Chapter XVII Bob Gives a Party
Had Jolly Bill Hickey announced that he was digging in Hiram’s old garden to locate the treasure buried by the dead and gone Hank Denby, the young detective would not have been more surprised than he was when the laughing sailor declared that he was digging worms.
“Worms!” repeated Bob as he made his way toward the gate in the fence. “Worms!” He spoke the last aloud.
“Sure—worms!” declared Jolly Bill. “Guess I’ve got as much right to dig worms to go fishing with as that dago has to plant monkey nuts!” and he laughed genially.
“Oh—you’re going fishing,” exclaimed Bob.
“Sure I am—what else would I be digging worms for? Hiram and I are going fishing.”
“Oh—of course,” murmured Bob.
It was perfectly obvious and natural now. There was good fishing in Lake Netcong or Rockaway river, both near Cliffside. Bob had been to both places, with both good and bad luck at times. And he had fished with worms as well as with hellgrammites, and grasshoppers. The lads of Cliffside inclined to natural bait rather than spinners, plugs or artificial flies.
“Don’t you want to come along?” invited Jolly Bill as Bob stood looking at him turn over the brown earth, scanning each spadeful, meanwhile, for a sight of worms.
“Don’t believe I can,” answered the lad. “But you won’t find any worms here, no matter how long you dig. It isn’t the right kind of earth.”
“Do you know,” said Jolly Bill with a frank and engaging smile, “I am beginning to believe that myself. All I’ve turned up the last half hour has been one poor, miserable little worm. Must be an orphan, I reckon,” and he laughed heartily.
“That’s what I been telling him,” spoke the voice of Hiram Beegle from the doorway of his log cabin. “You’ll never get any bait there, Bill, and you might as well quit. Down back where the stable used to be are worms aplenty.”
“Oh, all right,” assented the other. “You ought to know the lay of the land better than I do. And I certainly haven’t had any luck here. I’ll take your advice.”
At one time Hiram had kept a horse which hauled a ramshackle wagon that took him to and from Cliffside. But he had sold the animal some years ago, as requiring too much care from an old man.
However, land about a stable, no matter how long the equine dweller has been away, seems to be a homestead for worms, a fact which Jolly Bill soon demonstrated. From his digging he called:
“I’m getting slathers of ’em now. Get your pole ready, Hiram.”
“All right,” was the answer.
Bob had been talking to the old man while Jolly Bill had transferred the scene of his digging operations.
“Think you’ll get any fish this time of year?” asked the young detective, for it was rather late in the season for the fish to bite well. The finny tribes were “holing up” for the winter, or doing whatever fish do in preparation for snow and ice covering the lake and river.
“Well, no, Bob, I don’t expect we’ll get many,” was the cautious answer. “It was Bill’s idea to take me fishing. He proposed it.”
Bob had begun to suspect that much.
“And he suggested coming here to dig for worms, didn’t he?” asked the lad.
“Why, that’s what he did!” exclaimed old Hiram. “How’d you know that, Bob Dexter?”
“Oh, I sort of guessed it, I reckon. Has he been digging long?”
“No, he just started a little while before you came around. But he says he and I will go fishing every day as long as the weather holds good. I’m not much of a hand for fish myself, but I didn’t want to refuse Bill.”
“He has a jolly way with him,” conceded the lad. The wooden-legged sailor stumped up with a tomato can half filled with worms.
“If we have luck like that at fishing,” he remarked as he scraped some mud off his timber-leg on the spade, “well be doing well.”
“I should say so!” laughed Bob. He had marveled at the skill with which Bill used the wooden leg. It served him at spading almost as well as did the foot and leg of a normal person. Bill stood on his good foot, and putting the end of his wooden stump on the top edge of the spade, where it is made wider to give purchase, he pressed the keen, straight, garden implement down in the soft soil. Then, with a quick motion, the spadeful of earth was turned over, and beaten apart with a quick blow, revealing the crawling worms.
“Then you won’t come, Bob?” asked Hiram as he got down his pole from inside the cabin.
“No, thank you—not this time.”
“If you’re passing back this way, later in the day, stop and well give you some fish for your uncle,” promised Hiram. “That is if we catch any.”
“Oh, well catch plenty!” predicted Jolly Bill.
“Thanks,” replied Bob. “I’ll stop if I pass this way. And now, if you like, I’ll run you down to the lake, or river—which are you going to try first?”
“The lake,” decided Hiram, as Bill looked to him to answer this question. “And it’s right kind of you, Bob, to do this. I was going to ask Tom Shan to hitch up and ride us down, but your machine’ll be a lot quicker.”
It was, and when Bob had left the fishermen at the lake, promising, if he had time, to call and take them home, he went on to his uncle’s store.
Contrary to expectation, Bob did not find anything to do. Mr. Dexter had wanted him to deliver a special order over in Cardiff, but the man called for it himself, and this gave the lad some free time.
“I think I’ll just take a run back to Storm Mountain,” mused the young detective. “Hiram won’t be back for some time, and I’d like to take a look around the place all by myself. He wouldn’t mind if he knew of it, especially when I’m trying to help him. But I’d rather not have to ask him. This gives me a chance to get in alone.”
Bob told himself that he would go in the cabin, and he knew he could do this, for he knew the old man never carried with him the key of the outer door, hiding it in a secret place near the doorstep. No one had ever yet found it, and probably Bob was the only one the old man had taken into the secret—and this only after Bob’s attention to Hiram after the latter was attacked when carrying home his treasure box.
“I’ll just slip in and have a look around,” decided the lad. “Maybe I might discover something, though what it can be I don’t know. If I could only figure out a way by which that key was put back in the room, after the door was locked on the outside, I might begin to unravel this mystery.”
