cop. ‘All ya windows and door was locked on the inside tight as a tick.’ Downstairs, we could hear the tromping of the other police. Police were all over the place; doors were yanked open, drawers were yanked e. How did the Bodwells react, when a shoe was thrown into their house?
f. What did the Bodwells think when they heard the mother shout? open, windows were shot up and pulled down, furniture fell with dull thumps. A half-dozen policemen emerged out of the darkness of the front hallway upstairs.
They began to ransack the floor; pulled beds away from walls, tore clothes off hooks in the closets, pulled suitcase and boxes off shelves. One of them found an old zither that Roy had won in a pool tournament. ‘Looky here, Joe,’ he said, strumming it with a big paw. The cop named Joe took it and turned it over.
‘What is it?’ he asked me. ‘It’s an old zither our guinea pig used to sleep on,’ I said. It was true that a pet guinea pig we once had would never sleep anywhere except on the zither, but I should never have said so. Joe and the other cop looked at me a long time.
They put the zither back on a shelf. ‘No sign o’ nothing’, said the cop who had first spoken to mother, ‘The lady seems hysterical.’ They all nodded, but said nothing; just looked at me. In the small silence we all heard a creaking in the attic. Grandfather was turning over in bed.
‘What’s that?’ snapped Joe. Five or six cops sprang for the attic door before I could intervene or explain. I realized that it would be bad if they burst in on grandfather unannounced, or even announced. He was going through a phase in which he believed that General Meade’s men, under steady hammering by Stonewall Jackson, were beginning to retreat and even desert.
When I got to the attic, things were pretty confused. Grandfather had evidently jumped to the conclusion that the police were deserters from Meade’s army, trying to hide