Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1947

by The Sleuth Patrol (v1. 1)

  Such a house had been impressive once, Sherlock mused. It must have been built for a large family, and a well-to-do one. Now it could have stood for the very symbol of decay and desertion. One or two of the younger boys shivered as the hikers turned away.

  “If ghosts were anywhere,” observed Sherlock, “they’d live in regiments at that place.”

  “I wouldn’t go there after dark,” sighed Chuck Schaefer, “not for the Congressional Medal of Honor.”

  “Medals are for heroes,” scoffed Max. “I’m collecting them. I’ve got half a dozen from different wars. I’d go back there for nothing, just to prove what it might prove. At night, I mean. I never saw a ghost in my life, and I won’t run until I see one.”

  The hikers returned to camp and headed by common consent for the swimming hole. It was big enough for all of them at once, and soon they were all splashing and paddling. From the gnarled roots of a big tree above the deepest point, Ranny Ollinger performed several dives, gracefully and with perfect timing. Sherlock and Doc watched with envy and admiration.

  “Let’s refuse any challenges for swimming and diving,” muttered Max, wading in behind them. “That Ranny’s like an otter, only he doesn’t have such a valuable coat of fur. What else does he want to challenge about, anyway?”

  “I’ll ask him,” said Sherlock, and slipped forward into the deeper water, stroking himself across to Ranny. Doc and Max came after to listen. But Ranny, turning on his back to float lazily, evaded the question.

  “Personally, I’d rather wait until Mr. Brimmer comes back with the news that his car’s been found and the thief punished,” he said. “We need plenty of Scoutmasters to judge things, anyway. Meanwhile, how about a special prize to whoever goes back to the haunted house and brings a ghost’s eyebrow for a souvenir?”

  “Why make the trip for nothing?” demanded Max, the skeptic. “There’s nothing there but a dark, empty house, not in very good repair even. It would be a waste of time.”

  “Sherlock,” said Doc, up to his plump chin in water, “I deduce that our colleague Max isn’t really anxious to visit Creep Castle, for all his scoffings.”

  Max lifted a hand to his ear, as though to remove and polish his spectacles, then remembered he had taken them off for the swim.

  “I read you carping critics like a very dull and uninteresting book,” he said. “You’re trying to dare me back there.”

  “Why not take the dare?” said Ranny. “Look, I’ve got a piece of blue chalk in my haversack. Take it with you after dark, Max, and write your name on the wall inside. Tomorrow we’ll all go there and see if you’re as nervy as you keep making off.”

  “A hike in the night, a trespassing on ground that’s pretty rough underfoot, and the literary effort of writing my name in the dark,” summed up Max scornfully. “What will it get me, besides something to heckle you about? As if I didn’t have enough material now to keep you heckled until you’re prematurely gray?”

  “Medals are for heroes,” Sherlock quoted Max’s own words. “You tell us you’re making a collection of such junk. Well, witness this promise, you other two. If Max will make good on his bluff—go there tonight after dark, with Ranny’s blue chalk, and write his name somewhere inside the house—I’ll give him an old medal I found years ago. It’s a Mexican War campaign medal. Probably belonged to Davy Crockett.”

  “That’s a deal,” said Max, and ducked under, catching Sherlock by a knee and tripping him so that he went sprawling to the bottom of the swimming hole.

  Spluttering angrily, Sherlock bobbed up again, got his sinewy hands on Max’s neck, and ducked him again and again in retaliation. Max broke away at last and swam for safety, coughing and blowing like a grampus. After a moment Sherlock and Doc also climbed out and walked toward the tree where their towels hung. Sherlock looked at his friend and winked.

  “You know my methods, Watson,” he said in an undertone. “I’d have given Max the medal anyway. This way I’ll make him earn it.”

  “Make him earn it?”

  “It’s a shame, isn’t it, for a fine upstanding young American like Max to sneer at time-honored beliefs like ghosts and haunted houses?” said Sherlock. “How about seeing that he changes his tune and believes in them.” “Right,” said Doc eagerly. “A healthy scare might stir up Max’s blood circulation and make him grow. What are you going to do, Sherlock? Whatever it is, count me in.”

  WHO SCARED WHO?”

