Somehow, with the morning our suspicions, if we had any, vanished. Mr.
Muldoon had been up at dawn, and when we wakened he had already brought
water from a near-by spring and was boiling some in the teakettle.
Seen by daylight, he was very good-looking. He had blue eyes with black
lashes and dark-brown hair, and a habit of getting up when any of us did
that kept him on his feet most of the time. His limp was rather
better—or his ankle.
“That’s what a little mothering has done for me,” he said gayly, over
his coffee and mackerel. “It’s a long time since I’ve had any one to do
anything like that for me.”
“But surely your wife——” began Tish. He started and changed color. We
all saw it.
“My wife!”
“You’ve got a wife and two children, haven’t you?”
He looked at us all and drew a long breath.
“Ladies,” he said, “I see some of my painful history is known to you.
May I ask—is it too much to beg—that—that we do not discuss that
part of my life?”
Tish apologized at once. We could not tell, from what he said, whether
he had been divorced or had lost them all from scarlet fever. Whichever
it was, I must say he was not depressed for very long, although he had
reason enough for depression, as we soon learned.
“It’s like this,” he said. “They know I’m here in the glen—the outlaws,
I mean. The red-bearded man, Naysmith, has sworn to get me.”
“Get you?” from Aggie.
“Shoot me. The other three all owe me grudges, too, but Naysmith’s the
worst. He’s just out of the pen—I got him a ten-year sentence for this
very thing, robbing an express car.”
“Ten years!” I exclaimed. “You look as if you hadn’t shaved in ten
years!”
He looked at me and smiled.
“I’m older than you think,” he said, “and, anyhow, he got a lot off for
good behavior. It’s outrageous, the discount that’s given to a criminal
for behaving himself. He got—I think I am right when I say—yes, he was
sent up in ’07—he got seven years off his sentence.”
We all thought that this was a grave mistake, and Tish, whose father was
once warden of the penitentiary, observed that there was nothing like
that in old times, and she would write to the governor about it. Tish
has written to the governor several times, the last occasion being the
rise in price of brooms.
“It’s like this,” said Mr. Muldoon. “They’ve got the glen guarded.
There’s a man at each end and the rest are covering the hilltops. A
squirrel couldn’t get out without their knowledge. I might have before I
got this leg, but now I’m done for.”
“Oh, no!” we chorused.
“It amounts to that,” he said dejectedly. “They’ve been watching you
women and they’re not afraid of you. As long as I stay in the cave here
I’m safe enough, but let me poke my nose out and I’m gone. It’s an awful
thing to have to hide behind a woman’s petticoats!”
We could only silently sympathize.
It was bright and clear that day. The sun came out and dried the road
below. It would have been a wonderful day to go on, but none of us
thought of it. As Tish said, here was a chance to assist the law and a
fellow being in peril of his life. Our place was there.
Even had we doubted Mr. Muldoon’s story, we had proof of it before noon.
A man with a gun came out on a ledge of rock across the valley and
stood, with his hands to his eyes, peering across at our cave. Tish was
hanging some of our clothing out to dry, and although she saw the outlaw
as well as we did she did not flinch. After a time the man seemed
satisfied and disappeared.
Tish came into the cave then and took a spoonful of blackberry cordial.
As we knew, her intrepid spirit had not quailed; but, as she said, one’s
body is never as strong as one’s soul. Her knees were shaking.
We put in a quiet and restful afternoon. Mr. Muldoon had a pack of cards
with him and we played whist. He played a very fair game, but he was on
the alert all the time. At every sound he started, and once or twice he
slipped out into the thicket and searched the glen in every direction
with his eyes.
He had asked us, if the outlaws surprised us, to say that he was Tish’s
nephew, Charlie Sands, and to stick to it. “Unless it’s Naysmith,” he
said. “He knows me.” From that to calling us Aunt Tish, Aunt Aggie and
Aunt Lizzie was very easy. At four o’clock we stopped playing, with Mr.
Muldoon easily the winner, and Aggie made fudge for everybody.
