In the pantry, which, planning for the future, he had entered several times already by the small serving window, he had noticed in a casual way that there was a door set into the wall. It was a square door, a cupboard door he supposed, set about three feet above the floor. One day he gave it a whack by accident, and hearing that the whack made an unusually hollow drumlike sound, he decided to open the door. It was hard work to get it open because it was stuck in its frame. (Everything in the house was stuck, being swollen with damp and disuse, and all the Blakes developed good muscles and bad blisters that summer simply from the amount of lifting, yanking, shoving, pushing, and pulling that was required of them.)
Finally, though, Foster managed to wrench the thing open, and looked in at what appeared to be a very small elevator in a shaft.
"Hey, Dave!" yelled Foster. "Come look at this!"
Davey came from the kitchen, where he had been industriously grinding up acorns in the coffee grinder; a fact unknown to Mrs. Blake.
"What is it?" he inquired. "An elevator?"
"Not for people. Maybe for dogs," said Foster, who had never seen a dumb-waiter in his life.
"Maybe for children?" Davey wondered.
"Well, come on. What are we waiting for?" invited Foster; and he hiked himself up and into the box of the dumb-waiter. "Come on in, Dave; there's room for two if we sit kind of squeezy."
