The Golden Eagle Mystery (23 page)

Mr. Firkins thanked him profusely and went away.

The editor, Mr. Canavan, looked up and beckoned to Socker Furlong to come to his desk. “Write a good funny story,” he ordered. “But before you do, go out and take a look at this haunted house. Be sure you get the right house. We can’t print stories about houses being haunted, without making sure it’s the right one. What if it should turn out that there were some important people living in it? We’d he in a nice lot of trouble! Be sure you go out there.”

“Yes, sir,” said the reporter. He strolled over to the lockers and got his hat. Looking around cautiously, he saw Ben, and beckoned to him to follow him out into the hall. When they had got out where Mr. Canavan couldn’t see them or hear them, young Mr. Furlong fished a quarter out of his pocket.

“Listen,” he whispered. “The boss has lost his mind. He suggests that I ought to go out to this empty house and gawp at it. I think the heat has been too much for him. There isn’t a bit of use doing that. An empty house is an empty house. I don’t need to look at it. Why, I can write a much better story if I
don’t
look at it. No, I can think of a much better way of spending an afternoon like this than standing around in front of an empty house. The ball park, for instance. That’s where I’m going. I’ll be there just in time for the second game in the double-header. Now, this is what I want
you
to do, Ben. You know where I live. As soon as I get back from the ball game, I’ll write this story at home. You come around there at six o’clock and I’ll have it ready. Bring it back here and give it to the Night Desk. Will you do that?”

“Why, sure, Mr. Furlong,” said Ben. “That’s no trouble.”

The reporter patted him on the head and rang for the elevator, smiling.

“Say, where
is
that haunted house?” asked Ben. “Did the man tell you?”

“It’s on Carpenter Street,” said the young man. “Number seven-seventy-seven. Very easy number to remember, somehow.”

“Seven-seventy-seven!” exclaimed Ben. “Why,
I
know where that is! It’s only a couple of blocks from where
I
live! Gee, I know that house–it certainly
looks
like it was haunted! But
I
don’t believe in ghosts, do you, Mr. Furlong?”

“Only on pay days,” said the reporter, carelessly. “So you know the place, do you? It’s empty, all right, isn’t it? You sure nobody lives there?”

“Sure, it’s empty,” Ben assured him. “It’s been empty for as long as I remember. It’s all going to pieces. Gee, I go right past it a million times a day, don’t I? I guess I ought to know!”

“Well, that’s fine!” said Mr. Furlong. “That just proves what I said–there isn’t a bit of use in my wasting time to go out and look at it. I’ll write a story that will scare the life out of everybody in town! When I get through with that house, nobody in this town will dare to come within a mile of it. Just watch me, boy!”

And he stepped into the elevator, beaming with pleasure.

Four hours later, at the end of his day’s work, Ben hurried to the reporter’s boarding-house, got the story from him, and delivered it to the night editor who had taken Mr. Canavan’s place at the desk.

Then he, too, went home.

Djuna had made several more dimes during the afternoon and was pretty hungry by the time he got home. He ate a very hearty supper and then, at a few minutes past seven, he started for Ben’s house to have another look at Ben’s little green turtle. He turned west on Carpenter Street and after going about a block and a half he passed a big house that looked entirely empty. All the windows were boarded up. The house had once been painted gray, but that must have been a long time ago, for the paint was all peeling off. There was a good-sized yard around the house, surrounded by an iron fence, but the grass had not been cut in years. It was very long and tumbled every which way, and the garden was full of weeds. Over the front gate was a rusty sign, on which Djuna could just make out the numbers, “777.” The whole place looked very lonely, as if no one had lived there for years. Anyone looking at it would have said it was just the sort of house that ought to have ghosts in it.

Djuna wondered about it as he went past it. But in another block or two he came to Ben’s house, a very pretty little white house with blue window shutters. Ben came running out as soon as he heard Djuna whistling outside.

“Say,” said Ben, excitedly, as soon as he jumped down the front steps, “did you happen to notice an old house down the street from here, when you were on your way here?”

“Why, yes,” said Djuna. “You mean that one with the fence around it, that old empty house? What about it?”

