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These events would break the backbone of the camping season, high schools and grammar schools would presently beckon their reluctant conscripts back to town and city, until, in the pungent chill of autumn, old Uncle Jeb, alone among the boarded-up cabins, would smoke his pipe in solitude and get ready for the long winter. It was late on Thursday afternoon.
"Some one may have seen the little boarded-up door open Did you leave it open?" she asked, turning to Mrs. Collingwood. "I think I did. I was too hurried and nervous, when I came in, to think of it." "That's it, then. Some one has seen it open, and has stopped to inquire if everything is all right." She hurried away to the front door, and, after an effort, succeeded in pulling it open.
By means that were fair, or by means that were foul, I meant to win my way into that boarded-up attic and see for myself if the words hidden away in my vinaigrette were true. To do this openly would cause a scandal I was yet too much under my husband's influence to risk; while to do it secretly meant the obtaining of keys which I had every reason to believe he kept hidden about his person.
"Pardon me," began Joyce, always the spokesman, "but I'd like to ask a question or two about the old boarded-up house on Orchard Avenue." Now the agent was apparently not in the best of spirits that day. Business had been very dull, he had two children at home sick with measles, and he himself was in the first stage of a cold. "I don't know anything about it!" he mumbled crossly.
Joyce would exclaim. "And who would ever have thought of a story in that old, Boarded-up House. And us in the midst of it!" Cynthia's first question that afternoon, on the way home from high school, was: "What did you ask about pocket-money for? I'm down pretty low on my allowance, but I don't see what that's got to do with things." Joyce laughed.
When death means life there is no death, but the towns were still-born. There were harrowing scenes in the spring, when, like incense at funeral-rites, the smoky wood-piles smouldered on the pillaged, ransacked, and bespattered streets with their broken windows, boarded-up doors, and defaced walls, consuming carrion and enveloping the town in a stinking and stifling vapour.
Joyce's eyes were full of tears, as she gazed up at the proud, beautiful face above them. "Well, that's the end of the story, and that's the tragedy and mystery about this Boarded-up House. Oh! there's one other thing, Great-aunt Lucia says she thinks Mrs. Collingwood is still alive, a very old lady, living down in the little old South Carolina town of Chesterton.
Getting into the Boarded-up House this time was accompanied by less difficulty than the first. Before entering, Cynthia thoroughly dusted the window-ledge and as far about it as she could reach, with the result that there was less, if any, damage to their clothes. Armed as they were with plenty of candles and matches, there were no shudders either, or fears of the unknown and the dark.
Another table a little bigger occupied the middle of the room; in one corner the boarded-up stairs leading to the higher floors bulked largely.
"I should like to have been able to take the park of the next place, La Sarthe Chase, too that impassable haw-haw and the boarded-up gate irritate me. The boards have been put since I came to look over everything last autumn.
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