"I can not help being troubled," he returned, just as evenly.
"'You see, it makes me ill for days if my car runs over a dog.'"

Luckily, at that moment Dal came in. He pushed his way through
the crowd without a word, shut off the lights, crashed through
the pans and slammed the shutters closed. Then he turned and
addressed the rest.

"Of all the lunatics--!" he began, only there was more to it than
that. "A fellow goes to all kinds of trouble to put an end to
this miserable situation, and the entire household turns out and
sets to work to frustrate the whole scheme. You LIKE to stay
here, don't you, like chickens in a coop? Where's Flannigan?"

Nobody understood Dal's wrath then, but it seems he meant to
arrange the plot himself, and when it was ripe, and the hour
nearly come, he intended to wager that he could break the
quarantine, and to take any odds he could get that he would free
the entire party in half an hour. As for the plan itself, it was
idiotically simple; we were perfectly delighted when we heard it.
It was so simple and yet so comprehensive. We didn't see how it
COULD fail. Both the Mercer girls kissed Dal on the strength of
it, and Anne was furious. Jim was not so much pleased, for some
reason or other, and Mr. Harbison looked thoughtful rather than
merry. Aunt Selina had gone to bed.

The idea, of course, was to start an embryo fire just inside the
windows, in the pans, to feed it with the orange-fire powder that
is used on the Fourth of July, and when we had thrown open the
windows and yelled "fire" and all the guards and reporters had