Puzzle of the Red Stallion (9 page)

But it was Miss Withers who found Abe Thomas coming out of the haymow with a hatful of eggs. And it was Miss Withers who asked the first question.

“By the way,” she said casually, “do you smoke a pipe?”

Thomas stared at her suspiciously. Then he nodded and took from his coat pocket a blackened corncob. “I smoke it, but not around the barns,” he explained.

“No, I don’t mean that one,” Miss Withers went on. “Haven’t you got another pipe—or didn’t you have one?”

He reached into his other pocket and produced a duplicate of the first, except perhaps a little more rich in color and aroma. “Never smoke anything but a corncob,” he announced. “When one gets hot I switch to the other.”

Miss Hildegarde Withers hung on like a puppy to a root. “And when both pipes get too hot to smoke?”

Abe Thomas retained his air of friendly helpfulness. “Now that’s nice of you to be so interested,” he told her. “When I run out of pipes I always chew gum or eat an apple. Nothing like an apple to freshen your mouth. It’s early for ’em yet, but back in the pasture there’s a Yellow Transparent tree that’ll be worth shaking in a week or two….”

Miss Withers relaxed. “I must try one whenever my mouth gets scorched,” she said and started to move on toward the restless inspector.

But Abe Thomas followed her. “I got to know, ma’am—have you found anything yet? Did I bring you up here on a wild-goose chase?”

As she hesitated the little man kicked nervously at the dirt with his heavy shoe. “I know—you and him, you agree with that cocksure cub of a doctor that Mr. Gregg only had an attack of apoplexy. Well, I tell you he didn’t—and he knows he didn’t! You ask Mr. Gregg!”

“The old man has no idea of what happened,” Piper vouchsafed. “I asked him.”

Abe Thomas thoughtfully stuffed black tobacco into one of his pipes. “That makes it a lot harder, doesn’t it?”

“A lot harder or a lot easier,” Miss Hildegarde Withers concluded. She was staring over his head, up at the little cupola perched on top of the house. One of its four windows was open and the wind whipped at a chintz curtain.

She nodded and spoke very softly. “Or a lot easier,” said Hildegarde Withers.

¹
Miss Withers’s last appearance in the combined role of Hawkshaw and Cupid is recounted in
The Puzzle of the Silver Persian,
1934.

D
R. PETERSON TOOK HIS
hat from the horns of the glassy-eyed deer head which haunted the front hallway. “The old man is not to be disturbed until he wakes, understand?”

Mrs. Thomas swore that she would guard her master’s rest with every drop of blood in her veins.

“I’ll be back later this afternoon with a nurse,” continued the young medico. “I’ve given Mr. Gregg an opiate and he ought to sleep until then.” He moved brusquely toward the door, stopping when he saw that it was barred by Miss Withers and the inspector.

“What I said goes for you too,” the doctor told them. “No more third degrees.”

But Miss Withers was interested. “A nurse for Mr. Gregg, eh? Is he as ill as all that?”

The doctor frowned. “Well—no. I don’t think so. But there are some contradictory symptoms that I’d like to keep an eye on.”

“In other words, you’re not so sure that it’s apoplexy after all?”

Peterson smiled wryly. “The one thing I’m most certain of is that Mr. Gregg has had some sort of cerebral accident. But what worries me is the fact that it wasn’t fatal!”

“I beg your pardon?” Miss Withers gasped, and Piper drew closer.

“I mean,” he went on, “the attack was somehow arrested right in the middle, as if the hand of death slipped. That doesn’t happen often—but it’s a break for the old man. I’ve great hopes for his recovery now that he’s dropped off to sleep.”

“‘To sleep: perchance to dream’!” murmured Miss Withers under her breath. “To dream of being part of a clock, poor man. If I were he, Doctor, I should try my hardest to keep very much awake.” But the front door had with great finality slammed upon the doctor’s heels. The inspector moved after him.

“And where are you going, Oscar?” demanded Miss Withers.

“Back to town,” he told her. “Back where there’s a hot trail. We’re not buttering any parsnips out here.”

“That,” Miss Withers told him impolitely, “that is what
you
think!” But she was worried all the same. Absent-mindedly she patted the deer’s nose and then whirled suddenly to face the inspector.

