"Oh-h-h!" Miss Eyester gasped faintly.
"Perhaps he has merely locked the door and he is outside," Mr. Stott suggested.
"I"ll go down and see if I can notice his legs stickin" out of the crick anywhere," said Mr. Hicks, briskly.
"It is very curious--very strange indeed," they declared solemnly, though they all continued eating spare-ribs--a favourite dish with The Happy Family.
The cook, returning, said in a tone that had a note of disappointment.
"He ain"t drowned."
"Is his horse in the corral?" asked Wallie.
Mr. Hicks took observations from the doorway and reported that it was, which deepened the mystery.
Since no human being, unless he was drugged or dead, could sleep through the cook"s battering with the frying-pan, Wallie himself grew anxious.
He recalled Pinkey"s gloom of the evening before he had gone to Prouty.
"I wisht I"d died when I was little," he remembered his saying.
Also Pinkey"s moroseness of the morning and the ferocity of his expression took on special significance in the light of his strange absence. Instinctively Wallie looked at Miss Eyester. That young lady was watching him closely and saw his gravity. Unexpectedly she burst into tears so explosively that Mrs. Budlong moved back the bread plate even as she tried to comfort her.
"I know something has happened! I _feel_ it! When Aunt Sallie choked on a fish-bone at Asbury Park I knew it before we got the wire. I"m sort of clairvoyant! Please excuse me!" Miss Eyester left the table, sobbing. It seemed heartless to go on eating when Pinkey, the sunshine of the ranch, as they suddenly realized, might be lying cold in death in the bunk-house, so they followed solemnly--all except Mrs. Henry Appel, who lingered to pick herself out another spare-rib, which she took with her in her fingers.
They proceeded in a body to the bunk-house, where Wallie applied his eye to the keyhole and found it had been stuffed with something. This confirmed his worst suspicions. n.o.body could doubt now but that something sinister had happened.
Mr. Penrose, who had been straining his eyes at the window, peering through a tiny s.p.a.ce between the towel and the window frame, declared he saw somebody moving. This, of course, was preposterous, for if alive Pinkey would have made a sound in response to their clamour, so n.o.body paid any attention to his a.s.sertion.
"We"ll have to burst the door in," said Mr. Stott in his masterful manner, but Wallie already had run for the axe for that purpose.
Mrs. Appel, alternately gnawing her bone and crying softly, begged them not to let her see him if he did not look natural, while Miss Eyester leaned against the door-jamb in a fainting condition.
"Maybe I can bust it with my shoulder," said Mr. Hicks, throwing his weight against the door.
Immediately, as the lock showed signs of giving, a commotion, a shuffling, was heard, a sound as if a shoulder braced on the inside was resisting.
There was a second"s astonished silence and then a chorus of voices demanded:
"Let us in! Pinkey! What _is_ the matter?"
The answer was an inarticulate, gurgling sound that was blood-curdling.
"He"s cut his wind-pipe and all he can do is gaggle!" cried Mr. Hicks, excitedly, and made a frenzied attack on the door that strained the lock to the utmost.
If the noise he made was any criterion it was judged that Pinkey"s head must be nearly severed from his body--which made the resistance he displayed all the more remarkable. He was a madman, of course--that was taken for granted--and the ladies were warned to places of safety lest he come out slashing right and left with a razor.
They ran and locked themselves in the kitchen, where they could look through the window--all except Miss Eyester, who declared dramatically that she had no further interest in life anyhow and wished to die by his hand, knowing herself responsible for what had happened.
Wallie, breathless from running, arrived with the axe, which he handed to Mr. Hicks, who called warningly as he swung it:
"Stand back, Pinkey!--I"m comin"!"
The door crashed and splintered, and when it opened, Mr. Hicks fell in with it.
He fell out again almost as quickly, for there was Pinkey with the glaring eyes of a wild man, his jaws open, and from his mouth there issued a strange white substance.
"He"s frothin"!" Mr. Hicks yelled shrilly. "He"s got hydrophoby! Look out for him everybody!"
"G-gg-ggg-ough!" gurgled Pinkey.
"Who bit you, feller?" the cook asked, soothingly.
"G-ggg-gg-ough!" was the agonized answer.
"We"ll have to throw and hog-tie him." Mr. Hicks looked around to see if there was a rope handy.
"Don"t let him snap at you," called Mr. Stott from a safe distance. "If it gets in your blood, you"re goners."
The cook who, as Pinkey advanced shaking his head and making vehement gestures, had retreated, was suddenly enlightened:
"That ain"t froth--it"s plaster o" Paris--I bet you! Wait till I get a stick and poke it!"
Pinkey nodded.
"That"s it!" Mr. Hicks cried, delightedly: "He"s takin" a cast of his gooms--I told him about it."
The look he received from Pinkey was murderous.
"How are we going to get it out?" Wallie asked in perplexity.
"It"s way bigger than his mouth," said Mr. Appel, and old Mr. Penrose suggested humorously: "You might push it down and make him swallow it."
"Maybe you could knock a little off at a time or chisel it," ventured Mr. Budlong. "It"s hard as a rock," feeling of it. "You"ll have to crack it."
"It"s like taking a hook out of a cat-fish," said the cook, facetiously.
"Say, can you open your mouth any wider?"
Pinkey made vehement signs that his mouth was stretched to the limit.
"It"s from ear to ear now, you might say," observed Mr. Budlong. "If you go to monkeying you"ll have the top of his head off."
"If I could just get my fist up in the roof somehow and then pry down on it." The size of Mr. Hicks" fist, however, made the suggestion impractical.
"I believe I can pick it off little by little with a hairpin or a pair of scissors or something." Miss Eyester spoke both confidently and sympathetically.
Pinkey nodded, his eyes full of grat.i.tude and suffering.
"Don"t laugh at him," she pleaded, as they now were howling uproariously. "Just leave us alone and I"ll manage it somehow."
It proved that Miss Eyester was not over-sanguine for, finally, with the aid of divers tools and implements, Pinkey was able to spit out the last particle of the plaster of Paris.