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 carcass 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 passed 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 analysis 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.