Penrod | Page 4

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 ends of the lines over a big spool,
which revolved upon an axle of wire suspended from a beam overhead,
and, with the aid of this improvised pulley, lowered the empty basket
until it came to rest in an upright position upon the floor of the
storeroom at the foot of the sawdust-box.
"Eleva-ter!" shouted Penrod. "Ting-ting!"
Duke, old and intelligently apprehensive, approached slowly, in a
semicircular manner, deprecatingly, but with courtesy. He pawed the
basket delicately; then, as if that were all his master had expected of
him, uttered one bright bark, sat down, and looked up triumphantly. His
hypocrisy was shallow: many a horrible quarter of an hour had taught
him his duty in this matter.
"El-e-VAY-ter!" shouted Penrod sternly. "You want me to come down
there to you?"
Duke looked suddenly haggard. He pawed the basket feebly again and,
upon another outburst from on high, prostrated himself flat. Again
threatened, he gave a superb impersonation of a worm.
"You get in that el-e-VAY-ter!"
Reckless with despair, Duke jumped into the basket, landing in a
dishevelled posture, which he did not alter until he had been drawn up
and poured out upon the floor of sawdust with the box. There,
shuddering, he lay in doughnut shape and presently slumbered.
It was dark in the box, a condition that might have been remedied by
sliding back a small wooden panel on runners, which would have let in
ample light from the alley; but Penrod Schofield had more interesting
means of illumination. He knelt, and from a former soap-box, in a

corner, took a lantern, without a chimney, and a large oil-can, the leak
in the latter being so nearly imperceptible that its banishment from
household use had seemed to Penrod as inexplicable as it was
providential.
He shook the lantern near his ear: nothing splashed; there was no sound
but a dry clinking. But there was plenty of kerosene in the can; and he
filled the lantern, striking a match to illumine the operation. Then he lit
the lantern and hung it upon a nail against the wall. The sawdust floor
was slightly impregnated with oil, and the open flame quivered in
suggestive proximity to the side of the box; however, some rather deep
charrings of the plank against which the lantern hung offered evidence
that the arrangement was by no means a new one, and indicated at least
a possibility of no fatality occurring this time.
Next, Penrod turned up