anything
that showed up at the mouth of the harbor. Of course if she had stopped
to think she would have known that a torpedo didn't come through a house
at the snail's pace the stove was moving at when it looked through at
her.

"But my land, at a time like that what is a body to think?" she
inquired. Of course as soon as she could get her wits together she could
see that it was her own stove, and nothing to be afraid of in itself if
only she knew what was animating it.

There was the rub. The truth is, the performance of the stove, at that
hour of the night, too, was so wholly out of the ordinary that she and
Elmer had not so much as stirred out of their tracks for the fraction of
a second it took the thing to come clear into the room. Pearl said later
that she thought she was seeing things.

"Scared? I was petrified! I couldn't stir hand or foot," she told her
friend. "You talk about your flabbergasted women! I never had such a
feeling come over me before."

Of course neither of them had the faintest notion of what was at the
back of it, and that made it all the worse. Pearl lay there under the
clothes as limp as a rag, and the main boom of the _Minnie Williams_,
which as we know was the thing behind it all, urged the stove forward
until it was in square contact with the foot of the bed.

Now if there was one thing on which Pearl Higgins prided herself it was
her bed. It was a mountainous, whale-backed, feather-bedded four-poster,
built in the days of San Domingo mahogany, and quite capable of
supporting the weight of a baby elephant without a quiver. Equipped with
the legs of a colossus it had a frame to match. Tradition had it that a
governor of the state had once lain in it. If there was one thing sure,
therefore, it was that the bed would not collapse. But then again the
_Minnie Williams_ was a lady not to be denied. She must come on; she
could not help it for her heart, for the bitter end of the chain cable
was not yet, and she still had way on her.

The bed, the stove and the boom met, they fitted together as if they had
been made for one another from the beginning, they engaged each other
like vertebra in a spine, they stiffened. There came a fearful rending
of laths; the mopboard buckled; two vases of alabaster fell from the
parlor mantel, and almost at the same moment the red plush clock with
the stone cuckoo-bird over the dial and the music box "where its gizzard
should have been," as Elmer always sa