Now I am not defending what followed. But the Lewis man had been nice
to us, and, as Tish said tartly to Charlie Sands, women who had lived
in single blessedness as long as we had, learned to think quick and
act quicker. As to the law, we sent a check to the farmer whose pig we
killed--and with pork at its present price it was ruinous, although
we were glad it had not been a cow; and as to using our missionary
money to make up for the packet Aggie lost--as we said, we considered
that it had been used in missionary work. It was hardest, of course,
on the _Morning Star_ reporter. Only a week or so ago we had to go to
Noblestown to get a new handle for the meat-chopper. We were in the
machine outside the store, and when we saw him it was too late. Tish
was wearing his necktie--having gathered it up with her clothes that
awful night, and not knowing his name she could not send it back to
him--and she clapped her hand over it. But he saw it.
“Good afternoon,” he said, grinning.
“What do you mean by addressing us?” Tish demanded, trying to pull the
collar of her duster over the tie.
“You don’t mean to say you’ve forgotten me already!” he exclaimed,
looking grieved. “Don’t you remember--your--our room at the Sherman
House?”
“Certainly not,” Tish said haughtily.
He pulled out a card and scribbled something on it. “My card,” he said.
He leaned over from the curb and gave it to Tish.
“Don’t bother about the tie,” he said. “I never liked it anyhow. But--I
lost a scarfpin that night. I--I suppose you don’t know anything about
it?”
Out of the corner of her eye Tish saw Aggie make a clutch at her neck,
and she threw her a warning glance.
“I am afraid you have made a mistake,” she said stiffly, and just then
the hardware man brought out the handle. Tish was so excited that she
started the car without paying for it, and when we looked back he and
the reporter were staring after us; and the reporter distinctly said,
“Those women will be wealthy some day.”
“Why didn’t you let me give him his pin?” Aggie demanded when we were
safely out of sight. “I--I feel like a thief.”
“Fiddle! And confess?” said Tish. “We’ll send it to him. I’ve got his
card.”
But all he had written on it, after all, was, “A. Dresser. Private
Bureau.” Charlie Sands has promised to return the pin.
Well, all this time I have left the three of us huddled in our
nightgowns on the side of the bed, with sheets draped over us, and
the _Morning Star_ gentleman with his ear to the connecting door and
taking down every word that was said, in shorthand. Robertson was
offering the girl, and enough money for Mr. Lewis to marry on, for his
vote on something or other. I reckon the balance between a man’s honor
and his cupidity hangs pretty even anyhow, and when you throw a girl to
one side or the other it swings the scale. The Lewis man was yielding
and Tish was breathing hard.
“The hussy!” she muttered.
“Did you notice how pretty her hair was in the sunlight?” whispered
Aggie.
Somehow it came over me then how young the girl was, and what kind of
moral sense could one expect of a girl with that red-headed scamp for a
father?
Strangely enough, the plot was gentle Aggie’s. Aggie is like baking
powder--she rises when she gets heated up. And she was mad clear
through. We had no trouble gathering our clothes in our arms, although
I could not find my shoe, which Tish had thrown at the bureau. Then we
sat and waited. At the last minute Aggie got a little weak and wanted
blackberry wine, but I had nothing in the satchel but arnica.
All we intended to do was to get the yellow notebook--to meet strategy
with strategy. The rest, while unexpected, followed naturally. But when
I look out the window from my desk and see Aggie’s placid face, and
Tish’s austere Methodist profile, it is difficult to associate them or
myself with the three partly dressed creatures who-- But to go back.
We had locked the door into the hall and each of us had her clothes.
When the two men in the next room went out Mr. _Morning Star_ turned to
us with a chuckle.
“Thanks for your forbearance, ladies,” he said, “we’ve got that villain
Robertson where he ought to have been a dozen years ago. And as for
Lewis--” He shut his notebook with a bang, and there was something in
his face besides exultation. “To buy a girl like that!” he said--and I
knew. He wanted the girl himself.
