“I would like to ask you one,” he said. “How do you reconcile blackberry
cordial with the W. C. T. U.?”
Tish went white with anger, and would no doubt have flayed him with
words, as our blackberry cordial is made from her own grandmother’s
recipe, and a higher principled woman never lived. But unluckily the
driver of the furniture wagon we were standing in had returned without
our noticing it, and drove off at that moment, taking us with him.
It was about this time that Charlie Sands came to see me one day,
looking worried.
“Look here,” he said, “what’s this about my having appendicitis?”
“Well, you ought to know,” I replied rather tartly. “Don’t ask me if you
have a pain.”
“But I haven’t,” he said, looking aggrieved. “I’m all right. I never
felt better.”
He then said that once, when a small boy, he had been taken with a
severe attack of pain, following a picnic when he had taken considerable
lemonade and pickles, followed by ice cream.
“I had forgotten it entirely,” he went on. “But the other day Aunt Tish
recalled the incident, and suggested that I get my appendix out. It
wouldn’t matter if she had let it go at that. But she’s set on it. I may
waken up any morning and find it gone.”
I could only stare at him, for he is her favorite nephew, and I could
not believe that she would forcibly immolate him on a bed of suffering.
“I used to think she was fond of me,” he continued. “But she’s—well,
she’s positively grewsome about the thing. She’s talked so much about it
that I begin to think I _have_ got a pain there. I’m not sure I haven’t
got it now.”
Well, I couldn’t understand it. I knew what she thought of him. Had she
not, when she fell out of the tree, immediately left him all her
property? I told him about that, and indeed about the entire incident,
except the secret in the barn. He grew very excited toward the end,
however, where we met the blackberry-cordial person, and interrupted me.
“I know it from there on,” he said. “Only I thought Culver had made it
up, especially about the gun being levelled at him, and the machine in
the creek bed. He’s on my paper; nice boy, too. Do you mean to say—but
I might have known, of course.”
He then laughed for a considerable time, although I do not consider the
incident funny. But when I told him about Mr. Culver’s impertinent
question at the recruiting station, he sobered.
“You tell her to keep her hands off him,” he said. “I need him in my
business. And it won’t take much to send him off to war, because he’s
had a disappointment in love and I’m told that he walks out in front of
automobiles daily, hoping to be struck down and make the girl sorry.”
“I consider her a very sensible young woman,” I observed. But he was
already back to his appendix.
“You see,” he said, “my Aunt Letitia has a positively uncanny influence
over me, and if I have it out I can’t enlist. No scars taken.”