Part 2

"But yes it is necessary, Jule!" she cried now. "Oh, yes, please, Uncle Pin! I haven't had a ride in the Machine since last September!"

"By all means, then, by all means," said Mr. Payton, rising. "I'll just go and fetch my ulster; you two can come along with me, and then we'll be off. Do you wish to come, Min?"

"No thank you, Pin. I do not care to tear about the countryside."

(The Franklin's maximum speed was twenty miles an hour.)

They said good-by to Mrs. Cheever and Tarrigo, and stepped outdoors. Already, because of the clouded sky the day was darkening. The houses by the path looked gaunt and lonely; wind sounded in their gaping halls and porches, so that they reminded one of a collection of gigantic blackened sea shells. It was spooky, it really was, and Portia, last in single file, kept so close to Julian that she stepped the shoe off his heel.

"Ow," Julian said. "What's the matter? Scared?"

"A little bit," Portia admitted.

"Well, you can go ahead of me, then, if you want," Julian offered magnanimously, and Portia was glad to accept.

Mr. Payton's house did not look spooky. Though it was shabby, it was neatly mended here and there, and a tidy doormat lay on the front step. The striped cat, Fatly, was sitting in a window, looking out, and Portia, of course, had to go in and pay her respects to him. These he acknowledged gracefully by turning on his purr.

Mr. Payton draped himself in his ulster, returned the dashing hat to his head, and threw open the door.

"Avaunt, then, Philosophers," he said. (This was a name he often called them, since the club they maintained in the Tuckertowns' old attic was known officially as the Philosophers' Club.)

Outside in the gathering twilight, the Machine stood waiting proudly. Portia, from habit, climbed into the back seat, while Mr. Payton and Julian took turns winding the crank. The Machine was sometimes stubborn about starting, but today it decided to be kind, and after a cough and a snort, the motor came to life and the whole ancient automobile began shuddering and syncopating noisily. Mr. Payton and Julian leaped into the front seat, Mr. Payton gave a loud trumpet blast on the horn because he felt like it, and off they went.

Portia, jouncing about on the slippery back seat, was perfectly happy: riding high, with the wind snapping through her hair, and all the world going by in a jiggle. Nobody talked because in order to talk above the motor you had to yell, and nobody felt like yelling.

All too soon they were turning in at the Jarmans' drive and all too soon standing on the Jarmans' doorstep waving good-by as the old Machine, a figure of skin and bones, went dancing spryly off toward Gone-Away.

* * * * *

"You know what I wish, Mother?" Portia said, later that evening. "I just wish we could stay here all through the spring till summertime, and never have to go back to the city or to school until the fall."

"Darling, it won't be for very long," her mother told her. "Only a few weeks, really. And we still have nine days here ahead of us, remember."

"I know," Portia said. She appreciated her mother's talent for making things look better and gave her a hug to show it.

Before she went to bed that night, Portia opened the window wide. Cold damp air came in, bringing a smell of old soaked leaves, of soaked earth. There was a sound of wind in branches, and another sound, too: the spangled, silver-noted calling of the peepers, the first sweet jingling bell notes of the spring.

3

_The House_

The first one up, next morning, was Foster Blake. He had slept industriously for eleven hours and woke up all of a piece without any lingering or yawning.

In his blue-striped pajamas he swung himself down from the top deck of the double-decker bed--he refused to sleep in the lower one--went over to the door and listened. Not a sound. It must be very early, he thought. His hair from having been slept on hard was all pressed up in a one-sided crest, and his cheek on that side was redder than the other. Opening the door, he leaned out into the hall and listened some more. All he could hear was the thump, thump of a dog scratching.

Foster liked to be the first one up. It made him feel he knew something about the day that no one else did. He got dressed quickly and quietly, all except his shoes, and ignoring the thought of his toothbrush, tiptoed along the hall and down the stairs. Katy and Othello got up to greet him, snuffling quietly and wagging. They were warm from their sleep.

"Come on, you guys, I'll let you out," Foster told them in a loud whisper. He unlocked the front door and opened it. The smell of a cold morning came in; Katy and Othello raced out and Thistle entered, looking irritated.