Aggie was to ask to see the notebook and then toss it over the transom
into the corridor. While the reporter was trying to get out the locked
door into the hall we could escape into the adjoining room, lock the
connecting door, walk around easily and get the notebook, and then make
our escape comfortably.
It would have been all right, but Aggie can not throw. The first
attempt failed by seven feet. The young man was so astonished, however,
that he stood with his mouth open, and the second trial sent it through.
“What in the name of Heaven did you do that for?” he demanded, thinking
Aggie had suddenly gone mad. Then he rushed to the door. It was locked
and I had the key! We were all in the next room and a bolted door
between us before he realized what had happened.
We had expected, of course, to get the notebook, to dress, and to leave
in the machine quietly, but from that time on there was no time to
think of the conventions. The young man began to hammer on the door
and other doors opened along the hall. Then a bell-boy came up and ran
off in a hurry for a key. I saw Tish putting on her ulster over her
petticoat, and Aggie and I did the same. The next thing we knew we were
down in the empty lobby, and Tish had forgotten the spark plugs!
We got started finally with a steel hairpin for a plug, and as we moved
away I heard the chase coming down the stairs after us. They were
howling “Stop thief!” We were hardly well under way when the bell-boy
came in sight with the bureau man at his heels and a collection of
people in all sorts of costumes following.
Tish says we did forty miles an hour going down the main street. I
should have guessed more than that. I had a fearful exaltation: Aggie
had advanced her speed limit since morning from four miles an hour to
the capacity of the engine, and kept bawling to Tish a phrase she had
caught from Charlie Sands.
“Letter out!” she cried, over and over. “Letter out!”
We stopped on a quiet side street and listened, but there was no noise
of pursuit. Tish got out and stuck her wet finger on the hood, but it
wasn’t boiling.
“There’s nothing coming,” she said. “I’m going to stop long enough to
put on my stockings.”
“I don’t see why you couldn’t have flung your own shoe, Tish,” I
snapped. “What use is one shoe?--unless I lose a leg, and that’s as
like as not before this night’s over.”
“Do you see where we are?” Aggie asked. “Isn’t this where we brought
Miss Anne?”
It was, for Anne opened the door just then and peered down at the car.
“Is that you, father?” she called. She came down the steps, and
the light from the hall fell full on us. We must have looked rather
strange, with Tish putting on her stocking in the driving seat and the
most of our clothing in our laps instead of on us.
“Something has happened!” she said, catching her breath. “Ted!”
“Something _has_ happened,” Tish retorted grimly, and held up the
notebook. “Here’s the _Morning Star’s_ shorthand report of the
interview in which your Ted sold his honor for a mess of pottage--you
being the pottage.”
“Oh, no,” said Miss Anne, going wobbly. “Oh, he wouldn’t--he didn’t do
such a thing!”
“Upon my soul!” I broke in. “Weren’t you fighting him all day to do it?”
“You couldn’t understand,” she said, looking at me with the eyes of a
baby. “I didn’t want him to do it; I wanted him to want to do it.”
“Well, if that’s being in love, thank Heaven for the mind of a
spinster,” I retorted angrily.
“You’ve won,” Tish said. “You’ve got him kneeling at your feet, as
you wanted. But he went down in the mud to do it. And the only reason
the newspapers won’t be slinging some of that very mire to-morrow
is because three elderly women, who ought to have more sense, have
resorted to thievery and lost their reputations and parts of their
garments to save him!”
“I hate him,” said the young woman, with her chin quivering. “I knew
all along I should hate him if he did it. I--I’ll never marry him.”
And with that she turned and started up the steps. Half way up she
turned.
“I’m sorry you went to so much trouble,” she said. “I don’t think he is
worth saving.”
Aggie’s early experience with the roofer stood her in good stead then.
She understood; Tish and I never would have. She got out of the
machine and went up into the vestibule, and a minute later, against the
hall light, we saw the girl’s head on Aggie’s shoulder. Then they both
came down again with their arms wrapped around each other, and Aggie
asked me to move over.
