The Mystery of the Flaming Footprints - M. V. Carey [24]
“Jupe! You’re not planning on going inside?” Bob’s voice came in a horrified whisper.
“I think not,” said Jupe. “It might lead to unnecessary unpleasantness. We can go round the house and look into the library window.”
“Okay,” said Bob. “Just so long as we stay outside. If anything goes wrong, we can run like crazy.”
Jupiter didn’t answer this. He led the way around past the dark kitchen to the lighted windows of the library. There was a narrow, paved path which made the going easy. The shrubbery that had once decorated the side of the house had long since withered away from neglect and lack of water.
The library windows, as Jupiter had pointed out, could have used a good cleaning.
The boys knelt and peered in over the sill and saw, mistily, the two strangers who had stopped at the salvage yard the day before. Two bunk beds had been set up in the huge room. Cans and paper plates and paper napkins were heaped helter-skelter on shelves which had once held books. There was a fire roaring away in the fireplace, and the younger man — the driver of the Cadillac — knelt in front of the flames and toasted a hot dog on a long piece of wire. The ageless, hairless man sat in a folding chair at a card table. He had the air of a man waiting in a restaurant for the waiter to serve his dinner.
Bob and Jupe watched the younger man turn the hot dog on the improvised spit.
Then the bald man made an impatient movement, got up, and walked away through the wide arch into a darkened room beyond the library. He was gone for some minutes, and when he returned the hot dog was ready. The younger man inserted it clumsily into a roll, put it on a paper plate, and placed it before the bald man.
Jupiter could hardly suppress a chuckle at the expression of the bald one as he confronted his hot dog. He had seen Aunt Mathilda look like that once when a Danish friend in Rocky Beach had served cold eels and scrambled eggs at a dinner party.
The boys backed away from the window and returned to the rear of the house.
Bob leaned on the Cadillac. “Now we know what they’re doing,” he said. “That’s the untidiest camp-out I ever saw.”
“There has to be more to it than that,” declared Jupiter. “No one would rent a mansion – however aged – so that they could sleep on bunks and toast hot dogs in the library. Where did that bald man go when he walked through the archway?”
“The living room’s on the ocean side of the house,” said Bob.
“And the terrace,” Jupiter reminded him. “Come on.”
Bob followed Jupiter to the corner of the house. The terrace adjoined the drive, and extended all the way across the front of the place. It was almost fifteen feet wide, made of smoothly poured cement and edged with a stone wall more than three feet high.
“There’s something set up there,” whispered Jupiter. “An instrument of some kind, on a tripod.”
“A telescope?” said Bob.
“Probably. Listen!”
A man’s voice came to them where they stood. Jupiter pressed himself close to the house, watching. The younger man came out of the house on to the moonlit terrace, crossed to the instrument on the tripod, looked into it, then called out something. He looked again and laughed, then made another remark. Jupiter frowned. The cadence of the speech was peculiar. There was almost a singsong quality to what the man said.
Then a second, deeper voice was heard. It was a voice which sounded immensely tired. The bald man stepped out on to the terrace, came to the tripod and bent to peer into it. He said a word or two, shrugged, and returned to the house. The younger man hurried after him, speaking rapidly and urgently.
“Not French,” said Jupiter when they had gone.
“Or German,” said Bob, who had had a year of that language.
“I wonder,” said Jupiter, “what Lapathian sounds like.”
“I wonder,” said Bob, “what they were looking at.”
“That, at least, we can find out,” said Jupiter. He stepped quickly and noiselessly from the drive on to the terrace and stole forward to the instrument on its tripod. As Bob had guessed, the thing