stable. In
a dark corner Tunis Latham saw a huge grain box, for once the Ball
farm had supported several span of oxen and a considerable dairy
herd, its cover raised and its maw gaping wide. There was something
moving there in the murk, something fluttering.

"Come here, boy!" gasped Cap'n Ira, hurrying across the barn door.
"I'm so crippled I can't git her up, and she's dove clean to the
lower hold, tryin' to scrape out a capful o' oats for that dratted
Queen of Sheby."

"Aunt Prue!" shouted Tunis, reverting to the title he had addressed
her by in his boyhood. "It's never her?"

A muffled voice stammered:

"Get me out! Get me out!"

"Heave hard, Tunis! All together now!" gasped Cap'n Ira, as the
younger man reached over the old woman's struggling heels and seized
her around the waist.

"Up she comes!" continued the excited old man, as though he were
bossing a capstan crew starting one of the _Susan Gatskill's_
anchors.

Tunis Latham set Prudence Ball on her feet, but the old woman was
forced to lean against the stalwart young man for a minute. She
addressed her husband in some heat.

"Goodness gracious gallop! Why don't you sing a chantey over me, I
want to know? You'd think I was a bale of jute being snaked out of a
ship's hold. Good land!"

"There, there, Prudence!" exclaimed Cap'n Ira. "You're safe, after
all! It--it was something awful!"

"I cal'late it was," rejoined the old woman rather bitterly. "And I
didn't get them oats, after all."

"I'll 'tend to all that, Aunt Prue," said Tunis.

"If it hadn't been for that dratted Queen of Sheby"--Cap'n Ira
glared malevolently at the rather surprised-looking countenance of
the gray mare in her box--"you wouldn't have got into that jam."

"If it hadn't been for you taking that dose of snuff when I was
expecting nothing of the kind, I wouldn't have dove into that feed
box, Ira, and you know it very well."

"I swan!" admitted her husband in a feeble voice. "I forgot again,
didn't I?"

"I don't know as you forgot, but I know you mighty near sneezed your
head off. You'll be the death of me some day, Ira, blowin' up that
way. I wonder I didn't jump clean through the bottom of that feed
box when I was just reaching down to get a measure of oats."

"Aunt Prue," Tunis interposed, "why do you keep the little tad of
feed you have to buy for Queenie in this big old chest?"

"There!" Cap'n Ira hastened to rejoin, glad likewise to turn the
trend of conversation