Under the bed!"
"What! "
"I fell on him! Something's the matter with the bed. It broke. I fell on him!"
Cora stared at her wide-eyed. "Why, it can't be. Think how long I was in there. Your bed broke, and you just thought there was some one there. You imagined it."
"No, no, no!" wailed Laura. I HEARD him: he gave a kind of dreadful grunt."
"Are you sure?"
"SURE? He wriggled--oh! I could FEEL him!"
Cora seized a box of matches again. "I'm going to find out."
"Oh, no, no!" protested Laura, cowering."
"Yes, I am. If there's a burglar in the house I'm going to find him!"
"We mustn't wake papa."
"No, nor mamma either. You stay here if you want to----"
"Let's call Hedrick," suggested the pallid Laura; "or put our heads out of the window and scream for----"
Cora laughed; she was not in the least frightened. "That wouldn't wake papa, of course! If we had a telephone I'd send for the police; but we haven't. I'm going to see if there's any one there. A burglar's a man, I guess, and I can't imagine myself being afraid of any MAN!"
Laura clung to her, but Cora shook her off and went through the hall undaunted, Laura faltering behind her. Cora lighted matches with a perfectly steady hand; she hesitated on the threshold of Laura's room no more than a moment, then lit the lamp.
Laura stifled a shriek at sight of the bed. "Look, look!" she gasped.
"There's no one under it now, that's certain," said Cora, and boldly lifted a corner of it. "Why, it's been cut all to pieces from underneath! You're right; there was some one here. It's practically dismembered. Don't you remember my telling you how it sagged? And I was only sitting on the edge of it! The slats have all been moved out of place, and as for the mattress, it's just a mess of springs and that stuffing stuff. He must have thought the silver was hidden there."
"Oh, oh, oh!" moaned Laura. "He WRIGGLED----ugh!"
Cora picked up the lamp. "Well, we've got to go over the house----"
"No, no!"
"Hush! I'll go alone then."
"You CAN'T."
"I will, though!"
The two girls had changed places in this emergency. In her fright Laura was dependent, clinging: actual contact with the intruder had unnerved her. It took all her will to accompany her sister upon the tour of inspection, and throughout she cowered behind the dauntless Cora. It was the first time in their lives that their positions had been reversed. From the days of Cora's babyhood, Laura had formed the habit of petting and shielding the little sister, but now that the possibility became imminent of confronting an unknown and dangerous man, Laura was so shaken that, overcome by fear, she let Cora go first. Cora had not boasted in vain of her bravery; in truth, she was not afraid of any man.
They found the fastenings of the doors secure and likewise those of all the windows, until they came to the kitchen. There, the cook had left a window up, which plausibly explained the marauder's mode of ingress. Then, at Cora's insistence, and to Laura's shivering horror, they searched both cellar and garret, and concluded that he had escaped by the same means. Except Laura's bed, nothing in the house had been disturbed; but this eccentricity on the part of a burglar, though it indeed struck the two girls as peculiar, was not so pointedly mysterious to them as it might have been had they possessed a somewhat greater familiarity with the habits of criminals whose crimes are professional.
They finally retired, Laura sleeping with her sister, and Cora had begun to talk of the lieutenant again, instead of the burglar, before Laura fell asleep.
In spite of the short hours for sleep, both girls appeared at the breakfast-table before the meal was over, and were naturally pleased with the staccato of excitement evoked by their news.
Mrs. Madison and Miss Peirce were warm in admiration of their bravery, but in the same breath condemned it as foolhardy.
"I never knew such wonderful girls!" exclaimed the mother, almost tearfully. "You crazy little lions! To think of your not even waking Hedrick! And you didn't have even a poker and were in your bare feet--and went down in the CELLAR----"
"It was all Cora," protested Laura. "I'm a hopeless, disgusting coward. I never knew what a coward I was before.
Cora carried the lamp and went ahead like a drum-major. I just trailed along behind her, ready to shriek and run--or faint!"
"Could you tell anything about him when you fell on him?" inquired Miss Peirce. "What was his voice like when he shouted?"
"Choked. It was a horrible, jolted kind of cry. It hardly sounded human."
"Could you tell anything about whether he was a large man, or small, or----"
"Only that he seemed very active. He seemed to be kicking.
He WRIGGLED----ugh!"
They evolved a plausible theory of the burglar's motives and line of reasoning. "You see," said Miss Peirce, much stirred, in summing up the adventure, "he either jimmies the window, or finds it open already, and Sarah's mistaken and she DID leave it open! Then he searched the downstairs first, and didn't find anything. Then he came upstairs, and was afraid to come into any of the rooms where we were. He could tell which rooms had people in them by hearing us breathing through the keyholes. He finds two rooms empty, and probably he made a thorough search of Miss Cora's first. But he isn't after silver toilet articles and pretty little things like that. He wants really big booty or none, so he decides that an out-of-the-way, unimportant room like Miss Laura's is where the family would be most apt to hide valuables, jewellery and silver, and he knows that mattresses have often been selected as hiding-places; so he gets under the bed and goes to work. Then Miss Cora and Miss Laura come in so quietly--not wanting to wake anybody--that he doesn't hear them, and he gets caught there. That's the way it must have been."
"But why," Mrs. Madison inquired of this authority, "why do you suppose he lit the lamp?"
"To see by," answered the ready Miss Peirce. It was accepted as final.
