There was the rub. The truth is, the performance of the stove, at that hour of the night, too, was so wholly out of the ordinary that she and Elmer had not so much as stirred out of their tracks for the fraction of a second it took the thing to come clear into the room. Pearl said later that she thought she was seeing things.
"Scared? I was petrified! I couldn't stir hand or foot," she told her friend. "You talk about your flabbergasted women! I never had such a feeling come over me before."
Of course neither of them had the faintest notion of what was at the back of it, and that made it all the worse. Pearl lay there under the clothes as limp as a rag, and the main boom of the _Minnie Williams_, which as we know was the thing behind it all, urged the stove forward until it was in square contact with the foot of the bed.
Now if there was one thing on which Pearl Higgins prided herself it was her bed. It was a mountainous, whale-backed, feather-bedded four-poster, built in the days of San Domingo mahogany, and quite capable of supporting the weight of a baby elephant without a quiver. Equipped with the legs of a colossus it had a frame to match. Tradition had it that a governor of the state had once lain in it. If there was one thing sure, therefore, it was that the bed would not collapse. But then again the _Minnie Williams_ was a lady not to be denied. She must come on; she could not help it for her heart, for the bitter end of the chain cable was not yet, and she still had way on her.
The bed, the stove and the boom met, they fitted together as if they had been made for one another from the beginning, they engaged each other like vertebra in a spine, they stiffened. There came a fearful rending of laths; the mopboard buckled; two vases of alabaster fell from the parlor mantel, and almost at the same moment the red plush clock with the stone cuckoo-bird over the dial and the music box "where its gizzard should have been," as Elmer always said, fell likewise. Pearl said afterward she knew that had gone because it started playing there on the floor at a great rate. And the next thing she knew she was in the parlor herself; and such a mess! She didn't know as she ever wanted to lay eyes on it again after that night's works.