be disturbed, and the
towel is to keep the light out," Mr. Stott deduced.

"Of _course_!" They all laughed heartily and admired Mr. Stott's
shrewdness.

"Any fool would have thought of that," growled Mr. Penrose.

"You think you know everything," said Aunt Lizzie, in whom his threat to
make moonshine and break the law still rankled.

"I know quite a lot, if I could just think of it," replied Mr. Penrose
almost good-naturedly.

"All the same," declared the cook, scouring a frying-pan in the doorway,
"it's not like him to go to all that trouble just to sleep. I'll go up
and see if I can raise him."

Even in the dining room they could hear Mr. Hicks banging on the door
with the frying-pan, and calling. He returned in a few minutes.

"There's something queer about it. It's still as a graveyard. He ain't
snoring."

"Could he have made way with himself?" Mr. Appel's tone was sepulchral.

"Oh-h-h!" Miss Eyester gasped faintly.

"Perhaps he has merely locked the door and he is outside," Mr. Stott
suggested.

"I'll go down and see if I can notice his legs stickin' out of the crick
anywhere," said Mr. Hicks, briskly.

"It is very curious--very strange indeed," they declared solemnly,
though they all continued eating spare-ribs--a favourite dish with The
Happy Family.

The cook, returning, said in a tone that had a note of disappointment.
"He ain't drowned."

"Is his horse in the corral?" asked Wallie.

Mr. Hicks took observations from the doorway and reported that it was,
which deepened the mystery.

Since no human being, unless he was drugged or dead, could sleep through
the cook's battering with the frying-pan, Wallie himself grew anxious.
He recalled Pinkey's gloom of the evening before he had gone to Prouty.
"I wisht I'd died when I was little," he remembered his saying.

Also Pinkey's moroseness of the morning and the ferocity of his
expression took on special significance in the light of his strange
absence. Instinctively Wallie looked at Miss Eyester. That young lady
was watching him closely and saw his gravity. Unexpectedly she burst
into tears so explosively that Mrs. Budlong moved back the bread plate
even as she tried to comfort her.

"I know something has happened! I _feel_ it! When Aunt Sallie choked on
a fish-bone at Asbury Park I knew it before we got the wire. I'm sort of
clairvoyant! Please excuse me!" Miss Eyester left the table, sobbing. It
seemed heartless to go on eating when Pinkey,