Sir Lancelot, as
conceived by Mrs. Lora Rewbush. Choking upon it, Penrod slid down from
the fence, and with slow and thoughtful steps entered a one-storied wing
of the stable, consisting of a single apartment, floored with cement and
used as a storeroom for broken bric-a-brac, old paint-buckets, decayed
garden-hose, worn-out carpets, dead furniture, and other condemned odds
and ends not yet considered hopeless enough to be given away.

In one corner stood a large box, a part of the building itself: it was
eight feet high and open at the top, and it had been constructed as a
sawdust magazine from which was drawn material for the horse's bed in
a stall on the other side of the partition. The big box, so high and
towerlike, so commodious, so suggestive, had ceased to fulfil its
legitimate function; though, providentially, it had been at least half
full of sawdust when the horse died. Two years had gone by since that
passing; an interregnum in transportation during which Penrod's father
was "thinking" (he explained sometimes) of an automobile. Meanwhile, the
gifted and generous sawdust-box had served brilliantly in war and peace:
it was Penrod's stronghold.

There was a partially defaced sign upon the front wall of the box; the
donjon-keep had known mercantile impulses:

The O. K. RaBiT Co.
PENROD ScHoFiELD AND CO.
iNQuiRE FOR PRicEs

This was a venture of the preceding vacation, and had netted, at one
time, an accrued and owed profit of $1.38. Prospects had been brightest
on the very eve of cataclysm. The storeroom was locked and guarded, but
twenty-seven rabbits and Belgian hares, old and young, had perished here
on a single night--through no human agency, but in a foray of cats, the
besiegers treacherously tunnelling up through the sawdust from the small
aperture which opened into the stall beyond the partition. Commerce has
its martyrs.

Penrod climbed upon a barrel, stood on tiptoe, grasped the rim of the
box; then, using a knot-hole as a stirrup, threw one leg over the top,
drew himself up, and dropped within. Standing upon the packed sawdust,
he was just tall enough to see over the top.

Duke had not followed him into the storeroom, but remained near the open
doorway in a concave and pessimistic attitude. Penrod felt in a dark
corner of the box and laid hands upon a simple apparatus consisting of
an old bushel-basket with a few yards of clothes-line tied to each of
its handles. He passed the en