“What do you expect to find tonight?” questioned Bob.
“Most certainly the two strangers who stopped at the salvage yard,” said Jupiter. “One of them, we assume, is Mr Demetrieff of the Lapathian Board of Trade. The other could be almost anyone. It will be interesting to see how they are amusing themselves at Hilltop House.”
Jupiter began to walk, and Bob stepped briskly along beside him. The moon edged up beyond the hills, silvering the road and throwing deep black shadows beside the boys. There was little conversation until the hulking, dark mass of Hilltop House came into sight ahead and to their left. The upper storeys of the place were dark, but a light gleamed faintly in one of the lower rooms.
“I explored that house once,” said Bob. “I think that light is in what used to be the library.”
“Windows could use a cleaning,” murmured Jupiter, “and that does not look like an electric lamp.”
“No. More like a lantern or a paraffin lamp. Well, give them a chance. They just moved in yesterday.”
A little stream bed ran down the hill from the trail and curved past Hilltop House. It was summer-dry now, and the boys stepped into it silently, feeling step by step for any loose pebbles which might slide and send them tumbling. They almost crawled for the last fifty feet before the bed turned and ran beside the retaining wall that held the driveway of Hilltop House firm.
Jupiter pulled himself up over the retaining wall and on to a paved apron at the rear of the house. The big Cadillac stood outside a triple garage. Jupiter walked once around the car, saw that it was empty, and decided to ignore it.
The windows that looked out on to the rear area were black. There was a door with a pane of glass set into the upper half, and it was locked. “Kitchen,” decided Jupiter.
“The servants’ quarters are upstairs,” said Bob.
“They have hardly had time to acquire servants,” said Jupiter. “I suggest we proceed directly to the library.”
“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 was a telescope. Jupiter bent, careful not to touch the instrument, and looked through the lens.
He saw the back windows of The Potter’s house. The bedrooms were brightly lighted, and he could clearly see Pete sitting on a bed, talking with young Tom Dobson. There was a checker board between the two boys. Tom jumped one of Pete’s men, and Pete made a wry face and pondered his next move. Mrs Dobson came into the room carrying a tray on which there were three cups. Cocoa, Jupiter assumed.
Jupiter stepped away from the telescope and returned to the driveway. “We now know how they are amusing themselves,” he told Bob. “They are spying on The Potter’s house.”
“About what you expected,” said Bob. “Let’s get out of here, Jupe. Those two give me the willies.”
“Yes. And there is nothing more to be learned at the moment,” said Jupiter Jones.
The boys passed the Cadillac and headed for the retaining wall to let themselves down again into the dry steam bed.
“It’s closer here, I think,” said Bob, cutting across an open patch of ground which might once have been a kitchen garden.
And with that, Bob suddenly shouted, threw up his arms, and dropped out of sight.
10
Caught!
“BOB, are you hurt?”
Jupiter knelt beside the hole which had appeared in the earth. Below, in what seemed to be some sort of cellar, Jupe could barely see Bob getting to his knees.
“Blast!” said Bob.
“Are you hurt?”
Bob stood up and hunched his shoulders. “No, I don’t think so.”
Jupiter stretched full length on the ground and reached one hand towards Bob. “Here!” he said.
Bob grasped the hand, put one foot on a shelf and tried to climb out of the hole. Wood splintered under his feet and he fell back, almost taking Jupe with him.
“Blast!” he said again, and then he froze, caught by the sudden beam of a very powerful torch.
“Do not move!” said the younger of the two tenants of Hilltop House.
Jupiter did not move, and Bob remained where he was, sitting on bare earth at the bottom of the hole, staring up past rotted, splintered planks.
“Exactly what are you doing here?” demanded the younger resident of Hilltop House.
Only Jupiter Jones could manage an air of superiority while stretched full-length on the ground. “At this precise moment,” he said, “I was endeavouring to get my friend out of this hole. Please assist me, so that we can ascertain as quickly as possible whether he is injured.”