  Sundown brought gloom to the campsite, and deeper gloom to the road below. The evening meal was eaten, garbage buried, dishes washed, and Max and Sherlock asked the Junior Assistant Scoutmaster for permission to stroll a short distance by the light of the halfmoon that was now rising above the treetops. Readily Lew Sheehan granted their request. Sherlock was relieved that no mention was made of Doc Watson’s petition for the same favor not fifteen minutes previously.

  The two boys picked their way downhill over the rock- strewn slope and reached the dirt road. It was Max who struck out confidently in the direction of the haunted house. Sherlock lagged a little.

  “You’re quiet, Sherlock,” Max observed. “Maybe you’re the one who ought to be demonstrating his nerve on this little adventure into ghostland.”

  “I didn’t ask for it at the top of my voice, the way you did,” rejoined Sherlock, “and what I’m thinking about just now isn’t ghosts.”

  “You’re harking back to the man you saw at Oatville, or anyway thought you saw,” suggested Max. “I deduced that, I’ve caught the habit from you. Why don’t you stop worrying about him? Even if it was Corey James, maybe he’s not causing trouble here. They suspended his sentence on condition that he left Hillwood, and he did. Perhaps he’s going straight. Maybe he’s going to be a respectable Garroway Township farmer, the kind of reformed criminal that everybody suspects in the detective stories and turns out to be a real right guy in the last chapter.”

  “Put it all down in that novel you say you’re going to write some day,” bade Sherlock. “Meanwhile, don’t try to dodge the present issue. You’ve got some ghosts to face down yonder within an hour’s time, Max.”

  “They’re going into my novel, too,” Max announced. “I need spook stuff for the climax of my book. I’m putting you in, too.”

  “For the detective?” asked Sherlock.

  “For the luckless victim of the unspeakable crime,” Max replied in a hollow voice. “Beware, Sherlock. It is later than you think.”

  “Not so late but that we haven’t time to see how much nerve goes along with all your oratory.” Sherlock strode along more quickly, watching for the mouth of the trail among the roadside trees. It took them half an hour to reach it, and Max was perhaps a little less confident. He talked as much and as defiantly, but with more staccato laughter than before. The two paused among the trees at the beginning of the trail, and very little moonlight filtered down through the branches.

  Sherlock turned on the flashlight he carried, and explored the way a moment. Then he switched it off.

  “Here’s where I leave you,” he said, borrowing from Max the trick of making his voice sound deep and sepulchral. “Or rather, here’s where you leave me.”

  “You’ll wait here until I get back?” demanded Max.

  “I promise nothing,” said Sherlock, and held out his hand. “Here, take Ranny’s blue chalk. Now get going.”

  Max put the chalk in his pocket, faced the trail and moved along it, his feet cautiously groping over the rough stony bed. Sherlock waited silently until Max could be seen and heard no more. Then he quickly unbuttoned his Scout shirt and drew from under it the tightly folded bundle he had successfully kept Max from noticing.

  It was a sheet from his cot, packed into a small compass. Shaking it out, Sherlock draped it cloak-fashion over him, with a fold to muffle his head like a hood. He wished for a mirror and a light to see how he looked as a ghost, and wondered if Doc, who had preceded them with a similar drapery, would be as impressive. Carefully Sherlock moved in Max’s
wake. His canvas sneakers, donned for the adventure, made no noise among the stones. He held the sheet’s folds closely around his body to keep them from rustling, and avoided branches and brush that might rattle and betray him.

  He gained the other end of the trail and was in time to see Max moving among the trees toward the house in the hollow. The moon gave some light here, enough to show the ugly dark shape of the house, seemingly bigger and more ruinous than it had looked by daylight. Sherlock continued to follow Max, slipping from tree trunk to tree trunk to hide his white-wrapped figure in case Max should glance back. Sherlock kept not more than a dozen yards behind him and by the time Max had reached the weed-grown front yard of the old place, he was close in and still unobserved.

  At the edge of the’yard Max paused, reconnoitering, and Sherlock paused, too. The tumbledown porch did not give much obstruction to the moonlight, and Sherlock could see that the front door was open a little, Or that it seemed to be. Had that door been open when the Scouts stopped for a look during their afternoon hike? Sherlock found himself unable to remember, and mentally scolded himself. Such details should stick, he pondered silently, in the memory of a good detective.