“We’re going to Mr. Lewis’ apartment,” she announced, with a thrill in
her voice. She was maudlin with romance. “It will be proper enough, I
think, with three chaperons. She wants to see him.”
“Not until I put on my other stocking,” Tish put in grimly. “And we
don’t get out of the machine; I’ve been compromised once to-night.”
“They are both young,” Aggie rebuked her gently. “I think, having begun
this thing, we ought to see it through. We will have to be mothers to
her, for she has none.”
Well, we passed Mr. Robertson at the corner of the next street, and
the girl shrank back and covered her face. And then she directed us,
and we overtook the other one as he was going into his doorway. The
girl jumped out and ran after him. We distinctly heard him say, “Anne!
Darling!” And then, what with anxiety and excitement, Aggie took the
worst sneezing spell of the summer, and the rest was lost.
He was terribly ashamed and humiliated, and he said he would take the
girl away and be married right off, only he had that wretched package
of bribe money that made him think, every time he saw it, how unworthy
he was of her! He was going to put it down a sewer drop, but Tish
suggested that they be married and go on a honeymoon, and let us return
the bribe to Mr. Robertson.
So he gave us the package; and, as you know, Aggie lost it later. Then
he asked us if there was a minister in the summer colony at Penzance,
and Tish mentioned Mr. Ostermaier. “I don’t like him,” she remarked,
“and his wife is a dowdy, but I suppose you don’t expect an organ
prelude and floral decorations. Get in.”
I did not mind their sitting back with me, and his kissing her hand
whenever he thought I was not looking. But the thing I objected to was
this: I distinctly overheard him say:
“I was desperate to-night, sweetheart; and, oh, my love, you saved me!”
She saved him!
At a crossroads near Penzance, Tish made them get out, and we directed
them to a landing where they would find a rowboat. We all kissed the
bride; and Mr. Lewis said he had nobody to cheer him on his way,
and wouldn’t we kiss him, too. So we did, and after they had gone
we prepared for Carpenter’s sharp eyes by going into the bushes and
putting on the rest of our clothes.
It was the first thing Carpenter said that caused the accident. He
brought in the ferry-boat and came up the bank to us.
“I’ve been expectin’ you,” he said, with a grin. “I was thinkin’ you
might come over by the Carrick Ferry, and the folks there wouldn’t know
you.”
“I guess they’d take my money without knowing me,” Tish said sharply.
“Well,” he drawled, with a sharp eye on the three of us, “I didn’t want
you to have any trouble. We got a telephone message from Noblestown not
very long ago to look out for an automobile containing three female
desperadoes. The police wants them.”
That was when Tish sent the car over the end of the ferry.
Well, as I said early in the narrative, after Tish and Aggie had
dried off and gone to bed I stood at my window and tried to see into
Ostermaier’s parlor, but all I could see was the sleeve of Mrs.
Ostermaier’s kimono.
As I stood there shivering, the door opened and two shadowy figures
came out of the house and crossed the lawn. Just under my window they
stopped and the tall shadow held open its arms. The smaller one went
into them with a little cry, and they stood there a disgraceful time.
Then they lifted their heads and looked up at our cottage.
“Bless their dear, romantic hearts!” said the girl. I was glad Tish was
asleep.
“They should have been pirates!” said the man. “They are true old
sports. I suppose they’ve had their catnip tea by now and are sound
asleep. Beloved!” he said, and held out his arms again.
Pirates! I went back to bed in a rage, but I couldn’t sleep. Somehow I
kept seeing that young idiot holding out his arms, and I felt lonely.
Finally I filled the hot-water bottle and put it at my back.
“It’s all over, Aggie!” I called--but the only response was a snore
that turned into a sneeze.
THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF LETITIA CARBERRY
PART THREE
CHAPTER I
THE GREEN KIMONO
Nothing would have induced me to tell the scandalous story had it
not been for Letitia’s green kimono. But when it was found at the
Watermelon Camp, two miles from our cottage, hanging to the branch of a
tree, instead of the corduroy trousers and blue flannel shirt that one
of the campers said he had hung there overnight, it seemed to require
explanation. For _one of the men at the Watermelon Camp knew the
kimono_.
