"I'm in a terrible hurry. Wife sick. I knew you'd haul me in for speeding, delay me, if you caught me. So I took a chance on getting away. I'm due at the hospital, where my wife is, right now."
The man smiled bleakly.
"Wife sick. Afraid you'd get hauled in for speeding. So you try to crawl away from a machine that will do a hundred miles an hour. Sure."
He looked into the sedan warily, saw that it was empty. He walked to the rear of the car and stared speculatively at the metal trunk.
The trunk presented a strange appearance—dented, battered, with thickly pressed strips of tape crossing and crisscrossing the top and sealing the cracks.
The man just looked at it in the enormous silence—looked till Opper felt the taste of blood in his mouth with the hammering of his heart.
"Only afraid of being pinched for speeding," drawled the trooper. "Sure. What's in that trunk?"
"Nothing," said Opper, the roof of his mouth so dry that he hardly knew how he managed to get the words out. "Not a thing."
"Nothing at all, eh?"
"Well, there are two empty suitcases in there. You know how these trunks are—two special cases fit in them"
"Why is it all stuck up with tape?"
Opper leaned against the fender. He couldn't stand unbraced.
"It was leaking when it rained, so I thought"
His voice died away. By an effort that drained all the remnants of strength he had left, he kept from screaming.
The whimper had sounded again.
Like a man hypnotized, he stared at the trunk. Tape sealed every slightest crack in it. Not one airhole, it would seem, remained for air to filter in to the cat.
But somehow it had stayed alive.
The State trooper was staring intently at the trunk. He turned slowly to Opper.
"I think we'd better open that and have a look," he said.
Opper's head shook back and forth like the head of a mechanical doll.
"No! There's nothing in it. I . . . no!"
"Come on. Where's the key ?"
"I haven't the key. You can search me if you like."
"You haven't a key for the trunk. There's nothing in it. Yet you have it all sealed up as if it was full of rubies. Come on, come on, hand over the key."
"I swear" Opper began. He stopped. The mewling whimper was a little louder.
"You have no right to stop me like this. I'm a respectable citizen and I can prove it. Take me in for speeding if you want to, but that's all you have a right to do"
That hideous whimpering! It seemed to be rising as his voice rose, so that no matter how loudly he talked the whimper sounded through. How had that thing stayed alive? Some obscure slit for ventilation left unnoticed by him in the bottom of the trunk?
He talked on, ever more loudly, screaming against the rising sound of the whimpering.
"absolutely nothing in the trunk—I'd prove it to you, only I haven't the key—search me if you want to—was going to a locksmith in the next town"
His voice died, like a phonograph running down, at the look in the trooper's eyes. And in the silence the whimpering sounded so plainly from the
