“All right then, as they say, return the goods and no questions asked. They say every dog is entitled to one bite and I suppose every boy that has a gun gets one shot. Now you’ve had yours and paid a good price for it. Now, Westy, you bring me that gun, here and now.” He clapped his hands with an air of finality and there followed a tense silence. “If—if I don’t—if I promise not to use—even take it outdoors——” “No, sir, you bring me that gun here and now.” Mr. Martin was grimly mandatory and neither his wife nor daughter ventured a word, though Mrs. Martin looked the picture of misery. Westy brought his precious rifle from his room and handed it to his father. Mr. Martin held it as if it were a poisonous snake. The mirthful Doris placed the apple she was eating upon her head as if to invite the modern William Tell to shoot it off. But Mr. Martin was not tuned to this sort of banter. Unlocking the closet beside the fireplace he gingerly lay the rifle inside it and locked the closet again, joggling the door to give himself double assurance that it was securely locked. In his over-sensitive state, Westy construed this last act as an implication by his father that his son might later try to get the door open. “You don’t have to lock it,” said Westy proudly. “It isn’t you he’s thinking about, dearie,” said Mrs. Martin. “He’s afraid about the gun.” Very likely that was true. Mr. Martin had indeed lost some faith in Westy’s ability to keep his promise where a gun was concerned, but his confidence in his son had not diminished to a point where he believed Westy would invade that forbidden closet. Probably Doris expressed her father’s mental state accurately enough when she said later to her mother, “He isn’t afraid that Westy will break in, he’s afraid that the gun will break out. The rifle has got father’s goat as well as somebody or other’s deer.” “You shouldn’t use such slang, dear,” said Mrs. Martin gently. The dungeon to which the rifle had been consigned was one of those holy of holies to be found in every household. Mr. Martin had always been the exclusive warden of this mysterious retreat. As a little boy, Westy had supposed it contained a skeleton (he never knew why he thought so) and that all his father’s worldly wealth was there secreted in an iron chest of the kind which has always been in vogue with pirates. Later, when he had learned of the existence of banks he had abandoned this belief and had come to know (he knew not how) that the closet contained books which had undergone parental censorship and been banned from the library shelves. Doris had never regarded this closet with the same reverential awe that Westy had shown for it; she said it was full of moths and that its forbidden literature was easily procurable through other sources.