"Do you care if we try to find one?" asked Sahwah eagerly. "I just feel it in my bones that there is one somewhere."

"Search all you like," replied Nyoda, with an amused laugh.

"O goody!" exclaimed Sahwah. "Let's begin right away."

She rose from the table and the rest followed, much taken up with this new quest, and the search began immediately. Upstairs and downstairs they tapped, peered, pried and investigated, but without success. One by one they abandoned the quest and drifted into the library where Nyoda and Sherry and Sylvia sat in a close group before the fire; Sherry smoking, Nyoda reading aloud, and Sylvia watching the images in the fire. Sahwah and the captain were the last to give up, but finally they, too, drifted in and joined the ranks of the unsuccessful hunters.

Nyoda paused in her reading and looked up with a smile as Sahwah and the captain came in.

"What have you to report, my darling scouts?" she asked gravely.

"Nothing," replied the captain, rather sheepishly.

Sahwah rubbed her fingers tenderly. "There are _miles_ of oak paneling in this house," she remarked wearily, "and I've rapped on every inch of it with my knuckles, until they're just _pulp_, but not one of those panels sounded hollow."

"Poor child!" said Nyoda sympathetically.

"You should have done the way the captain did," said Slim. "He used his head to knock with instead of his knuckles; it's harder."

A scuffle seemed imminent, and was only averted by Sahwah's next remark.

"Nyoda," she asked, "where does that door at the head of the stairs lead to, the one that is locked? It was locked last summer when we were here, too."

"That," replied Nyoda, "is the room Uncle Jasper used as his study. I've been using it as a sort of store room for furniture. There were a number of pieces in the house that didn't quite fit in with the rest of the furniture and I set them in there until I could make up my mind what to do with them. I didn't want to dispose of them without consulting Sherry, and as he has been away from home ever since we have lived here until just now, we have never had time to go over the stuff together. As the room looks cluttered with those odd pieces in there I have kept it locked."

"Your uncle's study!" exclaimed Sahwah. "Oh, I wonder if there wouldn't be a concealed door in there! It seems such a likely place. Would you care _very_ much if we went and looked there?"

Nyoda laughed at Sahwah's eagerness in her quest. "You're a true Winnebago," she said fondly. "Never leave a stone unturned when you're looking for anything. I might as well say yes now as later, because I know you will never rest until you have investigated that room. You're worse than Bluebeard's wife. I have no objections to your going in if you'll excuse the disorderly look of the place and the dust that has undoubtedly collected by this time. I'll get you the key."

With the prospect of a fresh field for investigation the others revived their interest in the search and followed Nyoda eagerly as she led the way upstairs and unlocked the closed door at the head. A faint, musty odor greeted their nostrils, the close atmosphere of a room which has been shut up, although the moonlight flooding the place through the long windows gave it an almost airy appearance. Nyoda found the electric light b.u.t.ton and presently the room was brilliantly lighted from the chandelier. The Winnebagos trooped in and looked curiously about them at the queer old desks and tables and cabinets that stood about. Sahwah's attention was immediately drawn to the window at the far end of the room.

She knew it was a window because it was framed in a mahogany cas.e.m.e.nt like the other windows in the house, but instead of a pane of gla.s.s there was a dark, opaque s.p.a.ce inside the cas.e.m.e.nt. Sahwah ran over to it at once, and a little exclamation of astonishment escaped her as she examined it. On the inside of the gla.s.s-if there was a pane of gla.s.s there-was a heavy black iron shutter fastened to the cas.e.m.e.nt with great screws.

"What did you put up this shutter for, Nyoda?" asked Sahwah wonderingly.

The others all came crowding over then to exclaim over the iron shutter.

"I didn't put it up," replied Nyoda. "It was there when I came here."

"But what's it for?" persisted Sahwah. "Is the window behind it broken?"

"No, it doesn't seem to be," replied Nyoda. "I looked at it from the outside."

"Then what can it be for?" repeated Sahwah.

"I don't know, I can't imagine," replied Nyoda. A note of wonder was creeping into her voice. "To tell the truth," she said, "I never thought anything about it. I noticed that there was an iron shutter over that window when we first came here, but I was too much taken up with Sherry's going away then even to wonder about it. The room has been closed up ever since and I had forgotten all about it. It _does_ seem a queer thing, now that you call my attention to it. But Uncle Jasper did so many eccentric things, I'm not surprised at anything he might have done. We'll take the shutter off in the morning and see if we can discover any reason for having it there.

"Now, aren't you going to hunt for the secret pa.s.sage after I've opened the door for you?" she said quizzically. "There's still an hour or so before bedtime; long enough for all of you to complete the destruction of your knuckles."

Again the house resounded with the tapping of knuckles against hardwood paneling, until it sounded as though an army of giant woodp.e.c.k.e.rs were at work, but the eager searchers continued to bruise their long suffering knuckles in vain. The paneling in Uncle Jasper's study was as solid as the Great Wall of China.

