I
It is doubtful if Aggie and I would have known anything about Tish’s
plan had Aggie not seen the advertisement in the newspaper. She came to
my house at once in violent excitement and with her bonnet over her ear,
and gave me the newspaper clipping to read. It said:
“WANTED: A small donkey. Must be gentle, female, and if possible
answer to the name of Modestine. Address X 27, Morning News.”
“Well,” I said when I had read it, “did you insert the advertisement or
do you propose to answer it?”
Aggie was preparing to take a drink of water, but, the water being cold
and the weather warm, she was dabbing a little on her wrists first to
avoid colic. She looked up at me in surprise.
“Do you mean to say, Lizzie,” she demanded, “that you don’t recognize
that advertisement?”
“Modestine?” I reflected. “I’ve heard the name before somewhere. Didn’t
Tish have a cook once named Modestine?”
But it seemed that that was not it. Aggie sat down opposite me and took
off her bonnet. Although it was only the first of May, the weather, as I
have said, was very warm.
“To think,” she said heavily, “that all the time while I was reading it
aloud to her when she was laid up with neuralgia she was scheming and
planning and never saying a word to me! Not that I would have gone; but
I could have sent her mail to her, and at least have notified the
authorities if she had disappeared.”
“Reading what aloud to her—her mail?” I asked sharply.
“‘Travels with a Donkey,’” Aggie replied. “Stevenson’s ‘Travels with a
Donkey.’ It isn’t safe to read anything aloud to Tish any more. The
older she gets the worse she is. She thinks that what any one else has
done she can go and do. If she should read a book on poultry-farming she
would think she could teach a young hen to lay an egg.”
As Aggie spoke a number of things came back to me. I recalled that the
Sunday before, in church, Tish had appeared absorbed and even more
devout than usual, and had taken down the headings of the sermon on her
missionary envelope; but that, on my leaning over to see if she had them
correctly, she had whisked the paper away before I had had more than
time to see the first heading. It had said “Rubber Heels.”
Aggie was pacing the floor nervously, holding the empty glass.
“She’s going on a walking tour with a donkey, that’s what, Lizzie,” she
said, pausing before me. “I could see it sticking out all over her while
I read that book. And if we go to her now and tax her with it she’ll
admit it. But if she says she is doing it to get thin don’t you believe
it.”
That was all Aggie would say. She shut her lips and said she had come
for my recipe for caramel custard. But when I put on my wraps and said I
was going to Tish’s she said she would come along.
Tish lives in an apartment, and she was not at home. Miss Swift, the
seamstress, opened the door and stood in the doorway so we could not
enter.
“I’m sorry, Miss Aggie and Miss Lizzie,” she said, putting out her left
elbow as Aggie tried to duck by her; “but she left positive orders to
admit nobody. Of course if she had known you were coming—but she
didn’t.”
“What are you making Miss Letitia?” Aggie asked sweetly. “Summer
clothes?”
“Yes. Some little thin things—it’s getting so hot!”
“Humph! I see you are making them with an upholsterer’s needle!” said
Aggie, and marched down the hall with her head up.
I was quite bewildered. For even if Tish had decided on a walking tour I
couldn’t imagine what an upholsterer’s needle had to do with it, unless
she meant to upholster the donkey.
We got down to the entrance before Aggie spoke again. Then:
“What did I tell you?” she demanded. “That woman’s making her a——”
But at that very instant there was a thud under our feet and something
came “ping” through the floor not six inches from my toe, and lodged in
the ceiling. Aggie and I stood looking up. It had made a small round
hole over our heads, and a little cloud of plaster dust hung round it.
“Somebody shot at us!” declared Aggie, clutching my arm. “That was a
bullet!”