The dogs went tearing about the lawn. Foster watched them for a minute, but it was chilly; his breathing made smoke in the air. He closed the door and tiptoed to the kitchen; he had decided to have a little practice breakfast before his real breakfast.

The kitchen was clean and quiet; the clock ticked. Thistle, drinking from his water dish, made a little slipping sound. Foster knew where everything was: the box of corn flakes, the brown sugar, and the milk. He had made a satisfactory arrangement of these things in a bowl and was eating his way through it when something darkened the window above the kitchen table. Looking up, Foster dropped his spoon with a splatter, and the sound that came out of him was a squeak. What he saw in the window was the face of a monster: green, wrinkled, with dreadful fangs and a ghastly scowl! For an instant he stared in perfect horror.

"Hi, Foss," called the monster in a friendly voice.

Only then did Foster notice the pink and innocent protruding ears and the upstanding cowlick of his good friend David Gayson.

"Hi," he called back, chagrined at having been so taken in. He went to the kitchen door, unlocked and opened it. Davey came up the back steps wearing his own face. The rubber mask dangled under his chin like a hideous bib.

"Who did you think you were scaring?" Foster greeted him pleasantly.

"You, man," said Davey. "I saw you drop the spoon and slop the milk all over. I scared _you_. How've you been?"

"O.K. You didn't scare me. You just surprised me." Curiosity got the better of Foster. "But how did you get up so high? You're not tall enough to reach the window."

"There's a good old garbage pail. Two good old garbage pails. I climbed up on one, _quiet_ as anything--"

"How'd you know I was in here?"

"I saw you let the dogs out when I was coming, and I thought I'd scare you. I knew you'd probably be in the kitchen. Could I have some corn flakes, too? No one's up at my house."

"No one's up here, either. Sure," Foster said, and went to find another bowl and spoon.

They sat eating and chattering, happy to resume their friendship. From time to time Davey would extract from his pocket some object he had brought to show Foster; first it was a compass, then a cap-pistol, then a small flashlight.

"Christmas stuff," he said. "Stocking stuff."

Next he brought out a pillbox with an elastic band around it. This he opened with tender care; inside, on a nest of cotton, lay his two front teeth.

"Those are worth fifty cents," he told Foster. "A quarter apiece, man! They're my first ones; that's why. I'll only get a dime for the others. You lost any yet?"

Foster felt humiliated by his teeth.

"Not exactly _lost_ them," he admitted. "But they're so loose, I can kind of wave them with my tongue."

"I got new ones coming in already," Davey boasted, stretching his mouth so Foster could have the experience of viewing two tiny scallopings of white just showing at the gum.

Foster felt betrayed not only by his teeth but also by his pockets: they were entirely empty because he had put on the newly laundered jeans his mother had laid out for him. By evening, though, he knew those pockets would have tenants.

The next things Davey produced were a sort of lariat made of rubber bands, a long chain made of paper clips, a penny that had been run over by a train, a paper puncher, and last of all, carefully folded, a drawing, which he spread out on the table. It was large and brightly colored. "How's that for a moon rocket!" demanded Davey with pride. "I drew it in school."

"Wow," Foster said politely. Actually he did not think much of it and was certain he had often drawn better ones himself. But he had not seen his friend in a long time.

There began to be sounds of people stirring overhead. The two boys looked up.

"Soon it will be breakfast," Foster said. "And after breakfast, you know what? We're going to go and see the house we bought. We bought a house, Dave, you know that? It's the old one you saw with the suit of armor in it!"

"Oh, I know _that_," Davey said. "Your aunt told me. She told me about a hundred years ago already."

So far it had definitely been Davey's morning.

* * * * *

The breakfast, which Davey was quite easily persuaded to share and which both little boys ate with appetites that had hardly been dimmed by the practice breakfast, was magnificent: fresh orange juice, hot buckwheat cakes with butter and apple jelly, and bacon. Aunt Hilda's breakfasts were famous: varied and original, not just an ordinary plodding through of cereal and eggs and toast.

Everyone ate a lot. Mr. Blake groaned. "Great Scott, Hilda, a few more breakfasts like this and I'll begin to waddle!"

