trunk?" he called over the din of the truck motor.
Opper only nodded, exhaustedly. He could scarcely think, scarcely hear.
"Got to watch out for that kind of thing," the man offered amiably. "Minute you park your car somewhere some thief tries to break in."
Opper shuddered perceptibly. He thought of a thief breaking in, furtively sliding his hand along the trunk while he stared around to see that he was not watched. . . .
The attendant was staring at him. Opper pulled himself together.
"That fills it," he said. "Quart of oil. And I want some tire-tape too, if you carry it."
"Sure. How much do you want?"
"A lot. Two or three large-sized rolls"
Suddenly Opper's voice was ringing in comparative silence. The truck motor had been abruptly shut off. Opper stared wildly at the truck. And at the same time, in the quiet, he heard the faint whimper sound from the depths of the trunk.
At once he raised his own voice almost to a shriek.
"I'm in a hurry—I'll take the hose out and screw on the cap—you get the tire-tape, three rolls—forget about the oil, I don't think I need it—hurry up—hurry"
The bewildered attendant let himself be pushed away from the tank. Sweating and shivering, Opper drew out the hose, and screwed the cap back on. The mewling sounded constantly from the trunk. On and on. The driver of the truck near-by was staring first at the trunk and then at him.
The attendant came out of the building with three big rolls of black pitch tape in his hands. Opper fairly jumped to the steering-wheel, started the motor and raced it. The whimpering sound was overwhelmed.
"Here's the tape," said the attendant. "What you want with so much?"
"How much is it?" babbled Opper, unhearing. "Never mind. Here's five—that'll cover it. Keep the rest."
He drove rapidly out of the station. Behind him the driver of the truck looked at the station attendant.
"The guy's crazy," said the driver.
"Drunk, maybe," the attendant supplied. "Funny way he had of looking at that trunk. Oh, well!" He shrugged and went on about his work.
Ten miles away, Opper stopped once more at the side of the road. He got out, with the rolls of tire-tape in his shaking hands.
He had had an idea just before noon that he cursed himself for not having had before.
The cat, locked in the trunk, could live indefinitely on the air that trickled in the cracks. But if the trunk were patched at every slight crevice, the beast would stop that hideous mewling in short order. Then, without that sound coming forth to betray him, he could go anywhere he liked for as long as he pleased.
With unsteady fingers he peeled the foil off the first roll of tape. He pressed strip after strip over the jagged small hole made by the jack in the trunk lid. Then he went over the rest of the trunk.
The tape did not adhere very well to the metal at first. Shivering and cursing, mumbling incoherently, with his eyes glaring out of the hollows in his face like the eyes of a man staring up from the bottom of a well, he pressed the tape so that it would stick.
He sealed up every crack of the