He brought it up the next morning, hanging over his arm, and asked
Letitia for the trousers and shirt! He said that the young man who
owned them had to wear a blanket until we returned them, not having
any other clothes in camp. Also, he said there was a particular kind
of bass hook in one of the pockets, and if there was any reason why we
could not return the trousers, would we be kind enough to send back the
hook.
Now Tish is a teacher in the Sunday-School and has been for thirty-five
years. But she looked up from the bowl she was wiping--we had made a
pretense at breakfast, although nobody could eat--and she _lied_.
“I don’t know what you mean by coming here for your corduroy trousers
and flannel shirt,” she said, with a three-cornered red spot in each
cheek. “As for that kimono, I _never saw it before_!”
Then she dropped the bowl. She had to pay twenty cents into the cottage
exchequer for it afterward, and she explained that she felt the bowl
going, and the falsehood slipped out before she knew what she was
saying. Anyhow, it did no good, for the young man in knickerbockers
and a bathing shirt held up the kimono, grinning and pointing to the
laundry tag. It said “Letitia Carberry,” as plain as ink could make it.
Aggie weakened at once. It is always Aggie that weakens. She sat down
on the porch step and began to cry. She had been crying off and on all
morning, having lost her upper teeth when the boat--but that brings me
to the boat.
Just as Aggie threw her apron over her face, we saw old Carpenter, the
boatman, coming up the path. I caught Tish’s arm as she was escaping
into the house. “Not a step,” I whispered sternly. “If they arrest one
of us, they take us all.”
“You see, it was like this,” the young man was saying, “Carleton, one
of our fellows, was out in his motor canoe last night, and it upset.
When he came in, he says he hung his trousers and shirt out on a branch
to dry. Anyhow, when he got up an hour or so ago, his clothes were
gone, and this--er--garment was there instead.” He was staring very
hard at Tish. “He didn’t notice the change, being half asleep, and he
got his feet in the sleeves all right, but when it came to drawing it
up, he noticed something strange about it.”
At the name “Carleton” Aggie threw me an agonized glance from her
apron. She would not speak without her teeth, and Tish was stooping
over the pieces of the bowl. I am a Christian woman, but seeing Aggie
weak-kneed and Tish as shaky as gelatine, I hoped that Carpenter,
the boatman, would have apoplexy or fall and break his leg before he
reached the porch. I turned on the young man at the foot of the steps.
“If you think,” I said indignantly, “that three ladies, past their
youth and with affairs of their own to look after, have nothing better
to do than to wander around at night stealing clothing that they
could not possibly wear, and leaving in exchange articles that they
er--cherish, go in and examine the house.”
Carpenter had come up and stood respectfully by, listening, and to my
horror I saw that he held the other half of Aggie’s broken oar.
“He won’t go into _my_ room!” Aggie said suddenly, and with amazing
clearness, considering her teeth.
“Nonsense,” I snapped. “This young man has seen an unmade bed before.”
But Aggie had gone pale, and suddenly I remembered. The handle of the
very oar Carpenter carried was lying on a chair beside her bed. All
that terrible night she had held on to it as a weapon.
The young man in the bathing shirt only smiled, however, and shifted
Tish’s kimono to the other shoulder.
“Certainly, if you say you haven’t seen Carleton’s clothes,” he said
easily, “the matter is settled. No doubt the same breeze last night
that blew the kimono down to the camp and hung it on the branch of
a tree took the trousers to make a sensation on one of the nearby
islands. I am sorry Carleton didn’t know they were going traveling, he
would at least have had them brushed.”
While I was glaring at him Carpenter stepped forward and placed the oar
blade on the porch. When Aggie saw the name “Witch Hazel” she opened
her mouth like a fish, and I daresay if I had not pinched her she would
have told the whole miserable story then and there. Not that I am
ashamed of it--I am not too old, thank the Lord, to know real love when
I see it--but Aggie has no sense of proportion, and in her telling,
what was pure romance would have become merely assault and battery,
with intent to compound a felony.