“Oscar Piper, I do wish you’d stop staring at the back of my neck …”

Her voice trailed away as she saw that the inspector was engaged in dropping his cigar ash in a convenient letter box.

He looked up and grinned. “Getting the jitters, Hildegarde?”

“Perhaps,” she nodded. She stared down the hall, which ended in a dining room where the fat Mrs. Thomas was doing a bit of casual dusting. Overhead rose the ancient sagging balustrade of the stair leading to the upper hall, but that was vacant. Nobody was in the living room—there was not even a family portrait to stare down from the wall with narrow wicked eyes. That left only the deer head, unhappy symbol of man’s interpretation of the idea of fellowship with the lower orders of life. Somehow Miss Withers could not believe that the silly glass marbles which the taxidermist had used for eyes could be responsible for the uneasy feeling at the back of her neck.

“Well, Hildegarde?” pressed Piper impatiently. “Coming back to the city?”

She nodded slowly. “It’s noon, Oscar—and we’ve missed breakfast. Do you suppose that you could use your influence with La Thomas to get us a bite to eat?”

The inspector said that there was something in the idea, and when pressed, Mrs. Thomas admitted with only a second’s hesitation that she thought she could find some cold baked beans and part of a lemon pie in the larder.

“Great!” cried the inspector. “Typical Bostonian breakfast—ought to suit you to a T, Hildegarde.”

Miss Withers brightened. Just as many Hebrew gentlemen who have never been south of Chicago burst into tears when “Dixie” is played in a restaurant, the angular schoolteacher was a fervent New Englander in everything but birth. She had never quite forgiven her parents for migrating from Back Bay to Iowa a few weeks before her advent into this world.

But with her duty came first—even before the allure of baked beans and coffee. She sat down at the dining-room table, as it happened in a chair which stood very close to the wall. Suddenly she drew a sharp breath and cocked her head.

“Oscar, do you hear anything?”

“Sure,” answered the inspector jovially. “I can hear chickens cackling, birds twittering, bees buzzing, and that she-horse in the pasture whinnying to her colt. This place is noisier than a subway station.”

That wasn’t quite what Miss Withers had meant. “Don’t you hear noises upstairs—like soft footsteps?”

He listened. “Nary a footstep, Hildegarde. But what if there were? It’s probably Thomas.”

Miss Withers had forgotten the little man. After all he had a perfect right upstairs, and no doubt several good reasons for being there.

“Stop jittering and eat,” counseled the inspector as Mrs. Thomas appeared with plates and cups. “Do you good.”

Miss Withers nodded and tried to relax. But after a moment she rose suddenly to her feet, murmuring something about powdering her nose. The inspector stared after her wonderingly, for it was his belief that her somewhat prominent beak had not been powdered since the Taft administration.

She hurried up the stairs alone, trying to move as softly as possible. But a chorus of squeaks from the sagging steps accompanied her, and she found the upper landing deserted. Even the face of a looming grandfather’s clock seemed alien and unfriendly. It struck the half hour—eleven-thirty.

For a moment she stood stock-still, wishing for the comforting presence of the little dog Dempsey at her heels, wishing for the black cotton umbrella which had proved so useful a weapon in the past—even almost wishing that the inspector had accompanied her. She shrugged her shoulders and tiptoed down the hall.

There were three doors opening off this upper hall, three closed doors and the gaping space where a way had been broken into the old man’s bedroom. She tried the handle of the first door. It turned, and she opened softly and peered within. Here was only a bathroom, grim and horrible. The streaked iron tub was mounted upon four lion’s claws, and the washbowl bore the decoration of an excessively over-painted wreath of roses. For a moment she stared at her face in the uncertain mirror and then she closed the door. Nothing evil lurked in this room—nothing but that atrocity of a bathtub.

The next door opened on dusty hinges to disclose a room cluttered with worn-out riding boots, dusty saddles, countless bits of leather and harness, empty gun racks, and old trunks and suitcases spilling forth faded blue silks and mouse-gnawed horse blankets. There was a ripe rich smell of horses and leather and dust. Several spiders had set up extended engineering operations here, vast webs which swung from the ceiling and which were undisturbed as far as the schoolteacher could see.

She closed that door. There was only one left, the door nearest the broken door of the old man’s room. Here, she decided, must be the room where Abe Thomas was pursuing his mysterious and furtive purposes.