  Now Max was approaching the house, along a path between clumps of weeds. He came to the front steps, put up his foot to try the first one. It creaked ominously, like something in a radio horror program. As though that noise were a signal, something moved in the darkest shadows of the porch and drifted forward into dim view. It was gray, deliberate, fluttery with fabric. Doc Watson had sagely chosen a light blanket instead of a sheet for his ghostly robe. Like Sherlock, he was wearing sneakers, and had apparently tested the boards of the porch in advance, for his feet made no noise upon them as he swept impressively forward to confront Max.

  “Ahhhhh!” the shape moaned, and waved two gray-swaddled arms.

  Max jumped back, but only one pace. He held his ground, cleared his throat, and Sherlock grinned to see, even in the feeble light, how tense Max’s gaunt frame had made itself.

  Sherlock, his sheet flapping, ran after Doc and Max.

  “Come out of that kimono, Doc Watson,” challenged Max, not too tremulously.

  “Aaaaaahhhhhh!” was all that Doc Watson could think of to say in reply to this challenge, and he said it extremely well. Again he waved his draped arms. It seemed to Sherlock that their motion was somehow reflected inside the pool of darkness beyond the half-open front door. However Doc achieved that effect, decided Sherlock, it was good enough for the movies. Max himself retreated another step.

  “I know you, Doc,” he insisted. “Your pudgy outline’s a giveaway, even in that rig. If you were a ghost, I could see through you, anyway; and you’re too solid a citizen for that.”

  Doc descended to the uppermost of the front steps. Max’s eyes, braced wide open behind his glasses, were getting more used to the light.

  “I not only know you,” he said, “I know that bedding of yours. And I suppose that’s your pal Sherlock there in the doorway just behind you.”

  “I’m right here,” groaned Sherlock drearily, coming out of his hiding among the trees to a point on the path behind Max. Max jumped as if somebody had stuck him with a pin.

  “Then what’s coming out of the house behind Doc?”

  Something black stepped heavily across the threshold into view. It emitted a menacing growl. Doc turned to stare, and the shape reached for him. Max whirled and sprinted along the path. Behind him Doc, speedy for all his plumpness, sprang from the porch and raced after, his blanket flapping behind him like a banner. The two boys whizzed past Sherlock like leaves in a gale, and Sherlock himself spun and ran after them.

  In short seconds the three ran the length of the rocky trail and paused on the dirt road beyond. Close together, they held their breath and strained their ears. There was no sound, of pursuit or anything else.

  “Well, who got scared?” Max was able to demand of his two comrades.

  “I think it was a three-way tie,” said Doc. His hands trembled as he tried to fold up his blanket. Sherlock was taking time to breathe deeply and gratefully. Max studied one of them, then the other.

  “It’s easy to see that you’re both on the level,” he said. “Well, whoever—whatever that was up there at the house, it wasn’t any low accomplice of yours. All right, Sherlock the sleuth hound, any deductions?”

  “The obvious one,” replied Sherlock. “Somebody else had the same idea that Doc and I did. He came down here to give you the scare of the decade.”

  “Ranny Ollinger,” said Max. “He was the only one who heard anything about the idea.”

  Doc shook his head, his round face solemn. “That black thing was bigger than Ranny.”

  “Ranny’s a well-grown fellow,” argued Max. “Anyway, at that moment, he’d have looked twelve feet tall, nine feet wide, and seven feet thick to any unobstructed vision.” Max whistled. “I hope you two were both as badly scared as I was.”

  “We were,” Sherlock told him. “Nobody here has any reason to kid either of the other two.”

  “And do I hear a motion that we go back to the haunted house and check up on what haunts it?” said Max. “Because if I do, I’ll oppose it with every trick known to parliamentary law.”

  “Where I’m going is straight to camp,” said Doc, “to make a checkup of my own.”

  “On Ranny?” said Sherlock.