“I reckon, Miss Lizzie,” Carpenter said, addressing me, “that you and
Miss Tish and Miss Aggie didn’t take the _Witch Hazel_ out last night
and forget to bring her back, did you?”
Aggie shut her mouth and swallowed.
“Certainly,” I retorted sarcastically. “We decided to take a midnight
row yesterday evening, but the boat leaked. In the middle of the lake
it filled and sank under our feet.”
Tish gave me an awful look, and snapped:
“I suppose if we’d taken your boat out, we’d have brought it back, not
being mermaids.”
“That’s what I argued down at the camp,” he meditated. “I said to them,
‘you boys have been up to some devilment or other, and I’ll git you
yet. It ain’t likely that them three old--them three ladies that can’t
row a stroke or swim a yard would take the _Witch Hazel_ out in the
middle of the night in a storm, sink the boat, and swim home four miles
in time to put up their crimps and get breakfast.’”
“Thirtainly not,” Aggie said with injured dignity, “I can’t thwim a
thtroke.”
Carpenter spat on one of our whitewashed cobblestones. “It’s what
you might call _ree_markable,” he observed. “Not another soul on the
island, and won’t be ’til the Methodist camp meeting next week; one of
the boys at the Watermelon Camp with a blanket on instead of his pants
and a bandage on his head, and the _Witch Hazel_ stole last night by
somebody who cut through her painter with a pair of scissors and takes
her out with two oars that ain’t mates.”
The young man with the kimono dropped it carelessly into Aggie’s lap
and straightened with a glance at her stricken face.
“Scissors!” he repeated. “Oh, come, Abe, you’re no detective. How the
mischief do you know whether the rope was cut with scissors or chewed
off?”
Abe dived into his pocket and brought up two articles on the palm of
his hand.
“Scissored off or chewed off,” he said triumphantly. “Take your choice.”
There, gleaming in the sunlight, were _Tish’s buttonhole scissors and
Aggie’s upper teeth_!
“Found them in four feet of water at the end of the boat dock,” he
said, “where I left the _Witch Hazel_ last night. If them teeth ever
belonged in a fish, then I’m a dentist.”
I remember the next ten minutes through a red haze; I knew in a dim way
that Aggie had clutched at her teeth and disappeared; I heard from far
off Tish’s voice, explaining that Aggie had dropped the scissors in the
water the previous afternoon, and had lost her teeth while lying on the
dock trying to fish them up--the scissors, of course--with a hairpin
on the end of a string. And finally, with the line of the waterfront
undulating before my dizzy eyes like a marcel wave--which is a figure
of speech and not a pun--I realized that Carpenter and the sleeveless
and neckless young man from the camp were retreating down the path, and
I knew that the ordeal was over.
I believe I fainted, for when I opened my eyes again Tish was standing
in front of me with a cup of tea, and she had been crying.
“You needn’t feel so badly about it,” I said, when I had taken a sip of
the tea. “There are times when to lie is humanity.”
“It isn’t that,” Tish whimpered, breaking down again, “but--but the
wretches didn’t believe me!”
“No,” I echoed sadly, “they didn’t believe you.”
“I could think of so many better ones now,” she wailed.
“Never mind,” I said, with a feeble attempt to console her, “they won’t
jail us for lying, anyhow. We are reasonably safe, Tish, unless Mr.
Carleton has Aggie arrested for assault and battery.”
But he did not. The only court concerned was the marriage license
court, from which you will know that this is a love story. Even if it
does begin with a mangy dog.
At least Aggie said it was mange; her parrot had the same moth-eaten
look before it died. But Tish has always maintained that it was fleas.
She says they breed in the grass, and attack dogs in swarms in hot
weather.
CHAPTER II
IT WAS THE DOG
The dog was put ashore under our very noses, by the crew of a passing
launch. We were knitting on our veranda that afternoon, looking across
at Sunset Island, which is four miles away. Carpenter was not in sight,
and from down the beach came the yells and splashes that told that the
college boys at the Watermelon Camp were bathing. We were sitting with
our backs to them, when Tish said suddenly:
“There is a launch coming in.”
