Page:Conflict (1927).pdf/235

 out till all hours of the morning, if the family had been at home to ask questions. As it was, he had carefully avoided the neighborhood where he lived. No one who knew him, even by sight, must see him lugging the doll-house around. Otherwise he might have taken it to the apartment, dismembered it with a saw and hatchet, and burned it in the kitchen stove, like a dead body one doesn't wish to be found with.

He knew exactly where he was going. He had had the spot picked out for days—an old gravel-pit, on a lonely road, discovered one Saturday afternoon after a long bus-ride and journey on foot. It was the third turn to the right after you left the State road, about half a mile beyond a barn deserted by its house.

He backed the car into the narrow cart-path that led to the pit, brought it to a standstill, gently let the doll-house down onto the ground, half-dragged, half-lifted it down the bank into the bottom of the pit, very careful not to let it slip or fall. He wished there wasn't so bright a moon. If it was dark, he couldn't see how pretty the darned thing looked, sitting there, with a miniature lawn all around it, on a bed of short green stuff of some kind that had taken root in the gravel pit, and a clump of dock, for all the world like cedar trees, rearing themselves up behind the house, and casting real shad-