"Never mind, Paul," Uncle Jake told him. "We need our strength; we have men's work cut out for us. The Lord knows how long it will take to get that back door open. We never did get the front one open, if you recall."

"Hurry, everyone, to work, to work!" Aunt Hilda cried. "As soon as the chores are done, we'll all set out for the Villa Caprice!"

"We _must_ get a new name for that house," said Mrs. Blake.

Upstairs, Portia made her bed with lightning speed and then, perched precariously on the ladder of the double-decker, made Foster's still more swiftly. "It looks like a relief map," she admitted to Julian, who had come looking for her. "All mountain ranges."

"The kid won't know the difference," Julian assured her. "You know perfectly well he'd sleep like a log if the mattress was stuffed with potatoes. Come on, Porsh; I want to show you how my plant eats hamburger."

Portia leaped down with a thud.

"How your what eats _what_?" she demanded, unable to believe her ears.

"My plant. It's a Venus's-flytrap. I sent away for it. It eats flies when it can get them, but there aren't any in winter, so I feed it little crumbs of hamburger."

Julian's room was a sight to behold: a museum of sorts, for Julian was a collector. He collected everything from stones to snakeskins; from fossils to butterflies; from cocoons to birds' nests. The walls were encrusted with his findings; the shelves were burdened with them. It was a fascinating place, but no one could have called it tidy.

On the window sill, between a terrarium and a tank containing a live crawfish, was the curious plant. Each of its broad leaves was tipped with a pair of flat rosy discs like a pair of queer little clam shells, fringed with crimson whiskers.

"Now watch this," Julian said. He lifted a speck of hamburger from the saucer he held and dropped it expertly into the center of a pair of gaping shells, which closed instantly, locking the fringes together.

"Oh, let me feed one, Jule, please!" Portia begged.

There was only time for one, because now Uncle Jake was calling them and they were eager to go. It took a while to get started since Foster and Davey had chosen this moment to disappear, and no one thought of looking in the cellar. Finally the repeated shouting of their own names reached the boys' attention and brought them clattering up the wooden stairs. Next Uncle Jake couldn't find the car keys, and _those_ had to be hunted for. In the end they turned up, for a reason no one could fathom, on the top shelf of the medicine cabinet. Then the telephone rang and it was a lady who wanted to talk (and talk and talk) to Aunt Hilda. But at last, at last, they were on their way, all eight of them, because of course Davey went, too.

They drove as far as Gone-Away, where they stopped for a moment to chat with Mrs. Cheever and Mr. Payton; then they went the rest of the way on foot, for the road leading to Mrs. Brace-Gideon's old driveway had long been taken over by the woods.

The day, no better than the day before, was gray and chill, and as they passed between the large stone gateposts of the drive, it was suddenly very quiet. There was no wind, and the trees, draped in great snarled capes of honeysuckle, seemed to have muffled out the noises of the world. Silence had fallen on the party, as well. It was too much for Foster. He suddenly felt called upon to give his ear-splitting rendition of an Indian war whoop. Davey attempted to outdo him; the noise startled two crows out of a tree and sent them squawking into the air. The spell of silence was shattered, and everyone began to talk again.

All of them were wearing old clothes, because, as Aunt Hilda said, "There's no sense in dressing up to cope with fifty years of dust."

Uncle Jake was carrying a toolbox. Mr. Blake was carrying a small stepladder and a crowbar. Julian had two buckets and a mop, while the women and Portia were armed with brooms, brushes, and dustcloths and had their heads tied up in bandannas.

"We look like some higgledy-piggledy left-over army," Portia said.

Walking briskly, they came to a turn in the drive, the trees thinned out, and there before them stood the Villa Caprice.

There it stood among its dead and brambled lawns, with all its windows boarded up and a big, tough, tangled vine, leafless now, tied round and round the battlements, the turrets, and the gables like a giant's wrapping twine. Beyond the house the ragged hedges looked black, and the queer tree that was called a monkey-puzzle tree looked black, too, and bristling. The whole scene was shabby and forbidding.

"Oh, _dear_!" wailed Mrs. Blake. "I didn't remember it as being quite so--quite so--"

"Bleak," Mr. Blake supplied. "And this is what we called a bargain! We must have been out of our minds!"

