Leo Edwards

“ But I saw right off that it was no ordinary gander. So the name was all right.
White, like most ganders, though peculiarly marked with small purple spots, it was the biggest fowl of its kind that I ever had seen. Standing on its webbed feet, which reminded me of a pair of palm-leaf fans, its tonneau, as we used to call the rear end of an automobile, sort of dragged behind like an overloaded dump cart. Of course, like all big geese, it waddled when it walked. Yet it had dignity in its waddle. A fat king, you know, would waddle much more becomingly than a fat junk peddler! ”

“ Mrs. Doane was buzzing around like a bumblebee. It was “dearie this” and “dearie that.” And when “dearie,” in walking up and down the room, got out a compact and powdered “her” nose, I thought I’d die. Everything looked so natural, “she” purred—only it was more of a squeak than a purr.
Having tried without success to get his mother on the telephone, young fatty primped in front of the hall mirror, to make himself pretty, and then sidled up to the “heiress” on the sofa. ”

“ What? Dr. Madden? What did you say? Dr. Madden what?... No, all I can hear is ‘Dr. Madden.’ Just a minute,” and trembling like a leaf, she partly turned and motioned to me. “There’s a boy here, and I’ll let him talk. Maybe he has sharper ears than me.”
The receiver switched hands.
“It’s long distance,” she told me nervously. “And I think it’s Pardyville, but I’m not certain. Oh, dear! How helpless people do get when they grow old. I hope it isn’t bad news. If the call is from Pardyville, no doubt the doctor has found Miss Ruth. And certainly that isn’t bad news.” ”

“ It was quite by accident that he found the diary. Reading it, to learn if it was his duty, as a friend who knew its probable secrets, to destroy it, he thus had found out about the lawyer’s trickery. But instead of writing and telling the granddaughter who he was and why she ought to be in the big house when the will was read, he worded his letter so crazy-like, with such queer reference to the dead man’s diary, that the letter frightened her. ”

“ For how would Poppy feel toward me to learn that I had hid from the ghost in a closet? No, instead of backing up, the thing for me to do, I realized, getting out all my grit, was to go farther down the stairs, even around the bend. Then I could see into the kitchen.
So down I went, slowly you may be sure, and on tiptoe. I was at the bend now. Another step; two steps. I could see a man in a long white nightshirt—ghostly enough, all right! Stooped over, he was doing something to the lock of the kitchen door.
Well, if you must know the truth, I felt sort of weak as the “ghost” turned his face. ”

“ I was about to unhinge some more of my crazy gab, when all of a sudden the leader gave a whoop and scooted down the road.
[14] “Here’s a signboard, Jerry. ‘New Zion ten miles,’” he read.
“Ten miles!” I groaned.
“We can make it.”
“But look at the road!” I wailed. “It’s nothing but sand. We’ll slip back faster than we can go ahead.”
“Then we’ll walk backwards,” came the quick grin.
“Ten miles!” I suffered anew. “It’s no use, Poppy,” I waggled weakly, as a sort of climax to my little act. “I’m done for. Remember, kid, the jigsaw’s yours. ”

“ Imagine what Corbin Danver would say, could he speak from the grave, to have his kitchen turned into a gander roost. Just imagine!”
The moon was gone now, as I say. The sky was black with tumbling storm clouds. And on the way to the barn, where we fastened the gander in for the night, Poppy and I used a flashlight. What a quick change, I thought, from early evening. The moon had been full of light then. Now the whole world was smothered under a heavy black blanket.
I don’t mind summer storms as a rule. The lightning never scares me. For I have a sort of feeling that God makes the lightning. ”

“ We couldn’t see his eyes—they were buried in fat—but I had a hunch that they were a sort of grayish-green, like a hungry cat’s.
The human elephant, or whatever you want to call it, had gotten out of the buggy, after a lot of twisting and grunting, and leaving the fagged-out, drooping-eared horse to sort of regale itself on the leaves of a lilac bush, was now waddling toward the house. Watching him, all I could think of was a dressed-up duck. No, I won’t say that he reminded me of a goose, for I don’t want to disgrace the Admiral by putting that hunk of human lard in the goose class. ”

“ THE SPOTTED GANDER
The ghost theory is bunk. Every big kid knows that. Ghosts? Pooh! Who could be crazy enough to believe in ghosts? That is what we say back and forth, the big kids I mean, when the sun is doing its dinner-time stuff, high in the sky, and the nearest cemetery is six miles away.
But what happens when a white cow makes goo-goo eyes at us over a moonlit cemetery fence? Oh, boy! How we can cut the dust then. The only kid who ever beat me in a race like that was Spider Whickleberry, and his legs are so long that he modestly uses his pa’s white duck trousers for basketball pants. ”

