Beasly finally came back. He carried three inexpertly-made sandwiches wrapped in an old newspaper and a quart bottle almost full of milk.

“You certainly took your time,” said Taine, slightly irritated.

“I got interested,” Beasly explained.

“Interested in what?”

“Well, there were three big trucks and they were lugging a lot of heavy stuff down into the basement. Two or three big cabinets and a lot of other junk. And you know Abbie’s television set? Well, they took the set away. I told them that they shouldn’t, but they took it anyway.”

“I forgot,” said Taine. “Henry said he’d send the computer over and I plumb forgot.”

Taine ate the sandwiches, sharing them with Towser, who was very grateful in a muddy way.

Finished, Taine rose and picked up his shovel.

“Let’s get to work,” he said.

“But you got all that stuff down in the basement.”

“That can wait,” said Taine. “This job we have to finish.”

It was getting dusk by the time they finished.

Taine leaned wearily on his shovel.

Twelve feet by twenty across the top and ten feet deep—and all of it, every bit of it, made of the milk-glass stuff that sounded like a bell when you whacked it with a shovel.

They’d have to be small, he thought, if there were many of them, to live in a space that size, especially if they had to stay there very long. And that fitted in, of course, for it they weren’t small they couldn’t now be living in the space between the basement joists.

If they were really living there, thought Taine. If it wasn’t all just a lot of supposition.

Maybe, he thought, even if they had been living in the house, they might be there no longer—for Towser had smelled or heard or somehow sensed them in the morning, but by that very night he’d paid them no attention.

Taine slung his shovel across his shoulder and hoisted the pick.