Aunt Hilda, who wanted to be comforting, said: "You know, I think when you've got rid of that ghastly porch and ripped the boards off the windows, you'll feel very different about it."

But though she tried, she didn't really sound convinced, and Uncle Jake was seen to shake his head.

"The place looks like a training school for witches," Mr. Blake remarked in utmost gloom.

The children, however, refused to be disappointed and went running toward the house with briers snatching at their jeans and Julian clattering more than usual because of the buckets.

"I think it's suave," he assured Portia, as he jolted along beside her. "All it needs is fixing up. Heck, it hasn't been fixed _up_ in fifty years! What do they expect?"

"I don't know," Portia said, feeling grateful to her cousin and indignant with her other relatives. "I think it's a perfectly wonderful house!"

"So do I," agreed Foster, dog-trotting behind them, slightly out of breath. "It's so nice and fancy; that's what I like about it. It's got so much stuff. I think it's suave."

Portia turned to beam at him. "And you know what you are? You're a wonderful _boy_," she told him.

"Big deal," Foster said, embarrassed.

They slowed down, for they were near the house. It towered above them, very large and quiet, very old. The great porch that ran halfway around it was supported by pillars set with cobblestones that reminded one of monstrous chunks of peanut brittle. The unpruned vine hung down in portieres from the eaves of the porch, and on its rotting floor were drifts of leaves. It was a dark, unfriendly thing, and even Portia thought she would not miss it when they took it away.

"But what will happen to the owls that used to nest here?" she asked.

"Oh, they'll find another site," Julian said. "If there's one thing you don't have to worry about, it's owls."

The slow grownups caught up with them at last, armed with their peaceable weapons.

"We'll try the back door first," Mr. Blake announced. "The front one might as well be turned to stone. We may have to blast!"

"Why can't we just climb in the window, the way we did last year?" Foster wanted to know. He would have preferred this course.

"It's boarded up again, too, remember? And anyway we can't just go flitting in and out of odd openings all the time like--like swallows," his father said. "We need a door. Like people."

He led the way, and they all trooped around one corner, then another, to the back stoop, with its boarded-up back door.

"Nailed fast, of course, and the nails are rusted," Uncle Jake said. "Well, let's have a go at it."

It took a while. Foster and Davey grew bored and began to roughhouse, tumbling on the dead grass. The women poked about the shrubbery trying to identify the bushes and decide which ones were still alive. Portia sat on one of the buckets, turned upside down, watching and whistling between her teeth; trying to, anyway; her tooth braces made it nearly impossible.

Her father and uncle and cousin worked and worked at the barricade, and finally, as they pried them loose with a crowbar, the nailed boards were wrenched free, with loud, protesting snarls.

The door they had hidden all these years was painted dark green; just an old ordinary door with a brown china doorknob, but Portia jumped up to have a look at it, and everyone else came running.

Uncle Jake waggled the knob uselessly and gave the door a kick or two.

"Locked, of course," he said. "But not bolted inside, I trust. Even Mrs. Brace-Gideon couldn't depart from a house leaving every door bolted _inside_."

"Maybe she departed from a window the way we did," Foster suggested, but no one listened to him.

Uncle Jake brought a jumble of keys from his pocket.

"From Gone-Away: old keys from other old locks," he explained. "Uncle Pin's idea. He thought that one might fit."

One did, too. Almost the very first one. It turned nicely in the keyhole, and they could hear the lock give way, but the green door, set in its ways after half a century asleep, absolutely refused to budge.

Mr. Blake sighed heavily.

"You know, you don't just _buy_ this house," he said. "No. You have to go to war with it, you have to conquer it! All right, Jake, let's go."

The two big men put their shoulders to the door and gave a tremendous shove, as Mr. Blake turned the knob. The first try didn't work, nor did the second, but on the third the door burst open, and they almost fell in. The others crowded close on their heels, Foster and Davey burrowing under arms and elbows like a pair of beagles.

A cloud of dust fumed up from the floor. As it cleared, they found themselves coughing and sneezing in a dim passageway.

"I suppose this--" Mrs. Blake was starting to say when all at once Uncle Jake, who was ahead, gave a mighty yell and a leap backward.

