Oswald went over and set limply down on his bed, while we stood in the doorway.
"How did you ever do it?" says he with shining eyes.
"It was perfectly simple," says Lydia. "I simply opened it--that"s all!"
"I have always suspected that the great secret of life would be almost too simple when once solved," says the Prof.
"It only needed a bit of thought," says the chit.
Then Oswald must of had a sudden pang of fear. He flew over and examined the lock and all the front surface of his treasure. He was looking for signs of rough work, thinking she might of broken into it in some coa.r.s.e manner. But not a scratch could he find. He looked up at Lydia out of eyes moist with grat.i.tude.
"You wonderful, wonderful woman!" says he, and any one could know he meant it from the heart out.
Lydia was still superior and languid, and covered up a slight yawn.
She said she was glad if any little thing she could do had made life pleasanter for him. This has been such a perfectly simple thing--very, very far from wonderful.
Oswald now begun to caper round the room like an Airedale pup, and says let"s have the keys and open the trunk up, so he can believe his own eyes.
Then Lydia trifled once more with a human soul. She froze in deep thought a long minute then says:
"Oh, dear! Now what did I do with those wretched old keys?"
Oswald froze, too, with a new agony. Lydia put a hand to her pale forehead and seemed to try to remember. There was an awful silence.
Oswald was dashed over the cliff again.
"Can"t you think?" says the wounded man. "Can"t you remember? Try! Try!"
"Now let me see," says Lydia. "I know I had them out in the living room--"
"Why did you ever take them out there?" demands Oswald in great terror; but the heroine pays no attention whatever to this.
"--and later, I think--I think--I must have carried them into my room.
Oh, yes; now I remember I did. And then I emptied my wastebasket into the kitchen stove. Now I wonder if they could have been in with that rubbish I burned! Let me think!" And she thought again deeply.
Oswald give a hollow groan, like some of the very finest chords in his being had been tore asunder. He sunk limp on the bed again.
"Wouldn"t it be awkward if they were in that rubbish?" says Lydia.
"Do you suppose that fire would destroy the silly things? Let me think again."
The fiend kept this up for three minutes more. It must of seemed longer to Oswald than it takes for a chinch bug to become a carboniferous Jura.s.sic. She was committing sabotage on him in the cruellest way.
Then, after watching his death agony with cold eyes and pretending to wonder like a rattled angel, she brightens up and says:
"Oh, goody! Now I remember everything. I placed them right here." And she picked the keys off the table, where they had been hid under some specimens of the dead and gone.
Oswald give one athletic leap and had the precious things out of her feeble grasp in half a second. His fingers trembled horrible, but he had a key in the lock and turned it and threw the sides of the grand old monument wide open. He just hung there a minute in ecstasy, fondling the keys and getting his nerve back. Then he turns again on Lydia the look of a proud man who is ready to surrender his whole future life to her keeping.
Lydia had now become more superior than ever. She swaggered round the room, and when she didn"t swagger she strutted. And she says to Oswald:
"I"m going to make one little suggestion, because you seem so utterly helpless: You must get a nice doormat to lay directly in front of your trunk, and you must always keep the key under this mat. Lock the trunk and hide the key there. It"s what people always do, and it will be quite safe, because no one would ever think of looking under a doormat for a key. Now isn"t that a perfectly darling plan?"
Oswald had looked serious and attentive when she begun this talk, but he finally got suspicious that she was making some silly kind of a joke. He grinned at her very foolish and again says: "You wonderful woman!" It was a caressing tone--if you know what I mean.
Lydia says "Oh, dear, won"t he ever stop his silly chatter about his stupid old trunk?" It seems to her that nothing but trunk has been talked of in this house for untold ages. She"s tired to death of the very word.
Then she links her arm in mine in a sweet girlish fashion and leads me outside, where she becomes a mere twittering porch wren once more.
Oswald followed, you can bet. And every five minutes he"d ask her how did she ever--really now--open the trunk. But whenever he"d ask she would put the loud pedal on the ukulele and burst into some beachy song about You and I Together in the Moonlight, Love. Even the Prof got curious and demanded how she had done what real brains had failed to pull off--and got the same noisy answer. Later he said he had been wrong to ask. He said the answer would prove to be too brutally simple, and he always wanted to keep it in his thought life as a mystery. It looked like he"d have to. I was dying to know myself, but had sense enough not to ask.