“Well, it’s haunted!” exclaimed Ben, trying hard not to laugh.

“Oh, go on!” said Djuna. “What are you talking about? You don’t believe in ghosts, do you?”

Ben laughed. “No,” he said. “I don’t, really. But I was just wondering if you noticed the house, because there’s going to be a story about it in the paper tomorrow morning, that says it’s haunted. It’s a swell story. It will make you laugh. Socker Furlong wrote it, and I read it before I came home. You just wait!”

“Socker Furlong?” repeated Djuna. “Oh, you mean that man I shined his shoes for this noon? What makes
him
think the house is haunted?”

Ben giggled. “He’s never even
seen
the house,” he said. “He just wrote the story to make fun of a man who came into the office this afternoon and said he was sure it was haunted!”

And he went on to tell Djuna all that happened when Mr. Firkins, the real estate agent, came in and asked the editor to print a story about the house, to help him find somebody who would know how to get rid of the ghosts in the house, so that people wouldn’t be afraid to rent it.

“Well, that’s the craziest thing I ever heard of!” said Djuna. But he didn’t laugh, as Ben did. He looked very much puzzled.

“Don’t you think it’s funny?” asked Ben. “What are you looking so serious for?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Djuna. “Say, can I see Waterbury again? What’s he doing? Swimming, or resting?”

The two boys went on into Ben’s house, and Ben proudly exhibited Waterbury, the tiny green turtle, as is paddled around in the glass bowl. They watched Waterbury for a long time. Finally Djuna said it was time for him to go home. It had grown quite dark.

“I’ll walk along with you, part of the way,” said Ben. “I think a little walk in the fresh air would do Waterbury a lot of good.”

He fished the tiny turtle out of the bowl and slipped him into his pants pocket. Waterbury had pulled in his head and his flippers and said not a word.

The two boys went on talking as they walked along together. There were lights in the front windows of all the houses along the street, but when they came to the block where the empty house stood alone, behind its rusty fence, the street seemed darker and lonelier than ever.

In the middle of the dark yard, the old house made a darker shadow, a black blot against the night sky. There was not a light in it.

Suddenly Ben clutched Djuna’s arm. “What’s that?” he whispered in a trembling voice. “D-d-d-do you see that?”

“Quiet!” whispered Djuna. Instinctively, the two boys dropped to their knees and peered between the bars of the tall iron fence.

Between the cracks of the boards fastened over the windows of the deserted house, in a room on the east side of the ground floor, they both saw a faint gleam of light. Someone was in there!

As they watched, breathless, their hearts thumping, the light vanished from that spot. But a moment later it reappeared, gleaming through the cracks in the boards over the windows in the next room. It was plain that someone was carrying a lamp of some sort from one room to another.

Next, the rooms on the east side of the house grew dark again, and a faint light appeared over the big doorway opening upon the front porch of the house, where there was a half-circle window over the door. It was very dim, as though the person holding the lamp was at the farthest end of the central hall.

Then another pinpoint of light suddenly appeared at the edges of a window shutter upstairs. It moved from one upstairs room to another. The faint dimness over the door downstairs still stayed just as it was.

“There must be
two
people in there!” whispered Djuna. “One is downstairs in the hall and the other is upstairs! Or else the lamp downstairs has just been left standing there on a table. Oh, gee, look, there must be
three
of them!”

A light was flickering between the rooms of the
third
floor, the top floor, while the light on the second floor was still moving from room to room!

“They’re all over the house!” gasped Ben. “Let’s get away from here!”

“You wait here a minute,” whispered Djuna. “I’m going up and find out who they are!”

“Oh, don’t!” wailed Ben. “Don’t go,
please!
”

But Djuna had already pushed open the sagging front gate and was walking boldly up the weed-grown gravel path that led to the front door. Ben stayed where he was, unable to move for worry.

Djuna marched up the steps of the porch, crossed to the front door, and knocked on it loudly.

There was a moment’s pause, then he could hear someone turning the door knob from inside. The door swung open.

In front of him stood a little girl, a very pretty little girl, who was carrying a small oil-lantern in one hand. She lifted it to see who was at the door, and the light fell upon her smiling face and shining curls.

