Miss Eyester resented the aspersion the meaning of which was now plain to everybody, and said with dignity, rising: "If no one else will call him, I shall."
"Rum has been the curse of the nation," observed Mr. Budlong to whom even a thimbleful gave a headache.
"I wish I had a barrel of it," growled old Mr. Penrose. "When I get home I'm going to get me a worm and make moonshine."
"Oh, how dread-ful!"
"'Tain't," Mr. Penrose contradicted Aunt Lizzie, curtly.
"'Tis!" retorted Aunt Lizzie.
They glared at each other balefully, and while everybody waited to hear if she could think of anything else to say to him, Miss Eyester returned panting: "The door's locked and there's a towel pinned over the window."
"No!" They exclaimed in chorus, and looked at Wallie. "Do you suppose any thing's happened?"
"He locked the door because he does not want to 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.