  “On Ranny. If he was the one, and we’re pretty sure he was, he’ll be short-cutting back to get there ahead of us. And then he’ll be lying on his bunk, pretending to sleep like a quiet, conscience-free young American, while he plans the hoorah he’ll raise on us tomorrow. But I can check up, I say, if I’m back there in time.”

  “How?” inquired Max eagerly.

  “Take his pulse. Dad showed me how to do it, long ago. If it’s fast at all, he’s been in action within minutes. Come on, let’s go.”

  They went, at a brisk trot. At camp, bedtime preparations were in progress. With elaborate unconcern, Sherlock and his two companions strolled over to the camp of the Eagle Patrol.

  “Ranny?” someone answered their query. “He’s tired tonight. The first into bed. Better not wake him up.” “We won’t if he’s asleep,” said Doc, with an eloquent glance at Sherlock and Max. He approached Ranny’s tent, peered at the quiet figure in the bunk, and stooped above it.

  “The second Doc gives us the high sign,” whispered Max in Sherlock’s ear, “here’s what we do. Move in quick.

  You get him around the legs, Doc, and I will pin his arms. Before any of his Eagle buddies understand what’s up and come swooping in to save him, we’ll have him lugged halfway to the swimming hole. From there it’ll be simple routine procedure to chuck him in.”

  Doc came back. At his gesture they drew a little apart. “Something’s wrong,” whispered Doc.

  “He’s awake?”

  “Asleep—sound as a black bear in winter. Pulse slow and sleepy, breathing regular. No fake, no wake. Whoever was there at the haunted house wasn’t Ranny.” “Then who,” stammered Max, “who scared who?” “Don’t you mean who scared whom?” asked Doc. “I thought you were literary.”

  Sherlock put one hand on Doc’s shoulder, the other on Max’s.

  “Don’t tell anybody anything,” he said quickly. “Come on down by the swimming hole. We three are going into conference.”

  THREE AGAINST THE GHOST

  In silence they turned away from the camp and toward the water. At the very brink, Sherlock peered across the quiet surface, then into the gloom of the surrounding trees, and listened for long moments. Finally he turned to his companions.

  “This is serious,” he said.

  “You can say that again,” sniffed Max.

  “All right, I will say it again. This is ser—”

  “Stop clowning, Sherlock,” begged Max. “I’m the one who’s supposed to make all the feeble wisecracks. Do you realize that we ought all to be going to bed, setting a good example to those tenderfeet? What if
they find out what we’ve been up to and begin to conduct themselves likewise, thinking that’s the way to be topflight Scouts. I’m no prize deductive reasoner like you, but I can forecast that Mr. Palmer would have us all in for a lecture, and it would be hard for even you to deduce whether he was talking like a police sergeant or a Scoutmaster.”

  “Mr. Palmer isn’t to know about this,” said Sherlock sternly to the other boys. “Not yet. It’s up to us.”

  “Give him a chance to talk, Max,” said Doc. “There’s enough moonlight to show me that our master detective’s worried about something, and plenty.”

  “As if I’m not worried, too,” said Max, “not to say mystified. And without the slightest yen to go back there and solve the mystery. Whooo!” He blew out his breath dolefully. “I can see that big black thing right now, and hear it growling. Maybe,” and he paused to gulp nervously, “maybe it was a bear.”

  “Nonsense,” said Sherlock. “There’s not been a bear in this part of the country since my grandfather was in the first grade.”

  “If it wasn’t a bear,” said Doc, “I don’t want to know what it was. Any expedition back to Morbid Manor can include me out.”

  “There’s going to be an expedition back there,” announced Sherlock stubbornly, “and both of you are included in. I said it, and I meant it. This is up to us.” Max sat down on a gnarled root, and put his hands on his knees. “They stopped shaking, my knees, I mean, when we decided it was Ranny Ollinger. Now that we know it isn’t, they started again. Well, Sherlock, you can have the floor. Make a speech. Give with what’s on your mind.”

  Sherlock rumpled his hair solemnly. “Let’s agree on what we know so far,” he said slowly. “This ought to be an ordinary, pleasant adventure in camping, with no surprises except little ones we hunt up ourselves, birds and plants and things like that. But instead, all kinds of mystery and menace come right into camp and find us, such as stolen automobiles that leave no tracks and deserted houses that aren’t deserted.”