I stooped down and felt the floor. There was a hole in it, and from
somewhere below I thought I heard voices. It was not very comfortable,
standing there on top of Heaven knows what; but we were divided between
fear and outrage, and our indignation won. With hardly a word we went
back to the rear staircase and so to the cellar. Halfway down the stairs
both of us remembered the same thing—that it was Tish’s day to use the
basement laundry, and that perhaps——
Tish was not in the laundry, nor was Hannah, her maid. But Tish’s
blue-and-white dressing sacque was on the line, and the blue had run, as
I had said it would when she bought it. In the furnace room beyond we
heard voices, and Aggie opened the door.
Tish and Hannah were both there. They had not heard us.
“Nonsense!” Tish was saying. “If anybody had been hit we’d have heard a
scream; or if they were killed we’d have heard ’em fall.”
“I heard a sort of yell,” said poor Hannah. “I don’t like it, Miss Tish.
The time before you just missed me.”
“Why did you stick your arm out?” demanded Tish. “Now take that
broomstick and we’ll start again. Did you score that?”
“How’ll I score it?” asked Hannah. “Hit or miss?” She went to the
cellar wall and stood waiting, with a piece of charcoal in her hand. The
whitewashed wall was marked with rows of X’s and ciphers. The ciphers
predominated.
“Mark it a miss.”
“But I heard a yell——”
“Fiddle-de-dee! Are you ready?” Tish had lifted a small rifle into
position and was standing, with her feet apart, pointing it at a white
target hanging by a string from a rafter. As she gave the signal, Hannah
sighed, and, picking up a broomhandle, started the target to swaying,
pendulum fashion; Tish followed it with the gun.
I thought things had gone far enough, so I stepped into the cellar and
spoke in ringing tones.
“Letitia Carberry!” I said sternly.
Tish pulled the trigger at that moment and the bullet went into the
furnace pipe. It was absurd, of course, for Tish to blame me for it, but
she turned on me in a rage.
“Look what you made me do!” she snapped. “Can’t a person have a moment’s
privacy?”
“What I think you need,” I retorted, “is six months’ complete seclusion
in a sanitarium.”
“You nearly shot us in the upper hall,” Aggie put in warmly.
“Well, as long as I didn’t shoot you in the upper hall or any other
place, I guess you needn’t fuss,” said Tish. “Ready, Hannah.”
This time she shot Hannah in the broomhandle, and practically put her
_hors de combat_; but the shot immediately after was what Tish
triumphantly called a clean bull’s-eye—that is, it hit the center of
the target.
That is the time to stop, when one has made a bull’s-eye in any sort of
achievement, I take it. And Tish is nobody’s fool. She took off her
spectacles and wiped the perspiration and gunpowder streaks from her
face. She was immediately in high good humor.
“Every unprotected female should know how to handle a weapon,” she said
oracularly, and, sitting down on the edge of the coal-bin, proceeded to
swab out the gun with a wad of cotton on the end of a stick.
“The poker has been good enough for you for fifty years,” I retorted.
“And if you think you look sporty, or anything but idiotic, sitting
there in a flowered kimono and swabbing out the throat of that gun——?”
Just then the janitor came down, and Tish gave him a dollar for the use
of the cellar and did not mention the furnace pipe. Aggie and I glanced
at each other. Tish’s demoralization had begun. From that minute, to the
long and entirely false story she told the red-bearded man in Thunder
Cloud Glen several days later, she trod, as Aggie truthfully said, the
downward path of mendacity, bringing up in the county jail and
hysterics.
We went upstairs, Tish ahead and Aggie and I two flights behind,
believing that Tish with an unloaded gun was a thousand times more
dangerous than any outlaw with an entire arsenal loaded to the muzzle.
We had a cup of tea in Tish’s parlor, but she kept us out of the
bedroom, where we could hear Miss Swift running the sewing machine.
Finally Aggie said out of a clear sky:
“Have you had any answers to your advertisement?”
Tish, who had been about to put a slice of lemon in her tea, put it in
her mouth instead and stared at us both.
“What advertisement?”
