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Page 79
With his hair in disarray from the frantic combing of his fingers,
Kenny went down to find Joan. He read the will aloud to her,
controlling his voice with an effort.
"Don shall have the farm," said Joan. "I shouldn't know what to do
with it."
Kenny read the baffling clause at the end of the will again.
"'All the rest, residue and remainder of my wealth, wheresoever
situate, provided the executor can find it.'"
It seemed to him in his excitement that he could not tell her what he
thought--that he could not say it all with care and calm when his head
was whirling.
"Joan," he said gently, "you must tell me everything you remember about
your mother and your father and your uncle. And whether there was ever
money. Much money," he insisted, his vivid face imploring.
Joan shook her head sadly.
"There is so little I remember, Kenny," she said. "So very little.
There was never money. I do not remember my mother or my father.
Neither does Donald. We lived until I was eight with an old cousin,
Nellie Craig. She said that uncle was a miser who loved nothing but
his brandy. Then she died and we came here. We had to come. There
was no other place for us. I remember that Don's clothes and mine were
always ragged until I grew old enough to mend them. Then I found
mother's trunks in the garret. Later Don and I thought of the ferry
and had for the first time some money of our own."
Kenny looked crestfallen.
"And there is nothing more?" he said. "Think, Joan, think!"
"Nothing," said Joan. "Donald and I were afraid of Uncle. We never
dared to ask him questions. And he never spoke of my mother save to
sneer and curse the stage. What is it, Kenny? What are you thinking?"
"I think," said Kenny, making a colossal effort to speak with the calm
he could not feel, "that somewhere buried on the farm is a great deal
of money. I think it belonged to your mother and that it was left in
trust to your uncle for Donald and you--"
"Kenny!"
"I think," went on Kenny steadily, "that this singular clause in your
uncle's will was a miser's struggle between justice and his instinct
for hoarding and hiding. Money he had kept so long he hated to
relinquish. Yet he dared not keep it. And so he buried the money.
God knows how or where, and shunted the responsibility of its finding
upon me. If it was never found, as perhaps he hoped, he had still
fulfilled his trust and the dictates of his conscience in willing the
money back to you."
"But, Kenny, how could he bury it?"
"How often," reminded Kenny, "has Hughie in summer wheeled him out to
the orchard and left him there? How often has he wheeled himself
around the walk by the lilac bush? And he was clever and cunning.
Could he not, from time to time, hide the money in his bathrobe and
find some means of digging?"
Joan looked unconvinced.
"And where," she said, "would my mother, who earned her living on the
stage, get money? A great deal, I mean?"
"I--I don't know," said Kenny, wiping the sweat from his forehead. "I
wish I did. Sometime or other, Joan, there has been Craig money and a
lot of it. This old house is the house of an aristocrat with money
enough to gratify expensive whims. Either the money was willed to her
or with the beauty she must have had, she married it. They are the
things you and I must find out somehow. Of one thing I am absolutely
convinced. There is money. It did not belong to your uncle. It is
hidden somewhere on the farm."
He told her of the fairy mill, of the old man's gloating pride in the
word miser, of All Souls' Eve and Adam Craig's hints about the apple
tree and the lilac bush.
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