The Corner House Girls Snowbound Part 30

There were a few flakes in the air. But it did not look as though any heavy fall had begun.

"I don't see why we need to have you go with us to slide," Tess said, pouting. "We go sliding without you in Milton."

"This is different, Tess," Ruth said firmly. "Now, let us hear no more about it! You will annoy Mr. Howbridge."

Sammy winked slyly at the two little girls. "Just you wait!" he mouthed so that only Tess and Dot heard him.

"Oh, Sammy!" murmured Dot. "What'll you do?"

"Just you wait!" repeated the boy, and that mysterious statement comforted Dot a good deal, if it did not Tess Kenway. Dot believed that Sammy was fertile in expedient. She had run away with him once "to be pirates."

Before the meal was over, Hedden came in and bent beside Mr. Howbridge to whisper into his ear.

"Oh! Has he come back again? I wondered where he went so suddenly,"

said the lawyer. "Yes. Tell him I'll come out to see him as soon as I am through."

Neale knew that he referred to M'Graw. Bright-eyed and interested, he bent forward to say to Mr. Howbridge:

"I just told Mr. M'Graw something that I guess you'd wish to know, too, Mr. Howbridge. May I go with you when you speak to him?"

"Certainly, my boy. There's nothing secret about it--not really. We are only puzzled about a suspicion that we have--"

"That there was somebody in the house that ought not to be here,"

whispered the boy.

"That's it. How did you know?"

"I'll tell you later," returned Neale O'Neil.

Agnes was glaring at him in a most indignant fas.h.i.+on. It always angered the second Corner House girl if Neale seemed to have any secret that she did not share.

"What's the matter with you?" she hissed, when Neale turned away from their host. "Don't you know it isn't polite to whisper at table, Neale O'Neil?"

"What are you doing it for, then?" he asked her, grinning, and would vouchsafe no further explanation of the secret between Mr. Howbridge and himself.

As soon as the lawyer arose from the table to go out to the kitchen to interview Ike, Neale jumped up to go with him. Agnes saw him depart with sparkling eyes and a very red face. She was really angry with Neale O'Neil.

The boy was too much interested in the mystery of the shooter of the fox and how he had got in and out of Red Deer Lodge to be much bothered by Agnes' vexation. He and the lawyer found the old woodsman sitting in the servants' dining-room where he had been eating.

"Well, sir," he began, when Mr. Howbridge and the boy entered, "'twixt us all, I reckon we're gettin' to the bottom of this here mystery. Did I tell you I couldn't find no place where the feller stood out there in the snow last evening to shoot that fox from?"

"No."

"But it's a fac'. Now you tell him, sonny, what you told me about what you found in the attic. I've been up and made sure 'twas so."

Neale told the surprised Mr. Howbridge of the proved fact that the fox was shot from one of the attic windows.

"And 'twas a play-toy rifle that done it--a twenty-two," said the woodsman, as though to clinch some fact that had risen in his own mind, if not in the minds of the others.

"Now, let's figger it out. We got enough fac's now to point purty conclusive to who done it. Yes, sir."

"Why, Ike, I don't see that," observed Mr. Howbridge.

"But you will, Mister, in a minute or so," declared the old man, nodding with confidence. "Now, look you: Whoever was in this here house and made that fire in Miz' Birdsall's sittin'-room, was here when your people came day before yesterday."

"No!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Mr. Howbridge.

"Yes!" repeated M'Graw with decision.

"But you found that key in your cabin, did you not?"

"Yes. But I tell you I've figgered that out. Whoever 'twas come here, got the key, come in here, opened the back door, and then locked the front door on the outside same as always."

"Wait! No buts about it," interrupted the woodsman. "I got it figgered to a fare-you-well, I tell you. Now! The feller locked the front door, went back to my shanty and hung up the key, and then came back in by the rear door. See? He--ahem!--was in here when that man, Hedden, of yours, and the others, come."

"But there were no footprints of human beings about the house in the snow."

"That's all right. The feller that built the fire upstairs had done all his walking around before the snow fell the day after I went to Ebettsville. Don't you see? He didn't leave here because his footprints would be seen, and he couldn't lock the house up behind him if he did leave and make it look as though it had never been opened."

"You are guessing at a lot of this!" exclaimed the lawyer, not at all convinced.

"No. I'm jest figgerin'. Now, this Neale boy here heard that shot fired upstairs that killed the fox. He went up this mornin' and saw where the shot was fired from. I seen it, too. So the feller that opened the Lodge and that lit the fire was up there at ten or half past last evening, for sure."

"Well?" murmured the lawyer.

"He didn't go out during the night, or his footprints would have been seen by John this morning in the new-fallen snow."

"That sounds right."

"It is right!" said the old man vigorously. "Now we come to this here dog you brought."

"Oh, yes!" cried Mr. Howbridge. "How about Tom Jonah? Surely if there had been a stranger about--one who stole food from the pantry--he would have interfered."

"Mebbe he would. And mebbe again he wouldn't. He's a mighty friendly dog."

"But he is a splendid watchdog," interposed Neale O'Neil.

"That may be, too," Ike said, quite unshaken in his opinion. "If anybody had come in from outside and undertaken to disturb anything, that old dog would probably have been right on the job."

"I see your point," Mr. Howbridge admitted. "But this person who came down from the garret must have been a stranger."

"Now we're gittin' to it. Let's figger some more," said M'Graw, with a chuckle. "If you think hard, an' figger close enough, I guess 'most any puzzle can be solved."

CHAPTER XIX

SAMMY TAKES THE BIT IN HIS TEETH