“ What stumped Poppy and I right now was the sort of contradictory side of the crazy tangle. There was old Ivory Dome. Having surprised him in the kitchen, very “ghostlike” indeed in his long white nightshirt, we had jumped to the natural conclusion that he was back of all the “spooky” stuff that was going on in the house. But now we knew differently. The old man wasn’t the “ghost,” as we had suspected. He had secrets, of course. And maybe he knew who the “ghost” was. ”

“ It seemed so—so sort of tremendous. A spy outside, with the rain beating [64] down on him (though evidently he didn’t notice it or mind it) and a “ghost” inside! How many more people were there, I wondered, in the crazy hidden tangle? And whether they were working together, or against each other, what was their secret purpose? Property! That must be it. In his grave less than a full year, his will about to be read, greedy hands were already reaching out in the dark, in evil schemes, for the dead house-owner’s property. That’s the way it is when some rich men die. ”

“ Going in the house, we sure made a wreck of the grub that Ma had waiting for us. Boy, did potatoes and gravy ever taste so good! Um-yum! Nor did Poppy and I shovel in any more hash than old blunderbuss. He seemed hollow from cellar to garret. Either his wife had been ladling out too much religion to him and not enough soup, or there hadn’t been enough soup to go around.
Supper over, we went out to the barn with our flashlight, which was working again by spells, to see how the gander was faring, and finding it asleep we circled through the grounds to settle our big supper. ”

“ Jonah! Every kid knows the story of Jonah and the whale. Adam! The fellow who ate the green-apple pie, of course. Moses! I wasn’t quite sure about him. Goliath! Oh, yes—David and Goliath! David was the little wart with the sling-shot and Goliath was the giant. Zing went the sling-shot and down went old blunderbuss. Hip-hip-hurray for David!
“Well, Jerry,” Poppy spoke up, and at the sound of his voice I sort of cut short my cheering to listen to him, “what are we going to do?” ”

“ I laughed.
[10] “Goose?” says the other, looking at me.
“Didn’t you see the goose on the seat?”
“Who do you mean?—the old man?”
“No, a real goose.”
“I guess it was a pair of geese,” laughed Poppy, thinking of the queer driver.
Sometimes a fellow gets a hunch about things that he’s heading into. But we had no hunch that we’d ever see that old car again, much less get mixed up in a crazy, shivery adventure with its queer driver and his equally queer gander—for it was a gander that I had seen, as we learned later on, and not a goose.
A spotted gander! Did you ever hear of one? No? ”

“ For we wanted to find out why the dead man’s loyal friend had hid in the lonely house, with queer-smelling drugs all around him, and what he had uncovered.
Poppy took it into his head to do some more sleuthing in the upper rooms, hopeful, I guess, that he would pick up a clew in the way of a cuff link, or something like that, as usually happens in detective stories. I saw that he didn’t need me, and going downstairs to help Mrs. Doane, who was sweeping and dusting for dear life, so that everything in the house would be spick and span for the big party that night, I found her at the telephone. ”

“ Poppy isn’t the kind of a kid to lay down like a door mat and let other people walk all over him. I guess not. So you can imagine how sore he was over the holdup.
“And suppose we want to dance a jig in front of your skating rink,” says he, sort of sarcastic-like. “Does that cost us another five dollars?”
“Um ...” came in continued craftiness. “How much money you got, anyway?”
“None of your business.”
But old Goliath found nothing in that to scowl over. Instead, he sort of grinned to himself, cat fashion, as though everything was nice and cozy in the back part of his mind. ”

“ The ‘ghost’ would get the surprise of his life, huh, when we yanked his sheet off?”
“I don’t like it,” I told him. But I wasn’t scared. No. Ready to stand by him, as a loyal chum should, what worried me, I guess, was the thought that I might not be gritty enough to do my part in some of the crazy situations that were sure to bob up if we started any of the “ghost-catching” business. For “ghost-catching,” let me tell you, even when the “ghost” is a man and not a real spook, is a mighty risky game, and nothing else but.
I’ll never forget our first trip into the upper rooms of the big house. ”

“ With Poppy’s pa doing the general-manager stuff in the new factory, my chum and I had merrily set forth on a hitch-hike as a sort of vacation. This, too, was Poppy’s idea. A hitch-hike, as every kid knows, is a sort of free automobile tour. You start walking down the concrete in the direction you want to go, and when a motor car to your liking comes alone you wigwag the driver to stop and give you a lift. ”