Late in the afternoon Tish called me aside. She said she did not want
Mr. Muldoon to feel that he was a burden, but that we were almost out of
provisions. We had expected to buy eggs, milk and bread at farmhouses,
and instead we had been shut up in the cave. She thought there was a
farm up the glen, having heard a cow-bell, and she wanted me to go and
find out.
“Go yourself!” I said somewhat rudely. “If you want to be shot down in
your tracks by outlaws, well and good. I don’t.”
Aggie, called aside, refused as firmly as I had. Tish stood and looked
at us both with her lip curling.
“Very well,” she said coldly; “I shall go. But if I get my neuralgia
again from wading through the creek bottom don’t blame me!”
She put on her overshoes and, taking a tin bucket for milk and her
trusty rifle, she started while Mr. Muldoon was showing Aggie a new game
of solitaire. I went to the cave mouth with her and listened to the
crackling of twigs as she slid down into the valley. She came into view
at the bottom much sooner than I had expected, having, as I learned
later, slipped on a loose stone and rolled fully half the way down.
The next two hours seemed endless. Mr. Muldoon, tiring of solitaire, had
rolled himself up in a corner and was peacefully sleeping, with his
injured foot on Aggie’s hop pillow. Aggie and I sat on guard, one on
each side of the cave mouth, and stared down at the valley, which was
darkening rapidly.
Tish had been gone two hours and a half and no sign of her, when Aggie
began to cry softly.
“She’ll never come back!” she whimpered. “The outlaws have got her and
killed her. Oh, Tish, Tish!”
“Why would they kill her?” I demanded. “Because she’s trying to buy milk
and eggs?”
“B-because she knows too much,” Aggie wailed. “We’ve found their lair,
that’s why—don’t tell me this isn’t an outlaw’s cave. It’s just b-built
for it. They’ll do away with her and then they’ll come after us.”
Aggie never carries a secret weight in her bosom. She always opens up
her heart to the nearest listener. This probably relieves Aggie, but it
does not make her a cheerful companion. Eight o’clock and darkness came,
and still no Tish. I went into the cave and brought out my gun, and
Aggie roused Mr. Muldoon and explained the situation to him. He grew
quite white.
“Good heavens!” he exclaimed. “What possessed her anyhow? To the
farmhouse! Why, they’ll——”
His face more than his words convinced us that the matter was really
serious. He examined Aggie’s revolver, which he mostly carried in his
hip pocket, and, going to the mouth of the cave, listened carefully.
Everything was quiet. The cave and both sides of the valley were in deep
shadow, but over the ridge of the Camel’s Back across from us there was
still a streak of red sunset light. Mr. Muldoon looked and pointed.
Against the background of crimson cloud a man’s figure stood out
clearly. He was peering down toward us, although in the dusk he could
hardly have seen us, and he carried a gun. Mr. Muldoon smiled faintly.
“Well, they’ve spotted me, I guess,” he said. “I’d better move on before
I get you into trouble. They won’t hurt women.”
“Why don’t you shoot him?” Aggie asked. “It would be one bandit less. If
you do arrest him, and he gets nearly all his sentence off for good
behavior, he’ll be out again in no time, doing more mischief.”
But at that moment we saw the man on the hill throw his gun to his
shoulder and aim at something moving below in the valley. Aggie
screamed, and I believe I did also.
“Tish!” cried Aggie. “He’s shooting at Tish!” And at that instant the
bandit fired. He fired three times, and the noise of his gun echoed
backward and forward among the hills. We thought we heard a yell from
the valley. Then the next second there was a faint crack from below and
the outlaw’s gun flew out of his hands. Mr. Muldoon’s jaw dropped. “Did
you see that?” he said feebly. “Did—you—see—that—shot?”
The outlaw disappeared from the skyline and perhaps ten minutes later
Tish crawled up to the cave and put down a tin pail full of milk, a
glass of jelly wrapped in a newspaper, and a basket of eggs. Aggie fell
on her and cried with joy.
