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A crate marked Stationery. It would be printed forms for the timekeepers, perhaps. But it wasn't. It dropped out. The plane bellowed on. And suddenly there was a burst of blue-white flame on the desert below. The box that should have contained timecards had contained something very much more explosive.
And, assuredly, this House of Peace was infinitely better than the miserable crate wherein he had spent twenty horrible and jouncing and smelly and noisy hours. From one to another of the group strayed the level sorrowful gaze. After the swift inspection, Laddie's eyes rested again on the Mistress.
This afforded him solid enjoyment, together with the charm of his adored pipe and he asked for nothing better. Thus an hour, two of them, and more passed, with nothing out-of-the-way taking place to attract his attention. He figured that if the pilot of the Curtiss-Robin crate intended to come back that night, he was subject to some sort of delay.
Mappo had very sharp teeth, even if he was a monkey, and he could give some good hard bites. But now he was going to be good. The net, with poor Mappo in it, was dragged up close to the crate, and a door in the crate was opened. Then part of the net was pulled to one side, and Mappo saw a hole where he thought he might slip out. He gave a jump, hoping he could get back into the tall trees again.
A far-away and faint buzzing sound came to Perk's ears but instead of adding to his excitement it really seemed to cool his blood, for surely this had nothing whatever to do with snakes of any kind. "Huh! must be a crate partner!" bubbled the relieved Perk. "No question about that, Perk, and growing clearer right along, showing it's heading this way."
The man does not appear to have been openly charged with any gravely unbecoming thing, but it is noted in the ship's log as a "curious circumstance" that albeit he brought his baggage on board the ship in a newspaper, he took it ashore in four trunks, a queensware crate, and a couple of champagne baskets.
At the railroad station, the crate was handled, not with deliberate roughness, but with such carelessness that it half-slipped out of a baggageman's hands, capsized sidewise, and was caught when it was past the man's knees but before it struck the cement floor. But, Michael, sliding helplessly down the perpendicular bottom of the crate, fetched up with his full weight on the injured paw.
When I trotted, I rattled like a crate of dishes, and that annoyed me; and moreover I couldn't seem to stand that shield slatting and banging, now about my breast, now around my back; and if I dropped into a walk my joints creaked and screeched in that wearisome way that a wheelbarrow does, and as we didn't create any breeze at that gait, I was like to get fried in that stove; and besides, the quieter you went the heavier the iron settled down on you and the more and more tons you seemed to weigh every minute.
Meantime some geese from a neighboring farm had come sailing out into the ford, to have a look at their friends in the crate, and the geese in the crate, wild to be out on the water with their comrades, craned their long necks far out between the laths, and set up a tremendous squawking.
In the living-room the men laughingly drank toasts to his future, and from the high-columned portico Marian Devant waved him good-bye, as in his clean padded crate he was driven off, a bewildered youngster, to the station.
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