CHAPTER XII.

THE SCRATCHES ON THE WINDOW.

Mary was in the kitchen when Renfro stormed in the back entrance at his home that evening. He heard her begin to rattle pans and he knew that she was going to see to it that he got an extra good supper. “Another turkey, Mary,” he sang out while he hung his paper bag and cap on the hooks she had given to him.

Cautiously she came to the door. “There’s company in the living room with your paw and maw,” she whispered sibilantly. “They’re talking about the kidnaping. I’ve been lying down close to the door--face and stomach to the floor,” she confided. “I crawled backwards when I heard you comin’ and Glory be, I got clean thru the dining room without knockin’ anything over.”

Renfro followed her into the kitchen. “Gee, but I’m hungry,” he sniffed. “Mary, love, what have you to feed me?”

Mary became stern. “A pretty detective you are, Mr. Renny,” she refused to use his manly nickname at the hour of his failure in her eyes. “Aint I been throwin’ clues in the shapes of hints at you ever since I begin talkin’? Aint I done got down off my own dignity and told you how downcast I was on that floor? And what’s to prevent you but a empty stomach from followin’ my example and learnin’ things your paw and maw never would tell you?”

“Aw, Mary, don’t be so hard on a fellow,” Renfro’s voice was pleading. “I was so hungry and I couldn’t grasp any kind of a hint. Course I’m going to go in there. Only, for goodness sake, have my supper ready when the talk changes to other subjects!”

But Mary seized his shoulders. “You’re goin’ to do no such thing!” she commanded. “Your supper is in the warming closet. Take it out and eat it with the other things on the kitchen table. It’s meself who’s goin’ back. If anybody starts into the room, distract them, Hooch.”

The next minute she was down on the floor and wriggling her way across the dark dining room. A big red and green snake could not have made any more twists and turns than she did in getting across the room. Renfro knew that she was so bulky that she was afraid to try to lie down in the dining room, so she had instead taken this way of getting to the door.

He held his hands to his sides to keep from laughing so that she could hear him. “Bulky but ambitious,” he laughed, “and a good pal,” he finished soberly.

Back he went to the supper, rattling the pans and dishes unnecessarily so that his parents knowing that he was home would be more comfortable. Straight thru oyster soup, roast mutton and peach pie he waded. He was just ready to venture on a second cup of coffee when he heard Mary nearing the kitchen door.

Just outside the door she straightened. Disgustedly she spoke, “If them Wiers aint goin’ to have some detectives from Chicago, and us with such a good clue.”

Renfro’s face fell. This then would probably be the end of his hopes to solve the mystery. Still there was a chance for him. No one except himself and Mary knew of the missing eyebrows.

Then he told Mary about his visit to Captain Pete’s cabin and the conversation. “Mary!” Renfro stood up in his excitement, “Pete’s face was a dead give away when I mentioned the lights in the big house. His eyes were as scared as a kid’s. He knows that somebody is there, and I’m going to find out who that somebody is and just where the rest of those missing eyebrows are.”

Mary nodded her head. “Our part of them, Renfro, are still in my Bible,” she assured him. “I’ve looked at them every hour to see they don’t fade away. And I bought me a blackboard to reproduce them as your pa says, for our observation--so as to keep ’em in our mind night and day.”

In the library Mr. Horn was telling the visiting lawyer about Renfro’s experience with a paper route when the youngster entered the room. He boasted of his new subscribers to his mother’s chagrin. “If she knew I was working for Thanksgiving turkeys she would die,” Renfro laughed to himself. “I’ve half a notion to spring it on her now.”

But he didn’t. He lingered long enough to be sure that they were not going to talk about the kidnaping any more, and then he went up to his own room. For a half hour he worked checking up on his new subscribers and collections. This done he took up the new magazine on his desk and tore off the cover. It had been on his desk three days unopened--a happening which had never before occurred. And all because of his interest in the turkey contest and the Missing Eyebrow Mystery.

He read the last chapter of the serial. And then he sought Mary again. “It ended just the way I said it would,” he told her waving the magazine in front of her. “The two fellows who took the jewels were Fred and Manuel and they hid them--”

Mary’s hand was raised imperatively. “Listen Hooch,” she said. “I’ve been making plans myself. Tomorrow night is my regular choir practice. Before I go to it I’ll come out on Washington and we’ll both go to them different places--one of us to the shack and the other to the big house. Then we’ll see who is in both places at the same time. That way they’ll have no chance to send signals or communicate to each other.”