“Be careful of those eggs,” Tish warned her. “That outlaw charged me
forty cents a dozen.”
“You gave him a good fright anyhow,” said Aggie fondly.
“Fright?”
“When you shot at him.”
“Oh, that one! I’m talking about the woman at the farm.”
“And—the one on the hill over there?”
“Oh! Well, he fired at me and I fired back. That’s all.”
With an air of exaggerated indifference Tish swaggered into the cave and
took off her overshoes.
“Hurry up supper, Ag,” she said—never before or since has she called
Aggie “Ag”—“I’m starving.”
She said she had heard little or nothing. She had found the farmhouse,
had bought her supplies from a surly woman and had come away again.
Asked by Mr. Muldoon if she had seen any men, she said she had seen a
farmhand milking. That was all, except the outlaw on the hill.
But under her calmness Tish was terribly excited. I could tell it by her
glittering eyes and the red spot in each cheek. Manlike, Mr. Muldoon did
not see these signs; he ate very little and sat watching her,
fascinated. Only once, however, did he broach the subject.
“I had no idea you were such a shot, Miss Letitia,” he said. “It—that
was a marvel.”
“Oh, I shoot a little,” said Tish coolly. “Only for my own amusement, of
course.”
Mr. Muldoon made no reply. He was very thoughtful all evening, did not
care to play whist, and watched Tish whenever he could, furtively.
Tish herself was in an exalted mood, but not about the shot—she was
modest enough about that.
And with cause. Months after she told us how it happened. She said she
was carrying the eggs and milk with her left hand and had the gun in her
right, when a shot struck a tree beside her. She was so startled that
her finger pulled the trigger of her own rifle, which was pointed up,
with the result we know of. She would probably never have confessed even
then, had she not taken rheumatic fever and thought she was dying.
When Mr. Muldoon went out to fix Modestine for the night Tish called us
to the back of the cave.
“I bought the milk and eggs,” she said hurriedly, “and having a dime
left—your missionary dime, Aggie, I borrowed it—I went back and bought
a glass of jelly. Men like preserves. The woman wrapped it in a
newspaper, and there is a full account of the robbery and of Muldoon
being after the outlaws. He’s after the outlaws, but he’s after the
reward too. They’re quoted at a thousand dollars!”
“He can have the thousand dollars for all of me,” said Aggie.
“A thousand dollars!” said Tish. “A thousand dollars to hand in to the
church as the return from your missionary dime! And if we don’t get it
Muldoon will! As soon as he can get about on his leg he’ll cease being
hunted and begin to hunt. Why should he have it? He has plenty of
chances, and we’ll never have another.”
That was all she had a chance to say, Muldoon joining us at that moment.
We retired early, but I did not sleep well. I wakened from time to time
and I could hear Tish stirring next to me. At last I reached over and
touched her.
“Can’t you sleep?” I whispered.
“Don’t want to,” she whispered back. “I’ve got it all fixed, Lizzie.
We’ll take those outlaws back to the city, roped two by two.”
It was a cool spring night, but I broke into a hot perspiration.
V
Tish began with Mr. Muldoon the next morning. He could not leave the
cave to carry up water, for daylight revealed another guard across the
valley and it was clear we were being watched. While Aggie and I went to
the spring Tish talked to him.
She told him that he had undertaken too much, single-handed, and that he
should have brought a posse with him. He agreed with her. He said he had
started with a posse, but that they had split up. Also he insisted that
but for his accident he could have managed easily.
“I’m up against it,” he said, “and I know it. They’ll get me yet. For
the last day or two they’ve been closing up round this cave, and in a
night or two they’ll rush it. They’ve got their headquarters at that
farmhouse.”
“The thing for you to do then,” said Tish, “is to get out while there is
time. You can get help and come back.”
“And leave you women here alone?”
“They’re not after us,” Tish replied, “and we’ve managed alone for a
good many years. I guess we’ll get along.”
