Mike Flannery, the agent of the Interurban Express Company, leaned over the desk in the company's office in Westcote and shook his fist. Mr. Morehouse, angry and red, stood on the other side of the desk shaking with fury. The argument had been long and hot. At last Mr. Morehouse had become speechless. The cause of the trouble lay on the desk between the two men. It was a box with two guinea pigs inside. "Do as you like, then!" shouted Flannery. "Pay for them and take them. Or don't pay for them and leave them here. Rules are rules, Mr. Morehouse. And Mike Flannery is not going to break them." "But you stupid idiot!" shouted Mr. Morehouse, madly shaking a thin book beneath the agent's nose. "Can't you read it here – in your own book of transportation rates? 'Pets, domestic, Franklin to Westcote, if correctly boxed, twenty-five cents each.'" He threw the book on the desk. "What more do you want? Aren't they pets? Aren't they domestic? Aren't they correctly boxed? What?" He turned and walked back and forth rapidly, with a furious look on his face. "Pets," he said. "P-E-T-S! Twenty-five cents each. Two times twenty-five is fifty! Can you understand that? I offer you fifty cents."