“’I hight Sir Lancelot du Lake, the Child,
     Gentul-hearted, meek, and mild. 
     What though I’m but a littul child,
     Gentul-hearted, meek, and——­’ oof!”

All of this except “oof” was a quotation from the Child Sir Lancelot, as conceived by Mrs. Lora Rewbush.  Choking upon it, Penrod slid down from the fence, and with slow and thoughtful steps entered a one-storied wing of the stable, consisting of a single apartment, floored with cement and used as a storeroom for broken bric-a-brac, old paint-buckets, decayed garden-hose, worn-out carpets, dead furniture, and other condemned odds and ends not yet considered hopeless enough to be given away.

In one corner stood a large box, a part of the building itself:  it was eight feet high and open at the top, and it had been constructed as a sawdust magazine from which was drawn material for the horse’s bed in a stall on the other side of the partition.  The big box, so high and towerlike, so commodious, so suggestive, had ceased to fulfil its legitimate function; though, providentially, it had been at least half full of sawdust when the horse died.  Two years had gone by since that passing; an interregnum in transportation during which Penrod’s father was “thinking” (he explained sometimes) of an automobile.  Meanwhile, the gifted and generous sawdust-box had served brilliantly in war and peace:  it was Penrod’s stronghold.

There was a partially defaced sign upon the front wall of the box; the donjon-keep had known mercantile impulses: 

     The O. K. RaBiT Co. 
     Penrod ScHoFiELD and Co.
     iNQuiRE for PRicEs

This was a venture of the preceding vacation, and had netted, at one time, an accrued and owed profit of $1.38.  Prospects had been brightest on the very eve of cataclysm.  The storeroom was locked and guarded, but twenty-seven rabbits and Belgian hares, old and young, had perished here on a single night—­through no human agency, but in a foray of cats, the besiegers treacherously tunnelling up through the sawdust from the small aperture which opened into the stall beyond the partition.  Commerce has its martyrs.

Penrod climbed upon a barrel, stood on tiptoe, grasped the rim of the box; then, using a knot-hole as a stirrup, threw one leg over the top, drew himself up, and dropped within.  Standing upon the packed sawdust, he was just tall enough to see over the top.

Duke had not followed him into the storeroom, but remained near the open doorway in a concave and pessimistic attitude.  Penrod felt in a dark corner of the box and laid hands upon a simple apparatus consisting of an old bushel-basket with a few yards of clothes-line tied to each of its handles.  He passed the ends of the lines over a big spool, which revolved upon an axle of wire suspended from a beam overhead, and, with the aid of this improvised pulley, lowered the empty basket until it came to rest in an upright position upon the floor of the storeroom at the foot of the sawdust-box.