"Great Scott!" shouted Mr. Blake at the same instant, and Foster, whimpering, turned to scramble for his mother.

"There's somebody there! A ghost, a ghost!"

Most of them, shocked, had caught a glimpse of it: a figure standing in the passage, standing very still, as though it had been waiting for them.

4

_The Victors_

"Well, this is ridiculous; there can't possibly be anybody there," Uncle Jake said, looking both annoyed and sheepish.

"We must be suffering from battle fatigue," Mr. Blake agreed. "Let's solve this thing right now!" And he whipped out a flashlight.

The two men strode purposefully through the doorway. Julian followed, looking rather more tentative than purposeful.

"Oh, Paul, be careful," quavered Mrs. Blake, and Aunt Hilda, who was her sister, quavered: "Jake, don't do anything rash!"

But they had hardly time to say the words before they heard a boom of laughter. Uncle Jake stuck his head out.

"Come in, all of you, and see the watchdog Mrs. Brace-Gideon left to guard the door she couldn't bolt!"

Somehow or other Portia managed to be first, and she couldn't help gasping at the sight before her: the appalling figure dressed in black. It stood there glaring at her, with eyes that had a reddish shine, and in its black-gloved hands it held a placard printed with the words: KEEP OUT!

Of course the thing wasn't real, Portia realized, just some sort of rigged-up trick, but it wasn't very friendly, either, and she was thankful she had not come upon it by herself.

"Heavens, I'm glad I didn't run into this character when I was alone!" her mother said, echoing her thoughts.

On closer inspection the fearsome creature turned out to be built on a dressmaker's dummy.

"Modeled along the noble lines of Mrs. B.-G. herself," Uncle Jake surmised, and gave the thing a friendly spank.

It was dressed in a man's cape-sleeved long black overcoat, riddled with moth holes and furred with dust. Its head was a stuffed stocking top on which a gruesome face had been devised: eyes made of red-glass buttons behind a pair of pinned-on spectacles; a guardsman's mustache cut out of felt; and a dreadful mouth in which white beads were stitched to look like teeth. On its head it wore a Tyrolean fedora tipped a bit to one side. This and the mustache gave it an aristocratic, though shabby, appearance.

"Baron Bloodshed fallen on hard times," Mr. Blake observed.

(Always after that they called the creature Baron Bloodshed, and they were so delighted with him that later, instead of throwing him away, they moth-proofed him and put him in the attic, where he went on scaring people for years, since they kept forgetting he was there.)

"Look, he's even got feet," Foster said; and sure enough, peeping out beneath the long overcoat, there was a pair of dried-up button boots. Foster picked one up to have a look but dropped it when he saw the mouse's nest inside.

"Yikes! I don't think they're living in it, though."

Portia dipped a cautious hand into one of Baron Bloodshed's pockets and was rewarded by finding a small rusted buttonhook. She dipped into another and found an Indian-head penny, dated 1883, which she decided to keep for luck, kindly offering the buttonhook to Foster.

"All right; I don't know what it's for, though," Foster said. "But come _on_; everybody's gone ahead."

Training their flashlights forward, they started after the others: through a dark laundry, thronged with tubs and laced with clotheslines overhead; through the dark kitchen with its dimmed old pots and pans hanging from hooks and its big rusted range under an iron canopy. Portia noted the old-fashioned coffee grinder fastened to the wall, the name of the stove, which was "The Marchioness," a tattered calendar for the year 1905. Foster noted a small window into the pantry, just the right size for him to go in and out by quietly and conveniently. Then they pushed open the screechy swinging door and went into the dining room, moving through it rather quickly, for in the darkness it looked gloomy, furnished heavily as it was with carved oak and having walls that were cordially adorned with crossed swords, crossed halberds, crossed battle-axes, and crossed spears. Foster thought that he might enjoy these; but later. Not now.

They followed the sound of voices through the front hall, where on the newel post of the broad stairway a bronze lady four feet tall stood on one tiptoe foot, flourishing a gas lamp over her head. And then they turned left into the large, elaborate room that Mrs. Brace-Gideon had always called her "drawing room."

Everyone was there, twinkling about with flashlights.