"I GOT to go," Penrod gasped. "I got to tell Margaret sumpthing."
"What have you 'got' to tell her?"
"It's--it's sumpthing I forgot to tell her."
"Well, it will keep till she comes downstairs," Mr. Schofield said grimly. "You sit down till this meal is finished."
Penrod was becoming frantic.
"I got to tell her--it's sumpthing Sam's mother told me to tell her," he babbled. "Didn't she, Sam? You heard her tell me to tell her; didn't you, Sam?"
Sam offered prompt corroboration.
"Yes, sir; she did. She said for us both to tell her. I better go, too, I guess, because she said--"
He was interrupted. Startlingly upon their ears rang shriek on shriek. Mrs. Schofield, recognizing Margaret's voice, likewise shrieked, and Mr. Schofield uttered various sounds; but Penrod and Sam were incapable of doing anything vocally. All rushed from the table.
Margaret continued to shriek, and it is not to be denied that there was some cause for her agitation. When she opened the closet door, her light-blue military cape, instead of hanging on the hook where she had left it, came out into the room in a manner that she afterward described as "a kind of horrible creep, but faster than a creep." Nothing was to be seen except the creeping cape, she said, but, of course, she could tell there was some awful thing inside of it. It was too large to be a cat, and too small to be a boy; it was too large to be Duke, Penrod's little old dog, and, besides, Duke wouldn't act like that. It crept rapidly out into the upper hall, and then, as she recovered the use of her voice and began to scream, the animated cape abandoned its creeping for a quicker gait--"a weird, heaving flop," she defined it.