Ma Pettengill Part 17

That seemed to be about where Oswald got off.

"Why, simply open it some other way," says Lydia, which seemed to be about where she got off, too.

"But how?" moans the despairing man. And she again says:

"Oh, it must be too simple!"

At that she was sounding the only note of hope Oswald could hear; and right then I believe he looked at her fair and square for the first time in his life. He was finding a woman his only comforter in his darkest hour.

The Prof took it lightly indeed. He teetered the trunk jauntily and says:

"Your device was admirable; you will always know where those keys are."

Then he teetered it again and says, like he was lecturing on a platform: "This is an ideal problem for the metaphysical mind. Here, veritably, is life itself. We pick it up, we shake it, and we hear the tantalizing key to existence rattle plainly just inside. We know the key to be there; we hear it in every manifestation of life. Our problem is to think it out. It is simple, as my child has again and again pointed out. Sit there before your trunk and think effectively, with precision. You will then think the key out. I would take it in hand myself, but I have had a hard day."

Then Lydia releases her candy long enough to say how about finding some other trunk keys that will unlock it. Oswald is both hurt and made hopeful by this. He don't like to think his beautiful trunk could respond to any but its rightful key; it would seem kind of a slur against its integrity. Still, he says it may be tried. Lydia says try it, of course; and if no other key unlocks it she will pick the lock with a hairpin.

Oswald is again bruised by this suggestion; but he bears up like a man.

And so we dig up all the trunk keys and other small keys we can find and try to fool that trunk. And nothing doing!

"I was confident of it," says Oswald; he's really disappointed, yet proud as Punch because his trunk refuses coldly to recognize these strange keys.

Then Lydia brings a bunch of hairpins and starts to be a burglar. She says in clear tones that it is perfectly simple; and she keeps on saying exactly this after she's bent the whole pack out of shape and not won a trick. Yet she cheered Oswald a lot, in spite of her failures. She never for one instant give in that it wasn't simple to open a trunk without the key.

But it was getting pretty late for one night, so Oswald and Lydia knocked off and set out on the porch a while. Oswald seemed to be awakening to her true woman's character, which comes out clad in glory at times when things happen. She told him she would sure have that trunk opened to-morrow with some more hairpins--or something.

But in the morning she rushed to Oswald and said they would have the blacksmith up to open it. He would be sure to open it in one minute with a few tools; and how stupid of her not to of thought of it before! I liked that way she left Oswald out of any brain work that had to be done.

So they sent out to Abner to do the job, telling him what was wanted.

Abner is a simple soul. He come over with a hammer and a cold chisel to cut the lock off. He said there wasn't any other way. Oswald listened with horror to this cold-blooded plan of murder and sent Abner sternly away. Lydia was indignant, too, at the painful suggestion. She said Abner was a shocking old bounder.

Then Oswald had to go out to his field work; but his heart couldn't of been in it that day. I'll bet he could of found the carca.s.s of a petrified zebra with seven legs and not been elated by it. He had only the sweet encouragement of Lydia to brace him. He was depending pathetically on that young woman.

He got back that night to find that Lydia had used up another pack of hairpins and a number of the tools from my sewing machine. All had been black failure, but she still said it was perfectly simple. She never lost the note of hope out of her voice. Oswald was distressed, but he had to regard her more and more 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 wainscoting right now.

It makes me perfectly furious to see a man so helpless without a woman.

Today I'll open his silly old trunk for him."

"It will be the best day's work you ever done," I says, and she nearly blushed.

"I'm not thinking of that," she says.

The little liar! As if she hadn't seen as well as I had how Oswald was regarding her with new eyes. So I wished her good luck and started out myself, having some field work of my own to do that day in measuring a lot of haystacks down at the lower end of the ranch.

She said there would be no luck in it--nothing but cool determination and a woman's intuition. I let it go at that and went off to see that I didn't get none of the worst of it when this new hay was measured.

I had a busy day, forgetting all scientific problems and the uphill fight our s.e.x sometimes has in bringing a man to his just mating sense.

I got back about five that night. Here was Miss Lydia, cool and negligent on the porch, like she'd never had a care in the world; fresh dressed in something white and blue, with her niftiest hammock stockings, and tinkling the ukulele in a bored and petulant manner.

"Did you open it?" I says as I went in.

"Open it?" she says, kind of blank. "Oh, you mean that silly old trunk!

Yes, I believe I did. At least I think I did."

It was good stage acting; an audience would of thought she had forgotten.

So I took it as calm as she did and went in to change.

By the time I got out the men was just coming in, the Prof being enthusiastic about some clamsh.e.l.ls of the year six million B. C. and Oswald bearing his great sorrow with an effort to do it bravely.

Lydia nodded distantly and then ignored the men in a pointed way, breaking out into rapid chatter to me about the lack of society up here--didn't I weary of the solitude, never meeting people of the right sort? It was a new line with her and done for effect, but I couldn't see what effect.

Supper was ready and we hurried in to it; so I guess Oswald must of forgot for one time to shake his trunk and listen to the pretty little keys. And all through the meal Lydia confined her attentions entirely to me. She ignored Oswald mostly, but if she did notice him she patronized him. She was painfully superior to him, and severe and short, like he was a little boy that had been let to come to the table with the grown-ups for this once. She rattled along to me about the club dances at home, and how they was going to have better music this year, and how the a.s.sembly hall had been done over in a perfectly dandy colour scheme by the committee she was on, and a lot of girlish babble that took up much room but weighed little.

Oswald would give her side looks of dumb appeal from time to time, for she had not once referred to anything so common as a trunk. He must of felt that her moral support had been withdrawn and he was left to face the dread future alone. He probably figured that she'd had to give up about the trunk and was diverting attention from her surrender. He hardly spoke a word and disappeared with a look of yearning when we left the table. The rest of us went out on the porch. Lydia was teasing the ukulele when Oswald appeared a few minutes later, with great excitement showing in his worn face.

"I can hear the keys no longer," says he; "not a sound of them! Mustn't they have fallen from the hook?"

Lydia went on stripping little chords from the strings while she answered him in lofty accents.

"Keys?" she says. "What keys? What is the man talking of? Oh, you mean that silly old trunk! Are you really still maundering about that? Of course the keys aren't there! I took them out when I opened it to-day. I thought you wanted them taken out. Wasn't that what you wanted the trunk open for--to get the keys? Have I done something stupid? Of course I can put them back and shut it again if you only want to listen to them."

Oswald had been glaring at her with his mouth open like an Upper Tria.s.sic catfish. He tried to speak, but couldn't move his face, which seemed to be frozen. Lydia goes on dealing off little tinkles of string music in a tired, bored way and turns confidentially to me to say she supposes there is really almost no society up here in the true sense of the word.

"You opened that trunk?" says Oswald at last in tones like a tragedian at his big scene.

Lydia turned to him quite prettily impatient, as if he was something she'd have to brush off in a minute.

"Dear, dear!" she says. "Of course I opened it. I told you again and again it was perfectly simple. I don't see why you made so much fuss about it."

Oswald turned and galloped off to his room with a glad shout. That showed the male of him, didn't it?--not staying for words of grat.i.tude to his saviour, but beating it straight to the trunk.

Lydia got up and swaggered after him. She had been swaggering all the evening. She acted like a d.u.c.h.ess at a slumming party. The Prof and I followed her.

Oswald was teetering the trunk in the old familiar way, with one ear fastened to its s.h.i.+ny side.

"It's true! It's true!" he says in hushed tones. "The keys are gone."

"Naughty, naughty!" says Lydia. "Haven't I told you I took them out?"