“We know all about it, Tish,” I said. “And if you think it proper for a
woman of your age to go adventuring with only a donkey for company——”
“I’ve had worse!” Tish snapped. “And I’m not feeble yet, as far as my
age goes. If I want to take a walking tour it’s my affair, isn’t it?”
“You can’t walk with your bad knee,” I objected. Tish sniffed.
“You’re envious, that’s what,” she sneered. “While you are sitting at
home, overeating and oversleeping and getting fat in mind and body, I
shall be on the broad highway, walking between hedgerows of
flowering—flowering—well, between hedgerows. While you sleep in
stuffy, upholstered rooms I shall lie in woodland glades in my
sleeping-bag and see overhead the constellation of—of what’s its name.
I shall talk to the birds and the birds will talk to me.”
Sleeping-bag! That was what Aggie had meant that Miss Swift was making.
“What are you going to do when it rains?”
“It doesn’t rain much in May. Anyhow, a friendly farmhouse and a glass
of milk—even a barn——”
Aggie got up with the light of desperation in her eyes. Aggie hates
woods and gnats, has no eye for Nature, and for almost half a century
has pampered her body in a featherbed poultice, with the windows closed,
until the first of June each year. Yet Aggie rose to the crisis.
“You shan’t go alone, Tish,” she said stoutly. “You’ll forget to change
your stockings when your feet are wet and you can’t make a cup of coffee
fit to drink. I’m going too.”
Tish made a gesture of despair, but Aggie was determined. Tish glanced
at me.
“Well?” she snapped. “We might as well make it a family excursion.
Aren’t you coming along, too, to look after Aggie?”
“Not at all,” I observed calmly. “I’ll have enough to do looking after
myself. But I like the idea, and since you’ve invited me I’ll come, of
course.”
At first I am afraid Tish was not particularly pleased. She said she had
it all planned to make four miles an hour, or about forty miles a day;
and that any one falling back would have to be left by the wayside. And
that if we were not prepared to sleep on the ground, or were going to
talk rheumatism every time she found a place to camp, she would thank us
to remember that we had really asked ourselves.
But she grew more cheerful finally and seemed to be glad to talk over
the details of the trip with somebody. She said it was a pity we had not
had some practice with firearms, for we would each have to take a
weapon, the mountains being full of outlaws, more than likely. Neither
Aggie nor I could use a gun at all, but, as Tish observed, we could pot
at trees and fenceposts along the road by way of practice.
When I suggested that the sight of three women of our age—we are all
well on toward fifty; Aggie insists that she is younger than I am, but
we were in the same infant class in Sunday-school—three women of our
age “potting” at fences was hardly dignified, Tish merely shrugged her
shoulders.
She asked us not to let Charlie Sands learn of the trip. He would be
sure to be fussy and want to send a man along, and that would spoil it
all.
What with the secrecy, and the guns and everything, I dare say we were
like a lot of small boys getting ready to run away out West and kill
Indians. In fact, Tish said it reminded her of the time, years ago, when
Charlie Sands and some other boys had run away, with all the carving
knives and razors they could gather together, and were found a week
later in a cave in the mountains twenty miles or so from town.
Tish showed us her sleeping-bag, which was felt outside and her old
white fur rug within. Aggie planned hers immediately on the same lines,
with her fur coat as a lining; but I had mine made of oilcloth outside,
my rheumatism having warned me that we were going to have rain. I was
right about the rain.
I had an old army revolver that had belonged to my father, and of course
Tish had her coal-cellar rifle, but Aggie had nothing more dangerous
than a bayonet from the Mexican War. This being too heavy to carry, and
dull—being only possible as a weapon by bringing the handle down on
one’s opponent’s head—Aggie was forced to buy a revolver.
