At no time did Trotter feel that there was anything momentous in
the movement. But it aroused his curiosity. It challenged
investigation. It set off his inquisitive young soul into
spreading pyrotechnics of imagination. And he realized, as he
walked up to the barrel, that his earlier sense of timidity had
disappeared. He quite calmly lifted the parcel from the barrel
top. Then he quite calmly dropped the other parcel in its place.
He was a little astonished, as he started on again, at the
pregnant weight of this new parcel. But he did not stop to
investigate. He did not care to gulp and lose the mystery at one
swallow. He scurried off with it, chucklingly, like a barnyard
hen with a corncob, to peck at it in solitude. He swung south and
then west again, to his own street. He went up his own steps,
through his own door, and up to his own top-floor room with the
rakish back wall. There he cautiously lighted the gas, drew the
blinds, and locked himself in. Next, he dragged a chair over to
the bedside, sat down on it, and carefully untied the parcel
string. Then, with somewhat accelerated pulse, he unwrapped the
paper-screened enigma.
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