The girl hardly spoke to Oswald again that night, merely giving him these cold showers of superiority when he would thrust himself on her notice. And she kept me out there with her till bedtime, not giving the happy trunk owner a chance at her alone. That girl had certainly learned a few things beyond fudge and cheese straws in her time. She knew when she had the game won. Sure, it was all over with Oswald. He had only one more night when he could call himself a free man; he tried hard enough not to have even that. He looked like he wanted to put a fence round the girl, elk-high and bull-tight. Of course it's possible he was landed by the earnest wish to find out how she had opened his trunk; but she never will tell him that. She discussed it calmly with me after all was over. She said poor Oswald had been the victim of scientific curiosity, but really it was time for her to settle down. We was in her room at the time and she was looking at the tiny lines round her eyes when she said it. She said, further, that she was about to plan her going-away gown. I asked what it would be, and she said she hadn't decided yet, but it would be something youth-giving. Pretty game, that was! And now Oswald has someone to guard his trunk keys for him--to say nothing of this here new specimen of organic fauna. * * * * * Then I talked. I said I was unable to reach the lofty altitude of the Prof when even a fair mystery was concerned. I was more like Oswald with his childish curiosity. How, then, did the young woman open the trunk? Of course, I could guess the answer. She had found she could really do it with a hairpin, and had held off for effect. Still, I wanted to be told. "Nothing easy like that," said Ma Pettengill. "She'd been honest with the hairpins. She didn't tell me till the day before they were leaving. 'It was a perfectly simple problem, requiring only a bit of thought,' she says. 'It was the simple thing people do when they find their front door locked. They go round to the back of the house and pry up a kitchen window, or something.' She pledged me to secrecy, but I guess you won't let it go any farther. "Anyway, this is what she done: It was a time for brutal measures, so she'd had Abner wheel that trunk over to the blacksmith shop and take the hinges off. Abner just loves to do any work he don't have to do, and he had entered cordially into the spirit of this adventure. It used up his whole day, for which he was drawing three dollars from me. He took off one side of four pair of hinges, opened the trunk at the back far enough to reach in for the keys, unlocked it and fastened the hinges back on again.