“ As for the road, if you can imagine a pair of wheel ruts across the most forsaken part of the Sahara Desert, that’s the kind of stuff we had to travel over. Sand, sand and nothing but sand. The only place where it wasn’t deep was where it was deeper. It’s a wonder the old car navigated the road at all. ”

“ Poppy, of course, was all hip-hip-hurray over his hitch-hike idea. That’s his way. Our most violent exercise, he spread around, seeing nothing but joy and sugar buns ahead, would be lifting our travel-weary frames into soft-cushioned Cadillacs and Packards. Once comfortably seated, we would glide along swiftly and inexpensively. No gasoline bills to pay. No new tires to buy. Everything free, including the scenery. Some automobiles would carry us ten miles, others would carry us a hundred miles. ”

“ LAWYER CHEW
Before doing our own breakfast stuff Poppy and I meandered to the barn and fed the big gander. All Mrs. Doane could give us in the way of gander grub was cornflakes in the package, but that seemed to fill the bill. And, to a point of nonsense, “fill the bill” is right! Boy, you should have seen that high-toned corn fodder evaporate when old peppy socked his molars into it! Part of the time the hungry fowl ate out of our hands. ”

“ To a rosy view of things, how handy old Goliath would be, we thought, if the Galloping Snail got another balky spell. Big as he was, he could push beautifully. If necessary, with so much muscle, he could make the old engine zip whether it wanted to or not. So it couldn’t put anything over on us. We really were lucky in having him along, we concluded. And most wonderful of all, we had saved our two dollars, though not in the way we had schemed. ”

“ And seeing your light, as we were hoofing it for New Zion, we wondered if you wouldn’t be kind enough to sell us something to eat.”
“Laws-a-me!” cried the little old woman, with a nervous, excited gesture. “If you’ve got money, keep it. You don’t have to pay for a meal in this house, not while I’m here, though how long I’ll be here I can’t say.”
“That’s fine,” says Poppy in good manners. “But we don’t want to be cheap about it.”
“Samantha Ann Danver Doane is my name,” the woman ran on, “Danver being my maiden name, and a name I’m justly proud of, I want you to know. ”

“ Poppy laughed.
[23] “Say, Jerry, I wonder if that wasn’t ‘Pa’ in the old car.”
“He was headed this way, all right.”
“Still,” the leader turned the thought around in his mind, “it couldn’t have been him. For the man who passed us in the Galloping Snail could easily have gotten here ahead of us. Besides, he was alone.”
“Don’t forget about the goose,” I grinned.
“A goose isn’t a girl.”
“A lady goose is,” I joked, “when she’s young.”
“You’re a goose yourself!”
The woman was nervous when she came back to the kitchen. ”

“ Here is the dope as we had it spread out in our minds now: To solve the secret that clouded the millionaire’s death, and probably to please the dying man, the loyal family doctor had hidden himself for a year in the closed house. There was deep mystery in his actions, of course, but he would clear that up. Sharing certain unusual secrets with the [180] dead man, and an enemy of the scheming lawyer’s, he had kept in touch with the granddaughter, and now was working with her, to fix it so the lawyer couldn’t do any cheating stuff. ”

“ Then, on spotting the spy in the storm, we could have made sure about his capture, even to going after him in a desperate way. And to that point, with the house open to him, why had he stayed [173] outside in the wind and rain? That, too, was puzzling.
There now! If that doesn’t completely tangle you up, I guess you had better go into the detective business yourself. But clever as you are, don’t be too blamed sure of yourself! For a whale of a surprise may jump out at you in the tail end.
As I say, Poppy and I had no intention of going to sleep. ”

“ Our failure to get good news over the telephone completely upset the woman.
“What will Miss Ruth’s ma say?” she cried. “Oh, dear! Oh, dear!”
Poppy remembered that the granddaughter had planned to come here on the sly.
“If I were you,” he advised, “I’d wait a day or two before I telephoned to the mother. For you don’t know as yet that anything really has happened to the girl. She may have hired a private car to drive her here.”
“Sure thing,” I put in, wanting to make the woman feel better. “We may hear her drive in any minute.” ”

“ Doane was done up, as her face showed. But it would do her no good to go to bed, she told us, nodding wearily. For how could she sleep with the awful picture in her mind of the missing granddaughter lying unconscious beside the deserted concrete highway?
“She could have jounced out of the car and Pa never would have missed her. That’s him. Oh, at times I feel as though I could take him and shake his pants off. He isn’t foolish—don’t deceive yourself on that point. He’s just naturally dumb.” ”