like an object of human interest.

She now said it was a simple matter of more keys. So the next day I sent
one of the boys down to Red Gap; and he rode a good horse to its finish
and come back with about five dozen nice little trunk keys with sawed
edges. They looked cheerful and adequate, and we spent a long, jolly
evening trying 'em out. Not one come anywhere near getting results.

Oswald's trunk was still haughty, in spite of all these overtures. Oswald
was again puffed up with pride, it having been shown that his trunk was
no common trunk. He said right out that probably the only two keys in all
the world that would open that lock was the two hanging inside. He never
passed the trunk without rocking it to hear their sad tinkle.

Lydia again said, nonsense! It was perfectly simple to open a trunk
without the right key. Oswald didn't believe her, and yet he couldn't
help taking comfort from her. I guess that was this girl's particular
genius--not giving up when everyone else could see that she was talking
half-witted. Anyway, she was as certain as ever, and I guess Oswald
believed her in spite of himself. His ponderous scientific brain told
him one thing in plain terms, and yet he was leaning on the words of a
chit that wouldn't know a carboniferous vertebra from an Upper Silurian
gerumpsus.

The keys had gone back, hairpins was proved to be no good, and scientific
analysis had fell down flat. There was the trunk and there was the keys
inside; and Oswald was taking on a year in age every day of his life. He
was pretty soon going to be as old as the world if something didn't
happen. He'd got so that every time he rocked the trunk to hear the keys
rattle he'd shake his head like the doctor shakes it at a moving-picture
deathbed to show that all is over. He was in a pitch-black cavern miles
underground, with one tiny candle beam from a possible rescuer faintly
showing from afar, which was the childish certainty of this oldest living
debutante that it was perfectly simple for a woman to do something
impossible. She was just blue-eyed confidence.

After the men left one morning on their hunt for long-defunct wood ticks
and such, Lydia confided to me that she was really going to open that
trunk. She was going to put her mind on it. She hadn't done this yet,
it seemed, but to-day she would.

"The poor boy has been rudely jarred in his academic serenity," says she.
"He can't bear up much longer; he has rats in his wain