Old Caravan Days






CHAPTER V. THE SUSAN HOUSE CELLAR.

It was not pleasant to stand in a strange house in an unknown neighborhood, drenched, hungry and unprotected, hearing fearful sounds like danger threatening under foot.

Corinne felt a speechless desire to be back in the creek again and on the point of drowning; that would soon be over. But who could tell what might occur after this groaning in the cellar?

“I heard a noise,” said Grandma Padgett, to bespeak their attention, as if they could remember ever hearing anything else.

“It's cats, I think,” said Robert Day, husky with courage.

Cats could not groan in such short and painful catches. Conjectures of many colors appeared and disappeared like flashes in Bobaday's mind. The groaner was somebody that bad Dutch landlord had half murdered and put in the cellar. Maybe the floor was built to give way and let every traveller fall into a pit! Or it might be some boy or girl left behind by wicked movers to starve. Or a beggarman, wanting the house to himself, could be making that noise to frighten them away.

The sharp groans were regularly uttered. Corinne buried her head in her mother's skirts and waited to be taken or left, as the Booggar pleased.

“Well,” said Grandma Padgett, “I suppose we'll have to go and see what ails that Thing down there. It may be a human bein' in distress.”

Robert feared it was something else, but he would not have mentioned it to his grandmother.

“What'll we carry to see with?” he eagerly inquired. It was easy to be eager, because they had no lights except the brands in the fireplace.

Grandma Padgett, who in her early days had carried live coals from neighbors' houses miles away, saw how to dispense with lamp or candle. She took a shovel full of embers—and placed a burning chip on top. The chip would have gone out by itself, but was kept blazing by the coals underneath.

“Shall I go ahead?” inquired Robert.

“No, you walk behind. And you might carry a piece of stick,” replied his grandmother, conveying a hint which made his shoulder blades feel chilly.

They moved toward the cellar entrance in a slow procession, to keep the chip from flaring out.

“Don't hang to me so!” Grandma Padgett remonstrated with her daughter. “I sh'll step on you, and down we'll all go and set the house afire.”

Garrets are cheerful, cobwebby places, always full of slits where long, smoky sun-rays can poke in. An amber warmth cheers the darkness of garrets; you feel certain there is nothing ugly hiding behind the remotest and dustiest box. If rats or mice inhabit it, they are jovial fellows. But how different is a cellar, and especially a cellar neglected. You plunge down rough steps into a cavern. A mouldy air from dried-up and forgotten vegetables meets you. The earth may not be moist underfoot, but it has not the kind feeling of sun-warmed earth. And if big rats hide there, how bold and hideous they are! There are cool farmhouse cellars floored with cement and shelved with sweet-smelling pine, where apple-bins make incense, and swinging-shelves of butter, tables of milk crocks, lines of fruit cans and home-made catsup bottles, jars of pickles and chowder, and white covered pastry and cake, promise abundant hospitality. But these are inverted garrets, rather than cellars. They are refrigerators for pure air; and they keep a mellow light of their own. When you go into one of them it seems as if the house were standing on its head to express its joy and comfort.

But the Susan House cellar was one of dread, aside from the noise proceeding out of it. Bobaday knew this before they opened a door upon a narrow-throated descent.

One of Zene's stories became vivid. It was a story of a house where nobody could stay, though the landlord offered it rent-free. But along came two good youths without any money, and for board and lodging, they undertook to break the spell by sleeping there three nights. The first two nights they were not disturbed, and sat with their candle, reading good books until after midnight. But the third, just on the stroke of twelve, a noise began in the cellar! So they took their candle, and, armed with nothing except good books, went below, and in the furthest corner they saw a little old man with a red nightcap on his head, sitting astride of a barrel! In Zene's story the little old man only had it on his mind to tell these good youths where to dig for his money; and when they had secured the money, he amiably disappeared, and the house was pleasant to live in ever afterward.

This tale, heard in the barn while Zene was greasing harnesses, and heard without Grandma Padgett's sanction, now made her grandson shiver with dread as his feet went down into the Susan House dungeon. It was trying enough to be exploring a strange cellar full of groans, without straining your eyes in expectation of seeing a little old man in a red nightcap, sitting astride of a barrel!

“Who's there?” said Grandma Padgett with stern emphasis, as she held her beacon stretched out into the cellar.

The groaning ceased for an awful space of time. Aunt Corinne was behind her nephew, and she squatted on the step to peer with distended eyes, lest some hand should reach up and grab her by the foot.

It was a small square cellar, having earthen sides, but piles of pine boxes made ambushes everywhere.

“Come out!” Grandma Padgett spoke again. “We won't have any tricks played. But if you're hurt, we can help you.”

It was like addressing solid darkness, for the chip was languishing upon its coals, and cast but a dim red glare around the shovel.

Still some being crept toward them from the darkness, uttering a prolonged and hearty groan, as if to explode at once the accumulations of silence.

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