“Yes, Terence. Hunt up Rachel, the maid, and find out all she knows. Use your phenomenal powers of enchantment and make her come across.”
“’Tis the same as done, sir!” declared the boy, and he departed at once in search of Rachel.
He sauntered out of the north door and took a roundabout way to the kitchen quarters.
Finally he found the cook, and putting on his best and most endearing little boy effects, he appealed for something to eat.
“Not but what I’m well treated at the table,” he said, “but, you know what boys are.”
“I do that,” and the good-natured woman furnished him with liberal pieces of pie and cake.
“Great,” said Fibsy, eating the last crumb as he guilefully complimented her culinary skill, “and now I’ve got to find a person name o’ Rachel. Where might she be?”
“She might be ’most anywhere, but she isn’t anywhere,” was the cryptic reply.
“Well, she’s plain disappeared, if you know what that means.”
“Vamoosed? Skipped? Faded? Slid? Oozed out?”
“Yes; all those. Anyway, she isn’t on the place.”
“Why, I saw her last about two hours ago. Then when Mrs. Wheeler wanted her she wasn’t to be found.”
“Just so. And as you are part and parcel of that detective layout that’s infestin’ the house an’ grounds, I wish you’d find the hussy.”
“Why, why, what langwitch! Why call her names?”
“She’s a caution! Get along now, and if you can’t find her, at least you can quit botherin’ me.”
“All right. But tell me this, before we part. Did she confide to your willin’ ears anything about the murder?”
“Uncanny you are, lad! How’d you guess it?”
“I’m a limb of Satan. What did she tell you? and when?”
“Only this morning; early, before she flew off.”
“Couldn’t very well have told you after she started.”
“No impidence now. Well, she told me that the night of the murder, as she ran from here to the garage, she saw on the south veranda a man with a bugle pipe!”
“I dunno. But she told it like gospel truth.”
“Said she saw a man—a live man, no phantom foolishness, on the south veranda, and he carried a bugle.”
“No; just carried it like. But she says he musta been the murderer, and by the same token it’s the man I saw!”
“As I told your master, I saw him, but not plain, as I ran along to the fire. Rachel, now, she saw him plain, so he musta been there. Well, belike, he was the murderer and that sets my people free.”