“Fine, fine, Mary!” Renfro’s enthusiasm was all that Mary could ask. She murmured something about the pity being that Renfro too had not taken a correspondence course in detective work and her bosom heaved with pride.

“But, Mary,” Renfro hesitated, “are you sure you won’t mind missing choir practice?”

Missing choir practice was one of Mary’s greatest horrors. In all the fifteen years that she had sung alto in the mission church, she had not missed one practice. And now she was planning to deliberately miss one.

But she wasn’t. The next minute she set Renfro to rights on that. “I said I might be late,” she said severely, “I’m countin’ on us workin’ fast. I’m not going to miss nothin’ I tell you.”

But she did miss something. Then next morning at exactly five o’clock the Horn telephone rang. Mary, calling down maledictions on the head of whoever would call at that hour, listened to the conversation at the other end of the wire and with a changed mien proceeded to Renfro’s door.

It was Jimmie who called. The carrier boy whose Morning Post route was adjoining his had badly frozen his foot the night before. His first aid work had relieved him somewhat the night before but this morning he could not walk. And Jimmie wanted Renfro to help him carry the other boy’s route.

“I told him you would,” Mary was hunting Renfro’s heaviest coat. “It’s not so cold as it was last night, Renny. And I knew you would want to be a good scout and help a carrier out. Now that’s the way I am. When the soprano soloist was sick and out of church for a whole week once, I sang high soprano when it was the most important part in the songs and then dropped right back to alto when the low parts were most important. There’s nothin’--”

But Renfro was motioning her to the door. “I’ve got to dress in a hurry,” he told her. “You explain to father and let him make it right with mother. Now, Mary, for heaven’s sake keep still before mother and don’t get her started. Let dad--”

A few minutes later he was off, buttoning his coat collar as he ran toward the station at which Jimmie got his papers. And there he found Jimmie waiting for him. “Hooch Horn,” he said impressively, “you’re a good scout. I called up six fellows’ houses before I did yours and every place I got Hail Columbia, Happy Land for waking up the family. And you--”

“And I, Jimmie,” Renfro said impressively, “I tell you the reason you didn’t get the same dope at the seventh house was because Mary Dugan, good old scout, answered the phone.”

And so flustered was Mary that morning with extra breakfasts and avoiding any mix-ups with her mistress that she forgot to read the morning paper. Renfro in turn did not have time to even think of such a feast. As he folded the papers he had glanced at the headlines, which told of Judge Wier’s summoning the Chicago detectives and Mrs. Wier’s getting another note from Helen, it also asserting that she was safe.

So she was frightened half “into fits” as she expressed it when Renfro rushed into the kitchen in the middle of the morning. “Mary, where is mother?” he demanded in a loud whisper.

Mary answered that she was out.

“Then I can talk,” he added, “Mary, we are lost; or our clue is--no, I mean discovered by some one else. I borrowed a morning paper last hour and there what do you think? Yesterday Mrs. Wier, while walking up and down the library happened to look at the window from which most of the ice had melted and discovered some little scratches I made with my knife when I scraped off those eyebrows.”

He caught his breath. “Of course she doesn’t know they’re mine,” he added. “But she showed them to the detectives and vowed they were not there before--that the windows were put in new this fall and were perfect and--”

His teeth chattering. Mary’s big, strong, red hand went over his trembling ones. “Hooch Horn,” she said sternly, “You aint worrying half so much over them finding a clue like ourn as you are because you’re skeert they’ll think you had something to do with that kidnaping! Now aint you?”

Before Renfro could answer she stormed on, “Well, they won’t. You and me is too small fry to even be considered. They know you aint got sense enough to plan such a thing. If they thought we was workin’ on a clue they would give us the horse collar. And that’s why we got to work this plot out. See?”

She shook him soundly. “We’ll go out there tonight as we planned. And you git back to school. Pretty soon you’ll have that sick excuse worn clean out. Git back, I say, in a hurry so that I can read the newspaper and see for myself just what they do know about them winder scratches.”