The girl hardly spoke to Oswald again that night, merely giving him these cold showers of superiority when he would thrust himself on her notice.
And she kept me out there with her till bedtime, not giving the happy trunk owner a chance at her alone. That girl had certainly learned a few things beyond fudge and cheese straws in her time. She knew when she had the game won.
Sure, it was all over with Oswald. He had only one more night when he could call himself a free man; he tried hard enough not to have even that. He looked like he wanted to put a fence round the girl, elk-high and bull-tight. Of course it"s possible he was landed by the earnest wish to find out how she had opened his trunk; but she never will tell him that. She discussed it calmly with me after all was over. She said poor Oswald had been the victim of scientific curiosity, but really it was time for her to settle down.
We was in her room at the time and she was looking at the tiny lines round her eyes when she said it. She said, further, that she was about to plan her going-away gown. I asked what it would be, and she said she hadn"t decided yet, but it would be something youth-giving. Pretty game, that was! And now Oswald has someone to guard his trunk keys for him--to say nothing of this here new specimen of organic fauna.
Then I talked. I said I was unable to reach the lofty alt.i.tude of the Prof when even a fair mystery was concerned. I was more like Oswald with his childish curiosity. How, then, did the young woman open the trunk?
Of course, I could guess the answer. She had found she could really do it with a hairpin, and had held off for effect. Still, I wanted to be told.
"Nothing easy like that," said Ma Pettengill. "She"d been honest with the hairpins. She didn"t tell me till the day before they were leaving. "It was a perfectly simple problem, requiring only a bit of thought," she says. "It was the simple thing people do when they find their front door locked. They go round to the back of the house and pry up a kitchen window, or something." She pledged me to secrecy, but I guess you won"t let it go any farther.
"Anyway, this is what she done: It was a time for brutal measures, so she"d had Abner wheel that trunk over to the blacksmith shop and take the hinges off. Abner just loves to do any work he don"t have to do, and he had entered cordially into the spirit of this adventure. It used up his whole day, for which he was drawing three dollars from me. He took off one side of four pair of hinges, opened the trunk at the back far enough to reach in for the keys, unlocked it and fastened the hinges back on again.
"It was some job. These hinges was riveted on and didn"t come loose easy.
The rear of that trunk must of been one sad mutilation. It probably won"t ever again be the trunk it once was. Abner had to hustle to get through in one day. I wish I could get the old hound to work for me that way.
They"d just got the trunk back when I rode in that night. It was nervy, all right! I asked her if she wasn"t afraid he would see the many traces of this rough work she had done.
""Not a chance on earth!" says Lydia. "I knew he would never look at any place but the front. He has the mind of a true scientist. It wouldn"t occur to him in a million years that there is any other way but the front way to get into a trunk. I painted over the rivets and the bruises as well as I could, but I"m sure he will never look there. He may notice it by accident in the years to come, but the poor chap will then have other worries, I hope."
"Such was the chit. I don"t know. Mebbe woman has her place in the great world after all. Anyway, she"ll be a help to Oswald. Whatever he ain"t she is."
VII
CHANGE OF VENUS
Ma Pettengill and I rode labouring horses up a steep way between two rocky hillsides that doubled the rays of the high sun back upon us and smothered the little breeze that tried to follow us up from the flat lands of the Arrowhead. We breathed the pointed smell of the sage and we breathed the thick, hot dust that hung lazily about us; a dust like powdered chocolate, that cloyed and choked.
As recreation it was blighting; and I said almost as much. Ma Pettengill was deaf to it, her gray head in its broad-brimmed hat sternly bowed in meditation as she wove to her horse"s motion. Then I became aware that she talked to another; one who was not there. She said things I was sure he would not have liked to hear. She hung choice insults upon his name and blistered his fair repute with calumnies. She was a geyser of invective, quiet perhaps for fifty yards, then grandly in action.
"Call yourself a cowman, hey? What you ought to be is matron of a foundling asylum. Yes, sir!"
This was among the least fearful of her dusty scornings. And I knew she would be addressing one Homer Gale, temporary riding boss of the Arrowhead. Indeed, Homer"s slightly pleading accents were now very colourably imitated by his embittered employer:
"Yes"m, Mis" Pettengill, it"s a matter of life and death; no less. I got to git off for two days--a matter of life and death. Yes"m; I just got to!"