow?”

He thought that was funny!

“Beat it,” says Poppy, “or I’ll tip this store building over on top of you and sprain your good looks.”

“Go on, you tramp! You couldn’t tip a mosquito over.”

“I bet you anything you want to bet,” says I, sticking up for our new leader, “that he can tip _you_ over with one hand.”

“_Him?_ Don’t make me laugh. I might crack my face.”

“If you did crack it,” says Scoop, “you wouldn’t lose anything out of your head except water.”

“You guys are a bag of wind.”

“You’ll think we’re a cyclone,” says I, “when we open up on you some day.”

“Talk’s cheap.”

“If you haven’t any other engagements this afternoon,” says Poppy, “come around and we’ll measure you up for a grave in our private cemetery.”

Bid put out his chest then and raised his arm muscles.

“When _I_ came to this town to live,” says he, strutting, “they had to put an addition on the hospital.”

“Yah,” says Scoop, “I saw that room. It’s padded on the inside and has your name over the door.”

“Watch me spit! Every time I do it I crack the sidewalk.”

“That’s nothing,” says Peg. “One time I sneezed and blew the North Pole over.”

There was more of this crazy bragging talk. Both sides enjoyed it. But I got mad as hops, let me tell you, when one of the smart Alecks plastered me with a mud ball.

Chasing the kid out of the alley with a club, I came back to my chums fighting mad.

“Why do we always let them get the best of us?” says I, wiping my muddy face. “Why don’t we clean up on them?”

Poppy grinned.

“Hold your horses, Jerry. Our time’s coming.”

“Yah, and so is the end of the world--but I don’t expect to live to see it.”

“We’re going to fix them to-night. Eh, Scoop?”

“I’ll tell the world we are!” says the old leader. “Remember what I told you the other night at the medicine show, Jerry?”

“About the Indian’s ‘spirit letter’ trick?”

“Sure thing. Well, Poppy and I have it all framed up to work the letter trick on them to-night. Spider Phelps is going to help us. We need a man on our side. And we can trust Spider, for he’s my cousin.”

I gave a tickled yip when the complete scheme was unfolded to me. The fun we were going to have! Oh, boy! A mud ball, or a dozen mud balls, wasn’t one, two, three as compared with what the Strickers were going to get.

However, I lost some of my enthusiasm that noon. For I overheard something at the dinner table that upset me.

Mother had a lot to say during the meal. She had been down town that morning, she told Dad, and had stopped at the emergency rooms to leave some pansies with a sick neighbor lady who recently had been repaired in the operating room.

“And while I was there I looked in on the Cap’n. Poor old man! He’s still flighty. The nurse says he has the strange hallucination that old Caleb Obed has drowned himself in somebody’s cistern.”

_Cistern!_ At the spoken word I suddenly pricked up my ears. And my thoughts jumped to Red.

“Tell me,” says Mother across the table, “is there any truth in these stories that are going around about old Caleb ordering a grave dug for himself and then committing suicide in some out-of-the-way place?”

Dad shrugged.

“That’s a queer thing,” says he slowly. “Caleb ordered the grave dug, all right. I figure he’s cuckoo.”

“Has he actually disappeared?”

“As completely as if he had walked off the earth. I was talking with the marshal about the case, and Bill tells me that he has ransacked the town for the old coot without being able to find hide or hair of him.”

Mother sighed.

“I hope the suicide story is untrue. For old Caleb was the best cistern cleaner we ever had.”

“What’s the matter with Negro Mose?”

“Oh, I can’t exactly complain of his work. But I like old Caleb the best of the two. However, if the latter isn’t available right now you had better hire Mose. For I think our cistern ought to be cleaned before a heavy rain comes.”

“I’ll see Mose on my way through town,” says Dad.

Well, as you can imagine, I did some quick work getting over to Red’s house.

“Your goose is cooked,” says I.

“What do you mean?” says he.

“Old Mose is coming to our house this afternoon to clean our cistern.”

That put a sick look on the other’s freckled face. And while we were talking over the unhappy situation, wondering if there was anything that we could do to save ourselves, a fat woman bustled into sight with an armful of rugs.

“Sh-h-h-h!” says I. “Here’s your Aunt Pansy, now.”

“Don-ald,” says the fat one, in a voice that was all honey and cream, “if you’ll come here, like a dear little man, and shake these bedroom rugs for Aunty I’ll make you a nice custard pudding for supper.”

I beat it then. For it made me nervous to be around Red’s aunt. And about two-thirty Poppy and the others came to my house in a delivery wagon that they had borrowed from Scoop’s store. Getting their signal, I ran into the street.

“Jump in, Jerry. Where’s Red?”

I told them of the freckled one’s predicament.

“He’s a goner,” says I. “For old Mose is bound to find his truck in the cistern.”

“He sure was a dumb-bell,” says Scoop, “to pull that burglar trick.”

“And as long as he was doing it,” says Peg, “why didn’t he use his own cistern?”

“Search me,” says I, shrugging. “But he’d be a lucky kid this minute if he had.”

Here Scoop got his eyes on something down the street.

“It’s going to rain, fellows,” says he, laughing. “Look at the dark cloud coming.”

The “dark cloud” was old Mose, a ladder draped on one shoulder and a coil of rope hung on the other. Each big hand gripped a pail handle.

I figured that it would be safer for me to be away from home when the silverware was brought up. So I quickly scrambled into the wagon, driving with the others to Peg’s house where we got the “treasure chest,” a sort of home-made trunk that his mother had dumped into the alley during the spring housecleaning work. Made of heavy wood, with a thick hinged cover, iron handles and iron corner pieces, it was just the thing that we needed for our “buried treasure” trick. Scoop’s father sells all kinds of cheap novelties in his store, and going there, our chum got four tiny red wheelbarrows.

