Page 55 - Lulu and Bob in Verbo City

Bob found his hand irresistibly drawn to the dwindling pool of
departed fauna. He barely heard his sister recite the completed tenth
line: “‘Doesn’t serve a purpose—energy drain’.” He rummaged in the
cookie jar and pulled out a Southern California kit fox. “Now I will
demonstrate my cleverness. As the second word is provided—‘the’—
I infer the first one is a verb the subject of which ended the previous
line. It could be ‘bludgeons’ or ‘clubs’ or any related word; so we
must proceed to the third item, unambiguously ‘will’. Therefore,
based on our commonest idioms, I choose ‘saps’ for the first word. I
think Uncle was specifically showing us a couple of saps.”
“To do that he would have provided a mirror, not a puzzle.” Lulu
watched the piecemeal dismemberment of the kit fox, and then
resumed decoding the rebus. “Next is ‘2’, then a three-piece word: a
prisoner plus another helping of herring plus the letter ‘U’. Hmm. I
have it: ‘continue’.”
“The next-to-last one is curious: an arrow pointing at the back end
of a ship plus ‘R’. Is it ‘rudder’, ‘stern’, ‘wake’, ‘aft’, ‘propeller’ or
‘taffrail’? None of them works with an ‘R’ except ‘aft’: ‘after’.” The
last of the kit fox disappeared. “Then it’s a snippet of cloth seen
through a microscope. Is it ‘shred’ or ‘evidence’ or ‘textile’ or what?”
“I think none of them,” said Lulu. “It indicates some quality of the
object which needs magnifying; in this case the weave. And ‘we’ve’ is
just what this line needs for its final word.”

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