Page:Christopher Morley--Tales from a rolltop desk.djvu/138

About three shovelfuls, that's all. What is this—some kind of a game to freeze us out?'

"Mrs. Vesey wrung her hands, and we all ran down to the cellar. It was as Blackmore had said. The bins were empty, save for a few lumps."

Dove gazed down thoughtfully at the coal office on the pier below us, where a wagon was loading.

"On a mellow afternoon like this," he said, "coal doesn't seem quite so pressing a concern; but I tell you, in a bleak boarding-house about Thanksgiving time, with no heat of any sort available but a gas-jet, it is a different matter. We were an angry and puzzled lot that night. Mrs. Vesey protested so pitifully that there had been coal in the bins only the day before, and asserted so repeatedly that she had heard the noise of the new load going in, that we could not help believe her. She promised to call up her coal man the first thing the next morning, and we also agreed to go round and visit him in a body, to add our personal appeals; but how on earth several tons of coal could have been stolen out of the cellar without any one hearing it seemed to us a mystery.

"The next morning we visited the coal-dealer en masse—in a coalition, as Blackmore said—and by spirited imprecation and paying cash we extracted a promise to have a couple of tons sent