Our truck gathered up, we then headed out of town on the Treebury pike. In Happy Hollow a familiar freckled face came into sight over the weeds beside the road.

“Hi,” says Red Meyers, waving to us.

Poppy pulled on the lines.

“I thought you were home reënforcing the seat of your pants,” says he.

“Where you headed for?”

“The old Scotch cemetery.”

“Hot dog! You can give me a lift.” Here the speaker bent over and tugged at something in the weeds. “Gosh, but this truck is heavy.”

Say, you should have seen the bundle of stuff that he had! Kettles and pans and a baseball bat and a catching glove and bread and canned beans and I don’t know what all.

“Are your folks moving?” says the leader.

“No, I’m running away.”

“_What?_”

“I’m headed for Montana.”

“Haw! haw! haw!” says Peg, in his rough way. “Why didn’t you bring along the kitchen stove and the player piano?”

I couldn’t believe at first that Red was in earnest about running away from home. Still, I reflected, it was just like him to start out this way with a wagon load of silly truck. He sure is rattleheaded.

There was a fearful clatter as the runaway pitched his frying pan and kettles into the wagon.

“Lookit!” says I, hooking a book. “‘Tricked at the Altar,’” I read.

“It belongs to Sis,” says the sweating worker, shooing the flies off his hunk of boiled ham.

“Since when,” says the grinning leader, as the runaway wedged himself into the seat with us, “did you get this grand and glorious idea of populating Montana?”

“Oh, it just came to me when I was flipping Aunt Pansy’s rugs. So I grabbed my stuff and beat it.”

“But what’s the _idea_?”

“You ought to know.”

“The silverware in the cistern?”

“That and the dead parrot.”

“Aw!...” says Peg, serious. “You aren’t really going to run away from home to escape a licking, are you?”

“Nothing else but.”

“Red, you’re crazy. Why, kid, you won’t get two miles from here before your folks catch you.”

“I’ve got a scheme.”

“Yah?”

“You know the old manse in the Scotch cemetery?”

“Where the sexton keeps the coffin cases?”

“Sure thing.”

Peg glanced back at the “treasure chest” and quartet of toy wheelbarrows.

“We ought to know the place,” says he, laughing, “for we’re headed for there this very minute.”

“I’m going to hide there,” says the runaway. “For two or three weeks. Everybody will think I’m in Chicago or somewhere. See? They won’t think of looking for me so close to home. Then, when the coast is clear, I’ll make my getaway into the West.” He unfolded his arms in a sweeping gesture. “Oh, you Montana!” says he. “The wild and woolly life for me. Injuns. Mountain lions. Gila monsters. Rattlesnakes.”

Well, the rest of us fairly busted ourselves laughing at this silly talk. For it’s a fact that Red Meyers has about as little grit as any kid in Tutter. On a camping trip one time he found a spider in his pancake and was gaggy for a week. I had a picture of him living a “wild and woolly” life in Montana. Oh, yes! He didn’t know a Gila monster from a camel’s egg. As for chumming with rattlesnakes, if he thought there was one in the same county with him he’d shiver his back teeth loose.

But we let on to him that we swallowed his crazy talk. It was fun for us.

Coming to the cemetery in which Caleb Obed had so strangely ordered a grave dug, our eyes curiously sought the pile of fresh dirt. The grave, we noticed, was covered with a canvas to keep it dry in case of a sudden shower. Through the big pine trees in the background we could see the dilapidated old manse, the place that the four of us were heading for with our “treasure chest,” and also the place where the runaway was intending to lay low until the way was clear for him to skin out for Montana.

A more direct course for us to have taken would have been through the big cemetery gate, but it was our scheme not to attract attention, so, passing the cemetery, we turned into a wood-lot road to the left. Winding here and there in this unfrequented road, dodging low-hanging limbs, we presently drew up at the back door of the manse. Tying the horse to a fence, we first helped Red unload his truck, then, leaving the runaway to manage his own affairs, the four of us headed for the manse cellar with the chest and the four toy wheelbarrows.

In this windowless and doorless old building, a storage house for wooden coffin cases, the sexton kept his grave-digging tools. And helping ourselves to a pick and three shovels we quickly descended a flight of rotten wooden stairs into as damp and spooky a cellar as ever I had been in. Thinking of the near-by graves, I got a sudden case of cold shivers. But I quickly got over that feeling. For whatever idea I had of dead people coming back to earth it wasn’t to be believed that a ghost or spook would be likely to meander into the manse cellar at this time of day. The time for ghosts to do their stuff was in the dark. I knew that.

Well, getting quickly to work, we marked off a spot three feet from one wall and six feet from another, sort of in a corner, and there we dug a hole in the dirt floor about four feet deep. The hole completed, we put the toy wheelbarrows into the chest, locked the cover with a rusted padlock, and then dropped the box into the hole, covering it with dirt, flush with the floor.

Peg wiped his sweaty face.

“I’m glad that job’s done,” says he. “Wow! I’m wringing wet.” He looked around at the shadowy corners. “Say, this is a spooky hole! A dozen black cats could hide down here and we’d never know it.”

“Come on,” says I, starting for the stairs. “Let’s get out of here. I don’t like the smell. It comes from the dead people on the other side of the wall.”

Scoop sniffed.

“Um...” says he. “It smells like a dead rat to me.”