abbit caught in a
trap.

It was not--it was part of the perambulator. I forget whether I said
that the perambulator was enamelled white--not the kind of enamelling
you do at home with Aspinall's and the hairs of the brush come out and
it is gritty-looking, but smooth, like the handles of ladies very best
lace parasols. And whoever had abandoned the helpless perambulator in
that lonely spot had done exactly as H. O. said, and covered it with
leaves, only they were green and some of them had dropped off.

The others were wild with excitement. Now or never, they thought, was a
chance to be real detectives. Oswald alone retained a calm exterior. It
was he who would not go straight to the police station.

He said: 'Let's try and ferret out something for ourselves before we
tell the police. They always have a clue directly they hear about the
finding of the body. And besides, we might as well let Alice be in
anything there is going. And besides, we haven't had our dinners yet.'

This argument of Oswald's was so strong and powerful--his arguments are
often that, as I daresay you have noticed--that the others agreed.
It was Oswald, too, who showed his artless brothers why they had much
better not take the deserted perambulator home with them.

'The dead body, or whatever the clue is, is always left exactly as it is
found,' he said, 'till the police have seen it, and the coroner, and the
inquest, and the doctor, and the sorrowing relations. Besides, suppose
someone saw us with the beastly thing, and thought we had stolen it;
then they would say, "What have you done with the Baby?" and then where
should we be?' Oswald's brothers could not answer this question, but
once more Oswald's native eloquence and far-seeing discerningness
conquered.

'Anyway,' Dicky said, 'let's shove the derelict a little further under
cover.'

So we did.

Then we went on home. Dinner was ready and so were Alice and Daisy, but
Dora was not there.

'She's got a--well, she's not coming to dinner anyway,' Alice said when
we asked. 'She can tell you herself afterwards what it is she's got.'

Oswald thought it was headache, or pain in the temper, or in the
pinafore, so he said no more, but as soon as Mrs Pettigrew had helped
us and left the room he began the thrilling tale of the forsaken
perambulator. He told it with the greatest thrillingness anyone could
have, but Daisy and Alice seemed almost unmoved. Alice said--

'Yes, very strange,' and th