But when she proposed her plan, which was that he should put on Aggie’s
spare outfit and her sun veil and ride out of the valley on Modestine’s
back in daylight, he objected. He said no outlaw worthy of the name
would fall for a thing like that, and he said he wouldn’t wear skirts,
and that was all there was to it.
But in the end Tish prevailed, as usual.
“I’m going to the farmhouse this morning and I am going to say that one
of the ladies is leaving this afternoon and going back home. That will
be you. I wish you had a razor, but the veil will hide that. They’ll not
molest you. You’ll not only look like Aggie—you’ll be Aggie.”
Well, it seemed to be his best chance, although none of us dared to
think what might happen if the hat blew off or Aggie’s gray alpaca
ripped at the seams.
We worked feverishly all day, letting out the dress and setting forward
the buttons on her raincoat. Mr. Muldoon was inclined to be sulky. He
sat at the back of the cave, playing solitaire and every now and then
examining the road maps. Aggie was depressed too. But, as Tish said,
getting rid of Muldoon was the first step toward the thousand dollars,
and even if Aggie never got her gray alpaca again it had seen its best
days.
That morning, while Aggie and I sewed and ripped and Mr. Muldoon sat
back in the cave with the road map on his knees, Tish went to the
farmhouse. She came back at eleven o’clock with a chicken for dinner and
a flush on each cheek.
“I’ve fixed it, Mr. Muldoon,” she said. “I talked to one of the
outlaws!”
“What?” screeched Aggie.
“He’d come in for something to eat—the red-bearded one. We had quite a
chat. I told him we were traveling like Stevenson—with a donkey; but
that one of the ladies had an abscess on a tooth and was going home. He
said it was no place for women and offered himself as an escort.”
Mr. Muldoon groaned. “What am I going to do if one of them comes up and
makes an ass of himself?” he demanded. “Kiss him?”
Tish looked at him coldly.
“You’ll have your jaw tied up,” she said. “That will cover your chin,
and you needn’t speak. Point to your jaw. Anyhow, they’ll not bother
you. I said the toothache had affected your disposition, and we were
just as glad you were going. The red-haired man says he’s got relatives
near the mouth of the valley and you can stay there overnight. One of
the men folks pulls teeth in emergencies.”
It is hard, writing all this of Tish, to remember that she has always
been a truthful woman. As Charlie Sands said later, when we told him the
story and he had sat, open-mouthed, staring from one to the other of us,
no one knows what depths of mendacity lie behind the most virtuous
countenance.
We started “Aggie” off at two o’clock that afternoon, sitting sideways
on Modestine, jaw tied up, veiled and sun-hatted, with Aggie’s
flowered-silk bag hanging to one wrist and a lunch-basket on the other
arm. Tish and I saw “her” down the hill and kissed “her” good-by.
This was Tish’s idea. I thought it unnecessary, but as a matter of fact,
no matter what Charlie Sands may say, it was not a real kiss, going as
it did through a veil and a bandage.
The man with a gun watched “her” off, and Tish, having waved “her” out
of sight round a curve, looked up at him and nodded. Far away as he was,
he saw that and swept his hat off with quite an air.
* * * * *
Tish’s plan was very simple. She told us as we cleared up the cave after
the day’s excitement.
“When I go for the evening milk,” she said, “I shall mention that we
have a young man with us, a stranger, who has hurt his ankle and cannot
walk. And I’ll ask for arnica. That’s all.”
“That’s all!” Aggie and I exclaimed together.
“Certainly that’s all. Sometime tonight they’ll rush the cave.”
“You’re a fool!” said Aggie shortly.
“Why?” demanded Tish. “We won’t be in it. We’ll be outside. The moment
they are in we’ll start to shoot. Not one of them will dare to stick his
nose out.”
When we told this to Charlie Sands he slid entirely off his chair and
sat on the floor. “Not really!” he kept saying over and over. “You
dreamed it! You must have! A thing like that!” I hastened to explain.
“Tish planned it,” I said. I remember him, looking at Tish—who was
crocheting as she told the story—and moistening his lips. He was quite
green in color.