“Oh,” she said, “how do you do?”

Djuna pulled off his cap. “Excuse me,” he said, “can you tell me who lives here?”

“
We
do,” said the little girl. She seemed to think this was answer enough.

“Oh!” said Djuna. “Well, is your father’s name Mr. Brown? I’m looking for Mr. Brown.”

Before the little girl could answer, Djuna heard heavy footsteps hurrying across the bare floor of the room overhead, and a man’s voice, a voice that came floating down from the top of the stairway.

“Who is that?” it shouted down angrily. “Who you talking to, Maria?”

“It’s just a boy,” the little girl called back. “He wants to know where Mr. Brown lives.”

“He don’t live here!” the angry voice shouted. “Shut that door, Maria! Shut it right away, you hear me?”

Djuna wanted to gain time. “Oh, gee, my shoestring’s untied,” he said quickly. He bent over and retied his shoestring, then straightened up.

The little girl looked frightened. Djuna started to speak, but she shook her head and motioned to him to go away. And before he could make up his mind what to do next, she had pushed the heavy door shut.

Djuna ran back down the path, as fast as he could, in the dark. Ben jumped to his feet as Djuna reached the gate.

“Who were they?” he cried, in an excited whisper. “I saw somebody open the door!”

“Let’s get away from here and get some help!” whispered Djuna. “Hurry!”

The two boys ran as hard as they could until they came to the next corner, where there was a street lamp. Here Djuna stopped long enough to say; “There was a little girl there, and there was a man upstairs that yelled at her and made her shut the door. We’d better find a policeman right away!”

“My gosh!” said Ben, “I’ll tell you what we’d better do—we’d better go to Socker Furlong’s house right away, and tell
him!
He said in that piece he wrote for the paper that there
wasn’t
anybody in the house at all, and if those people in there now have a
right
to be there, they’re going to be awful mad! And I guess Mr. Canavan would fire him right away, he would be so mad when he finds out that Socker went to the ball game instead of going to see if the house was
really
empty!”

“Where does he live?” asked Djuna. “Is it very far?”

“It’s just a block from here,” said Ben. “Come on, run!”

They dashed on, but Ben had gone only a few steps when he stopped short and gave a groan. He dug wildly into his pockets.

“Oh, my gosh!” he wailed. “There was a hole in my pocket and Waterbury has got out and gone! Oh, for Pete’s sake, I’ll bet he got out while we were hiding there by the fence, and by this time he’s crawled off into the long grass, and now I’ll
never
find him!”

Djuna grinned comfortingly. “Oh, yes, you will,” he said confidently. “I’ll bet you a million dollars that turtle is in that house, right this minute. Just you wait. But the
first
thing we’ve got to do is to get help!”

And, side by side, the two boys ran desperately on.

“W
E TURN HERE
,” Ben gasped as the two boys came to a cross street. A street light played on a sign that read Pewter Platter Alley. “It’s that big house across the street.”

They ran up the steps and stood panting for breath as Ben pulled the porcelain handle of the bell and heard it jangle dismally some place in the basement. After waiting impatiently for a few moments they tried to peek through the lace curtain that covered the inside of the upper part of the glass door. The dim light from a single gas jet cast flickering shadows in the hallway so that they could see only a few feet.

“Ring it again,” Djuna said. “There must be
somebody
here.”

Ben rang it again, but after the bell had ceased to jangle the only thing they could hear was the beating of their own hearts.

“Whatta youse want?” a sharp voice said suddenly, behind and below them. They were both so startled that their noses flattened out against the glass of the door before they whirled around to see a dim figure standing at the basement door beside the brownstone steps.

“We–we’d like to see Mr. Furlong, please,” Ben said when he could speak.

“Jus’ a minute,” the man said and disappeared.

“Gee! He scared me,” Ben said. “He sounded as though he came right up out of the ground.”

“He scared me, too,” Djuna said, and he giggled. “I guess we have ghosts on our minds.”

They heard someone coming up the inside stairs from the basement and then heard a voice shout, “Mr. Furlong! Mr. Furlong! Mr. Furlong!” three times, as fast as he could say it.