The Haunted Bookshop | Page 9

an
elderly dog at night.
While Mrs. Mifflin was away, however, Roger's routine was somewhat
different. After closing the shop he would return to his desk and with a
furtive, shamefaced air take out from a bottom drawer an untidy folder
of notes and manuscript. This was the skeleton in his closet, his secret
sin. It was the scaffolding of his book, which he had been compiling for
at least ten years, and to which he had tentatively assigned such
different titles as "Notes on Literature," "The Muse on Crutches,"
"Books and I," and "What a Young Bookseller Ought to Know." It had
begun long ago, in the days of his odyssey as a rural book huckster,
under the title of "Literature Among the Farmers," but it had branched
out until it began to appear that (in bulk at least) Ridpath would have to
look to his linoleum laurels. The manuscript in its present state had
neither beginning nor end, but it was growing strenuously in the middle,
and hundreds of pages were covered with Roger's minute script. The
chapter on "Ars Bibliopolae," or the art of bookselling, would be, he
hoped, a classic among generations of book vendors still unborn.
Seated at his disorderly desk, caressed by a counterpane of drifting

tobacco haze, he would pore over the manuscript, crossing out,
interpolating, re-arguing, and then referring to volumes on his shelves.
Bock would snore under the chair, and soon Roger's brain would begin
to waver. In the end he would fall asleep over his papers, wake with a
cramp about two o'clock, and creak irritably to a lonely bed.
All this we mention only to explain how it was that Roger was dozing
at his desk about midnight, the evening after the call paid by Aubrey
Gilbert. He was awakened by a draught of chill air passing like a
mountain brook over his bald pate. Stiffly he sat up and looked about.
The shop was in darkness save for the bright electric over his head.
Bock, of more regular habit than his master, had gone back to his couch
in the kitchen, made of a packing case that had once coffined a set of
the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
"That's funny," said Roger to himself. "Surely I locked the door?" He
walked to the front of the shop, switching on the cluster of lights that
hung from the ceiling. The door was ajar, but everything else seemed as
usual. Bock, hearing his footsteps, came trotting out from the kitchen,
his claws rattling on the bare wooden floor. He looked up with the
patient inquiry of a dog accustomed to the eccentricities of his patron.
"I guess I'm getting absent-minded," said Roger. "I must have left the
door open." He closed and locked it. Then he noticed that the terrier
was sniffing in the History alcove, which was at the front of the shop
on the left-hand side.
"What is it, old man?" said Roger. "Want something to read in bed?"
He turned on the light in that alcove. Everything appeared normal.
Then he noticed a book that projected an inch or so beyond the even
line of bindings. It was a fad of Roger's to keep all his books in a flat
row on the shelves, and almost every evening at closing time he used to
run his palm along the backs of the volumes to level any irregularities
left by careless browsers. He put out a hand to push the book into place.
Then he stopped.
"Queer again," he thought. "Carlyle's Oliver Cromwell! I looked for
that book last night and couldn't find it. When that professor fellow was
here. Maybe I'm tired and can't see straight. I'll go to bed."
The next day was a date of some moment. Not only was it
Thanksgiving Day, with the November meeting of the Corn Cob Club
scheduled for that evening, but Mrs. Mifflin had promised to get home

from Boston in time to bake a chocolate cake for the booksellers. It was
said that some of the members of the club were faithful in attendance
more by reason of Mrs. Mifflin's chocolate cake, and the cask of cider
that her brother Andrew McGill sent down from the Sabine Farm every
autumn, than on account of the bookish conversation.
Roger spent the morning in doing a little housecleaning, in preparation
for his wife's return. He was a trifle abashed to find how many mingled
crumbs and tobacco cinders had accumulated on the dining-room rug.
He cooked himself a modest lunch of lamb chops and baked potatoes,
and was pleased by an epigram concerning food that came into his
mind. "It's not the food you dream about that matters," he said to
himself; "it's the vittles that walk right in and become a member of