The man in the shop tried to sell her a small pearl-handled one, but she
would not look at it. She bought one of the sort that goes on shooting
as long as one holds a finger on the trigger—a snub-nosed thing that
looked as deadly as it was. She was in terror of it from the moment she
got it home, and during most of the trip it was packed in excelsior,
with the barrel stuffed with cotton, on Modestine’s back.
Which brings me to Modestine.
Tish received three answers to her advertisement: One was a mule, one a
piebald pony with a wicked eye, and the third was a donkey. It seemed
that Stevenson had said that the pack animal of such a trip should be
“cheap, small and hardy,” and that a donkey best of all answered these
requirements.
The donkey in question was, however, not a female. Tish was firm about
this; but on no more donkeys being offered, she bought this one and
called him Modestine anyhow. He was very dirty, and we paid a dollar
extra to have him washed with soap powder, as our food was to be
carried on his back. Also the day before we started I spent an hour or
so on him with a fine comb, with gratifying results.
I must confess I entered on the adventure with a light heart. Tish had
apparently given up all thought of the aeroplane; her automobile was
being used by Charlie Sands; the weather was warm and sunny, and the
orchards were in bloom. I had no premonition of danger. The adventure,
reduced to its elements of canned food, alcohol lamp, sleeping-bags and
toothbrushes, seemed no adventure at all, but a peaceful and pastoral
excursion by three middle-aged women into green fields and pastures new.
We reckoned, however, without Aggie’s missionary dime.
Aggie’s church had sent each of its members a ten-cent piece, with
instructions to invest it in some way and to return it multiplied as
much as possible in three months. This was on Aggie’s mind, but we did
not know it until later. Really, Aggie’s missionary dime is the story.
If she had done as she had planned at first and invested it in an egg,
had hatched the egg in cotton wool on the shelf over her kitchen range
and raised the chicken, eventually selling the chicken to herself for
dinner at seventy-five cents, this story would never have been written.
What the dime really bought was a glass of jelly wrapped in a
two-day-old newspaper. But to go back:
We were to start from Tish’s at dawn on Tuesday morning. Modestine’s
former owner had agreed to bring him at that hour to the alley behind
Tish’s apartment. On Monday Aggie and I sent over what we felt we could
not get along without, and about five we both arrived.
Tish was sitting on the floor, with luggage scattered all round her and
heaped on the chairs and bed.
She looked up witheringly when we entered.
“You forgot your opera cloak, Lizzie,” she said, “and Aggie has only
sent five pairs of shoes!”
“I’ve got to have shoes,” Aggie protested.
“If you’ve got to have five pairs of shoes, six white petticoats, summer
underwear, intermediates and flannels, a bathrobe, six bath towels and a
sunshade, not to mention other things, you want an elephant, not a
donkey.”
“Why do we have a donkey?” I asked. “Why don’t we have a horse and
buggy, and go like Christians?”
“Because you and Aggie wouldn’t walk if we did,” snapped Tish. “I know
you both. You’d have rheumatism or a corn and you’d take your walking
trip sitting. Besides, we may not always keep to the roads. I’d like to
go up into the mountains.”
Well, Tish was disagreeable, but right. As it turned out the donkey,
being small, could only carry the sleeping-bags, our portable stove and
the provisions. We each were obliged to pack a suitcase and carry that.
We started at dawn the next day. Hannah came down to the alley and
didn’t think much of Modestine. By the time he was loaded a small crowd
had gathered, and when we finally started off, Tish ahead with
Modestine’s bridle over her arm and Aggie and I behind with our
suitcases, a sort of cheer went up. It was, however, an orderly
leave-taking, perhaps owing to the fact that Tish’s rifle was packed in
full view on Modestine’s back.
I have a great admiration for Tish. She does not fear the pointing
finger of scorn. She took the most direct route out of town, and by the
time we had reached the outskirts we had a string of small boys behind
us like the tail of a kite. When we reached the cemetery and sat down to
rest they formed a circle round us and stared at us.
Tish looked at her watch. We had been an hour and twenty minutes going
two miles!