rly enough
to provide Martha with the ability to do the same."

"So what can we do?"

"About the only thing we can do is to hide," said James. "Luckily,
most of the business is conducted out of this place by mail. Write
letters to some boarding school situated a good many miles from here.
Ask the usual routine questions about entering a seven-year-old girl
and an eight-year-old boy for one semester. Robert Holmes, our
postmaster-taxicab driver-station-master, reads everything that isn't
sealed. He will read the addresses, and he will see replies and read
their return address."

"And then we'll pretend to send you and Martha to boarding school?"

James nodded. "Confinement is going to be difficult, but in this climate
the weather gets nasty early and that keeps people out of one another's
hair."

"But this station-master business--?"

"We've got to pull some wool over Robert's eyes," said James. "Somehow,
we've got to make it entirely plausible. You've got to take Martha and me
away and come back alone just as if we were in school."

"We should have a car," said Mrs. Bagley.

"A car is one piece of hardware that I could never justify," said James.
"Nor," he chuckled, "buy from a mail-order house because I couldn't
accept delivery. I bought furniture from Sears and had it delivered
according to mailed instructions. But I figured it better to have the
folks in Shipmont wondering why Charles Maxwell didn't own a car than to
have them puzzling why he owned one that never was used, nor even moved.
Besides, a car--costs--"

Mrs. Bagley smiled with real satisfaction. "There," she said, "I think I
can help. I can buy the car."

James was startled. "But can you afford it?"

Mrs. Bagley nodded seriously. "James," she said, "I've been scratching
out an existence on hard terms and I've had to make sure of tomorrow.
Even when things were worst, I tried to put something away--some weeks it
was only a few pennies, sometimes nothing at all. But--well, I'm not
afraid of tomorrow any more."

James was oddly pleased. While he was trying to find a way to say it,
Mrs. Bagley relieved him of the necessity. "It won't be a brand-new
convertible," she warned. "But they tell me you can get something that
runs for two or three hundred dollars. Tim Fisher has some that look
about right in his garage--and besides," she said, clinching it, "it
gives me a chance to give out a little more Maxwell and boarding-school
propaganda."