Poppy Ott and the galloping snail

“Under the spreading blacksmith tree the village chestnut sits,” I crazily recited, kicking off my shoes to cool my blistered feet. Then I looked at my chum with begging eyes. “...

As though to completely take the joy out of life for us, no other cars came along, as we had expected they would. The sway-backed roadster with the crazy name and queer-looking...

The ghost theory is bunk. Every big kid knows that. _Ghosts?_ Pooh! Who could be crazy enough to believe in ghosts? That is what we say back and forth, the _big_ kids I mean, wh...

The mystery that hung over the big stone house, like a bat’s shadow, was a strange tangle. We could see that, all right. And now, to help things along to even greater mystery, h...

White, like most ganders, though peculiarly marked with small purple spots, it was the biggest fowl of its kind that I ever had seen. Standing on its webbed feet, which reminded...

“Now,” says Poppy, when he was dressed, “you wait here at the window. I’ll go out the back way, taking the door key with me. And to play safe, I’ll circle to the front road. You...

Before doing our own breakfast stuff Poppy and I meandered to the barn and fed the big gander. All Mrs. Doane could give us in the way of gander grub was cornflakes in the packa...

“Search me,” says I, wondering if the heavy watch chain that the over-fed visitor carried around on his vest front, like a young suspension bridge, was solid gold. If it was, he...

“Absolutely. He talked big about his _duty_ to the dead man. But that was all bluff. ‘Dollars’ is a bigger thing in his mind than ‘duty.’ You wait and see if I haven’t got the r...

There wasn’t so much sand here. More black dirt. We could see stuff growing in a field. Still, it wasn’t the best kind of soil--not for Illinois. And I had a hunch that Jonah an...

I think it was around eleven o’clock when we pulled out of Neponset Corners on our way back to C. H. O. We had been three hours on the road, and if we were as long going back it...

Poppy and I were doing a sort of double-decker stunt now. We had to in riding with old Goliath, for he took up two-thirds of the seat. But we didn’t kick, however crampy it was...

After he once got the hang of things, old Goliath wasn’t such a fearfully punk driver. I’ve seen worse. Shortly after meeting Dr. Madden we very nicely tried to rainbow over a t...

Ma Doane sure was a worker. The supper dishes washed and put away in the cupboard, each dish in its proper place, she got out a little comb-like machine for making switches. A s...

In putting the gander in our room, was it the “ghost’s” scheme to sort of show us how helpless we were in the big spooky house? Not liking the way we were messing around in his...

Are you all tangled up in the mystery now? Having read this far, is the cart, in your jumbled mind, pulling the horse? Or, having carefully chewed up and digested Poppy’s wild t...

Boy, were we ever excited! And did we ever feel like yipping out a string of “Hip-hip-hurray-for-our-side” stuff! For now, as you can see, we had the cat by the tail. And soon i...

It didn’t take young fatty as long to untangle himself from the buggy seat as his old man. And, say, did he ever strut it off as he came toward the house! The king had arrived!...

We found Poppy in the big bedroom, doing detective stuff with a yardstick. But whatever his job was, he dropped the work in a hurry when I told him about the whispering voice on...

Yes, sir, the more we messed the matter around in our minds the more we were made to realize how very little Dr. Madden had told on himself. His secrets were still shut up. And,...

Well, with all of Poppy’s cleverness, the wonder to me is, as I look back, that fatty was fooled. For he wasn’t a dumb-bell. Yet, to our good luck, he never caught on. And if ev...

Well, I’m pretty close to the end of my story now. And to sort of hurry things along, I’m not going to write down, word for word, what everybody in the house said and did in the...