Bob flivvered up to the log cabin, but he did not alight at once from his little car. He wanted to make sure he wasn’t observed. Not that he was doing anything wrong, for it was all along the line of helping Hiram Beegle. But he felt it would be just as well to work unobserved.
Satisfied, after having sat in his auto for five minutes, that no one was in hiding around the log cabin, and making sure that no one was ascending or descending the Storm Mountain road, Bob ran his car in the weed-grown drive and parked it out of casual sight behind what had once been a hen house. But Hiram had given up his chickens as he had his horse. They required too much care, he said.
Bob found the key where Hiram had told him it would be hidden. Then, with a last look up and down the lonely road in front of the log cabin, the lad entered.
Ghostly silent and still it was, his footfalls echoing through the rooms. But Bob was not overly sentimental and he was soon pressing the hidden spring that opened the niche where the key to the strong room was concealed.
It was this room that held the secret, or, rather that had held it, and it was in this room that the young detective was most interested.
“But it seems to hold its secret pretty well,” mused the lad as he walked about it, gazing intently on the wooden walls. “There must be some secret opening in them,” thought the boy. “Though if there was why doesn’t Hiram know it? Or, if he knows it, why does he not admit it? Of course he might have his own reasons for keeping quiet. I wish I could find out!”
Bob looked, he tapped, he hammered he pounded. But all to no purpose. The walls would not give up their secret. He even stuck his head up the chimney flue as far as he could, thereby getting smudges of black on his face, but this effort was no more fruitful than the others.
“The key could come down the chimney, of course,” mused Bob, “but it couldn’t jump itself out of the ashes into the middle of the room. That’s the puzzle.”
He had spent more time than he reckoned on in seeking the secret and he was surprised, on looking at his watch, to find how late it was.
“I’d better be going after those two,” thought the lad. “They’ll have fish enough by this time, if they get any at all.”
As Bob was locking the strong room, and preparing to put the key back in its hiding place, he heard something that gave him a start. This was a knock on the front door of the log cabin.
“Gosh! Are they back so soon?” thought the lad.
He did not realize, for the moment, that Hiram would not have knocked at his own door. It must be some one else.
Quickly the lad closed the niche and then, going to the door opened it.
Standing on the threshold was—Pietro Margolis—the Italian music grinder. He had with him neither his monkey nor organ, but on his face there was a look of surprise, and he started back at the sight of Bob Dexter.
“Oh—excuse—please!” he murmured. “I t’ink to find the old man but—you have been cleaning his chimney—maybe?”
At first Bob did not understand. Then as he looked at a daub of soot on his hand, and remembered that there must be some on his face, he realized how natural was the visitor’s mistake.
“Hello, Pietro!” greeted the youth. “Mr. Beegle isn’t home. I—I’ve been doing some work for him while he’s gone fishing.”
“Yes—I see him go—with other man.”
“Hum! Maybe that’s the reason you came here—because you saw Hiram go away,” thought Bob. But he did not say this to the Italian. The latter carried something in a bundle, and, noting that Bob’s eyes were directed toward it, the caller, with a white-tooth smile, opened it, revealing some of those same strange nuts, or dried fruits he had been planting in the bramble patch.
“I come see mebby Senor Beegle let me try plant monkey nuts on his land,” explained Pietro.
“Mebby so they no grow where I put ’em,” and he waved his hand in the direction of Cliffside.
“I don’t believe anything would grow, the way you planted it,” chuckled Bob, remembering the deep holes the Italian had dug.
Pietro looked across the deserted garden. He saw where Jolly Bill had been trying for worms.
“Senor Beegle—he dig holes, too!” exclaimed the caller. He seemed strangely excited. “Mebby so he plant monkey nuts!”
“I don’t believe so,” stated Bob. “Hiram hasn’t any monkey. They have been digging worms,” he explained.
“Worms—what for worms?” asked the Italian with a vacant look.
“For fishing. That’s where they are, you know—after fish.”
“Oh, sure—feesh. Well, mebby so I leave these nuts for Senor Beegle—he plant them and try them—you t’ink?” He held the odd things out to Bob.
“You better come back and explain about them yourself,” said Bob. “I’m going after them now. Come back to-morrow.”
“Aw-right. I come back!”
The Italian did not seem disappointed. With a patience characteristic of his kind, he smiled and turned away. Bob watched until he saw the organ grinder tramping down the Storm Mountain trail.
Then Bob locked up the log cabin, hid the key where he had found it and took another road back to Cliffside in order to pick up Hiram and Jolly Bill.
They had had good luck fishing, contrary to what Bob had expected and he brought home to his aunt some welcome specimens of the lake. Hiram was left at his cabin and Jolly Bill at the Mansion House.
“Well, I know one thing I’m going to do,” said Bob to himself that night in his room. “I’m going to give a party!”
Rather a queer decision you might think, until you knew the reason for it.
There was a room in the headquarters of the Boys’ Athletic Club available for gatherings of various sorts. It could be hired for dances and parties by the members or friends of the latter, and often the boys and girls would give little affairs there.
So it did not surprise the chums of Bob Dexter to receive, in the next few days, invitations to a little affair of this sort at the club. On the bottom of some invitations was a line:
“Please bring peanuts.”
“What’s the idea, Bob?” asked Ned, reading this command. “Aren’t you going to feed us?”
“Oh, yes, but the peanuts are for the monkey.”
“What monkey?”
“The organ grinder’s.”
“Is he coming to the party—I mean the dago?”
“Yes, and he’s going to bring his organ and monkey.”
For a moment Ned stared at his chum, and then, seeing that Bob was serious, Ned broke out into a laugh.
“Oh, ho! I get you!” he chuckled. “It’s a dandy idea! Organ music and monkey tricks at your party! Quite a stunt! Good idea!”
“Yes, I think it’s quite an idea,” said Bob quietly.