"Now," continued my wife, "you two men must eat your dinner in the kitchen to-night. The woman who cooks for me is ill to-day, and you will have to take pot-luck. I have let the fire in the stove go out, and have been using the gas range; so you will find the kitchen cooler than the dining-room, and by eating there you will save me work, besides."
So we went into the kitchen, where we found the table already laid for us.
"Before we sit down," said my wife, turning smilingly to our friend, "I am going to show you the treat you were so clever in guessing. But you are not to have it at once; that will come after the cold meat. The tomatoes are nice and hot, and I have put them in here to keep them from cooling too fast:"—and with these words she kneeled upon the floor and opened the iron door which shut in a wide but shallow cavity in the masonry that formed the base of the open fireplace.
This fireplace was an unusual feature in a modern kitchen, and we, at least, had never put it to any use. It projected slightly into the room, and on the sides of it, and against the wall in each case, were, respectively, the cook stove and gas range. Under its hearth, and but a few inches above the level of the room, was the hollow space I have mentioned—I believe it was what is sometimes called a "Dutch oven"—eight inches high, perhaps, two feet wide, and eighteen inches deep. From this space my wife partly drew out for our inspection an iron baking pan, in which an even dozen of deliciously cooked, golden-and-red, crumb-stuffed tomatoes were sociably shouldering each other:—then, after hearing our expressions of satisfaction with their appearance, she pushed the pan back again, closed the iron door, and sat down with us to dinner.
The table stood against the wall, directly under the window. My wife was seated at the end next to the fireplace, I was opposite her, and our friend was at the side, his back to the hall door and his face to the window. Thus he and my wife were each within two feet of the fireplace and the chamber under it, and the iron door guarding our treasure was in direct range of my own eyes from the position I occupied.
Having despatched the earlier portions of the repast, my wife arose, removed the used dishes to a side table, set others in their places, and with the remark: "Now for the tomatoes!" swung open the iron door under the fireplace. The interior, however, was absolutely empty:—the tomatoes, and the heavy baking pan that had held them, had disappeared!
Our friend and I sprang from our chairs in astonishment and incredulity—but the fact was undoubted; the treat which had been so much anticipated had been snatched, as it were, from our very lips. Our friend turned from one to the other of us a face so comically set between wonder and disappointment that I burst out laughing in spite of myself. But my ill-timed levity was promptly checked by my wife, who was at the moment giving a competent imitation of a lioness robbed of her whelps.
"Oh!" she cried, seemingly addressing nothing in particular, although she might have felt—as I did—that she was speaking to a derisive audience; "that is too bad of you! To steal my tomatoes, when I worked over them so long! Bring them back instantly!" But they remained invisible, and over all a sarcastic silence brooded. Then she turned upon us unfortunate men.
"Have you been playing me a trick?" she demanded. "Do you know what has become of those tomatoes?" "Certainly not"—this to both questions. Neither of us had moved from his chair since we sat down to dinner and she had shown us the pan and its contents. Nor had she, for that matter, except when she had risen to change the dishes, and even then she had not left the room.
All that could be said was that the tomatoes had been exhibited, and then had been shut up again behind the door. There was no possible doubt about that—it was equally certain that they had vanished. Very well, then let us search for them! This we did, and with great thoroughness, all over the house, and in every part of the grounds; the outhouse at the back was also carefully inspected. I even got the ladder and went, in turn, upon the roofs of both structures, looked down the chimneys:—"nothing doing" (to employ an Oriental expression not then, unhappily, in use); nowhere any trace of the missing pan or of the tomatoes.