Miss Withers drew a deep breath and turned the knob. Perhaps it was her fancy, but that knob seemed a few degrees warmer than it should have been, as if someone had held it in his hand a moment or two before.

She looked into a bedroom almost as large as the old man’s, a long narrow room with windows to the south. Through the green shades, worn and tattered by the years, little pencil lines of sunlight radiated. The room was empty and airless, but as Miss Withers made a mental note of bed and bureau, table and chair, she wrinkled her nose at the faint but unmistakable odor of rich tobacco.

Quick as a flash she flung open the closet door, but found nothing more than a toy rifle, a very battered and empty suitcase, and a pair of riding boots, badly worn and scuffed.

Frowning, she surveyed the room again. This must, she felt, be Donald Gregg’s room, or the room which had been his before his marriage. The walls were decorated with Rolf Armstrong girls torn from the covers of
College Humor
. Over the mirror, in a frame evidently intended for a much larger picture, was a photograph of a face which she recognized with a start. It was the girl who had called herself Violet Feverel, smiling a very wide and toothy smile and clasping to her very insufficiently clad bosom a tube of tooth paste.

But if Miss Withers was sure of anything at this stage of the game it was that the footsteps she had heard were not made by Violet Feverel. Turning aside from the advertisement she went out into the hall again. There remained only the room in which the sick man lay. Softly she tiptoed down the hall and through the broken door of the old man’s bedroom.

The shades had been drawn again and the room was filled with the sound of heavy, irregular breathing. Pat Gregg’s round, somewhat blurred face seemed as pale now as it had been livid before.

“If he’s asleep I won’t bother him and if he’s awake it won’t matter,” she salved her conscience. Softly she crossed the room, while the man on the bed remained comfortably immobile. She went up the steep stairs at the farther end of the room, pressed against the trap door, and found that it lifted easily.

There was no sound from above, and risking everything on one rash plunge, she climbed into the cupola and let the trap door drop back softly beneath her. She found that she stood in a tiny room perhaps nine feet square, with a large window in the center of each wall. One window was open, and its chintz curtain flapped in the breeze.

She was alone—in spite of her certainty that here she would find the one who had padded softly up and down the hall.

From the walls, filling every available inch of space, half a hundred thoroughbreds looked down at her. It was horses, horses everywhere—horses in photographs, etchings, copies of paintings—and beneath each picture such deathless names of Exterminator, Sun Beau, Gallant Fox, Man o’ War and Cavalcade.

Above the battered oak desk was a large photograph of a galloping horse with a monkeylike exercise boy perched on his neck. She recognized without difficulty her acquaintance of the morning, the big red horse called Siwash. Next to his was a smaller picture, a little out of place among so many thoroughbreds she thought. It was of a young man and woman coming down the steps of the Little Church Around the Corner—and the man’s face was one that she had last observed on the bottom of a parakeet’s cage. The girl, of course, was Violet Feverel.

“Mr. and Mrs. Don Gregg,” Miss Withers observed to herself. “In happier days than this, I’ll warrant.”

Besides the desk, which was a litter of racing charts, records of past performances and breeding histories, there was nothing in the room except a low stool and—surprising enough—a good-sized telescope mounted upon a tripod.

“Heavens,” Miss Withers exclaimed. “The man’s an astronomer!” She crouched down and peered wonderingly into the shining instrument, but only the absolute darkness of outer space met her eye. Then it occurred to her to remove the eyepiece and she had better results.

She found that the telescope had not been aimed at the stars of heaven, but through a gap in the elms and into a neighboring valley about a mile to the south. With a little adjustment of the knob, before Miss Withers’s surprised blue eyes there appeared a portion of brown trampled earth. As she peered, she saw a massive red truck come momentarily into her field of vision, with a sharp-toothed drag hitched on behind. She could even see the clods of earth fly up from the soft track.

There was a pause, and then came a colored boy perched on a fat bay, one hand leading—or being led by—a prancing, eager race horse who wanted more exercise than he was being granted.

Miss Withers stood up and nodded. Of course—she should have remembered that Beaulah Park was in this vicinity.

“What an excellent method of saving admittance fees!” she observed.

But this was not what she had come to see. She poked busily among the papers on the desk but found little which seemed to have bearing on the case at hand. There were no letters, no signs of pipe or tobacco.