CHAPTER IV AN INTERVIEW WITH HERCULES

Among the furniture stored in the study was one piece which Nyoda had pounced upon with an exclamation of joy the night before when she opened the room to please the Winnebagos. That was an invalid's wheel chair.

"Just the thing for Sylvia!" she exclaimed delightedly. "She can get around the house by herself in this. It's a good thing you got curious about this room, Sahwah dear; I'm afraid I wouldn't have thought of opening it until spring. I remember now, Uncle Jasper had a paralytic stroke some months before he died which left him lame, and he went about in a wheel chair during his last days. This certainly comes in handy now."

The morning after Sahwah had discovered the iron shutter Sylvia was set in the wheel chair and rolled into the study, and the rest came flocking up to watch Sherry and the boys remove the shutter. It was no easy job, taking that shutter off, for the screws had rusted in so that it was almost impossible to turn them. Nyoda gave an exclamation of dismay at the holes left in the mahogany cas.e.m.e.nt. The Winnebagos were too much absorbed in the window which was revealed by the removal of the shutter to pay any attention to the damaged cas.e.m.e.nt. Unlike the other windows in the room, which were of clear gla.s.s, this one was composed of tiny leaded panes in colors. It was so dirty on the outside that it was impossible to see what it really was like. Sahwah hastened out and got cleaning rags and washed it inside and out, standing on the roof of the side porch to get at it on the outside, because it did not open. When it was clean, and the bright sun shone through it, the beauty of the window struck them dumb.

The leaded panes were wrought into a design of climbing roses, growing over a little arched gateway, the rich red and green tints of the flowers and leaves glowing splendid in the mellow light that streamed through it.

After a moment of breathless silence the Winnebagos found their voices and broke into admiring cries. Hinpoha promptly went into raptures.

"Why, you can almost _smell_ those roses, they're so natural! Oh, the darling archway! Did you ever see anything so beautiful? Don't you just _long_ to go through it? O why did your uncle ever have that horrible old shutter put over it?"

"Maybe he was afraid it would get broken," suggested Gladys.

"But why would he put the shutter on the inside?" asked Sahwah shrewdly.

"There would be more danger of the window's getting broken from the outside than from the inside, I should think."

"There wouldn't be with Slim around," said the captain, and prudently barricaded himself behind a bookcase in the corner. Slim gave him a withering glance, but did not deign to follow him and open an attack. He could not have squeezed in behind the bookcase, so he ignored the thrust.

"I wonder why he didn't put shutters on the other windows also," said Katherine.

"Mercy, I'm glad he didn't!" said Nyoda with a shiver, eyeing the ugly screw holes in the smooth mahogany cas.e.m.e.nt with housewifely horror at such marring of beauty. "One set of holes like that is enough. Isn't it just like a man, though, to put screws into that woodwork! It's time a woman owned this house. A few more generations of eccentric bachelors and the place would be ruined."

"But," said Sahwah musingly, "didn't you tell us once that this house was the pride of your uncle's heart, and he never would let any children in for fear they would scratch the floors and furniture?"

"That's so, too," replied Nyoda. "Uncle Jasper was so fond of this house that it was a byword among the relations. He loved it as though it were his own child. How he ever allowed anyone to put screws into that mahogany cas.e.m.e.nt is a mystery."

"Don't you think," said Sahwah shrewdly, "that there must have been some great and important reason for putting up that shutter? A reason that made him forget all about the holes he was making in the woodwork?"

A little thrill went through the group; all at once they seemed to feel that they were standing in the shadow of some mystery.

"What kind of a man was your uncle Jasper?" asked Sahwah.

"He was a queer, silent man," replied Nyoda, sitting down on the edge of a table and rubbing her forehead to aid her recollection. "He was an author-wrote historical works. I confess I don't know a great deal about him. I only saw him twice; once when I was a very little girl and once a few years ago. He never corresponded with any of his relations and never visited them nor had them come to visit him. Most everybody was afraid of him; he was so grim and stern looking. He couldn't have been very sociable here either, for none of the people of Oakwood seemed to have been in the habit of calling on him. None of those that called on me had ever been inside the house before. The old man didn't mix with the neighbors, they said. He seldom went outside the house. No one seems to know much about him. Of course," she added, "living up here on the hill he was sort of by himself; there are no near neighbors."

"Maybe he put up that shutter for protection," suggested Hinpoha.

"With all the other windows in the house unshuttered?" asked the captain derisively. "A lot of protection that would be! Besides, do you think the neighbors were in the habit of shooting pop guns at him?"

"Well, can you think of any other reason?" retorted Hinpoha.

"Why don't you ask old Hercules?" suggested Sahwah. "He might know."

"To be sure!" cried Nyoda, springing down from the table. "Why didn't I think of Hercules before? Of course he'd know. He was with Uncle Jasper all his life. I'll call him in and ask him and we'll have the mystery cleared up in a jiffy. Will one of you boys go out and bring him in?"