There was, a very fine one, although handsome is as handsome does, as
the colored man said about the hippopotamus. For as the launch steamed
past, a man in a white uniform threw something with a thud on to the
dock. It was a dog. The next moment they headed out into the lake
again, paying no attention to Tish, who ran down the path and tried to
signal them with the raffia basket she was making.
The dog came up and sniffed at her.
Now we never had any dogs on the island, even in the season. Tish’s
uncle had been bitten by a dog once, and although he never had
hydrophobia, he was always strange afterward. They say that when he
coughed it was exactly like a bark, and the very sight of a cat upset
him terribly. Also, although the family never said much about this, I
have heard that after he died they found quite a collection of bones
in his upper washstand drawer. And my grandmother saw him once eating
raw meat mixed with onion, between slices of bread! So when we bought
the island, and sold parts of it for cottages, we always put in the
agreement of sale: “No intoxicants, no phonographs and no dogs.”
You may imagine how we felt, therefore, when we saw the dog following
Tish up the path, and biting at her heels. (When a dog bites at your
heels, and isn’t wagging his tail, he is not playing; he is in earnest.
It is much like that line in _The Virginian_--“When you say that,
smile!” But this dog did not smile.)
Tish shouted to us, as she came, to run and shut Paulina, her cat, in
the spare room, and to give her her catnip ball (the cat, not Tish).
And then she came up and dropped on the porch step and covered up her
feet, and the creature sat down before her and dared her to move.
That was the most terrible afternoon of my life. He sat there and
drooled over the step, and growled now and then, and Tish told about
her uncle, and Aggie said she knew a man who had been attacked by a
bulldog, and the only way they got him loose was to give him--the
dog--a hypodermic of poison and pry him off after he died.
To make matters worse, there did not seem to be a soul on the island.
The boys from the camp had disappeared; Carpenter’s cabin was closed
and locked. At tea time the dog heard Paulina wailing up-stairs and he
made a hole in the screen door and went after her. He had chewed almost
through the guest room door before Aggie called him off with the chops
for supper.
That decided us.
About eight o’clock that evening, while the creature was gnawing
at a leg of the dining-room table, we held a whispered conference,
and Tish came forward with a plan. It was very daring, and Aggie
immediately objected. “It’s all very well,” she said, “to sit here in a
rocking-chair and talk about rowing four miles to Sunset Island, with
not one of us knowing anything about a boat, and Lizzie told by that
fortune teller last spring that she would die by drowning. Not only
that. _How are you going to get the dog into the boat?_”
Tish leaned forward cautiously. The Dog was still gnawing in the next
room.
“Chloroform him!” she whispered. “Wait until he gets sleepy. Then take
Lizzie’s bath sponge, soak it with your chloroform liniment, Aggie, and
when he’s stupefied, carry him down and dump him in the boat.”
“Why not let Carpenter do it, in the morning?” Aggie objected. She was
green with nervousness.
“Carpenter!” Tish snorted. “If he ever sees that flea-bitten creature
he will keep him.”
(Carpenter, being an original settler, had never subscribed to the
liquor, phonograph and dog clause.)
At eleven o’clock the Dog turned over on his side and went to sleep. We
were ready. My sponge, saturated with Aggie’s liniment and impaled on
the end of Tish’s umbrella, was held to his nostrils, and we each drew
a long breath. But we had counted without Aggie’s hay fever. Just as
the creature seemed about settled and was growing limp, Aggie began to
sneeze, and by the time the paroxysm was over the dog was awake and
had eaten part of the sponge. It was a terrible disappointment. As Tish
said afterward, we should have anæsthetized Aggie first.
However, perhaps it was for the best, after all, for it made him very
ill, and when, after Tish had washed the floor, she prodded him with
the wooden handle of the mop and he only groaned, he had ceased to be
formidable.
“It’s now or never,” Tish said, with determination, and put on her
overshoes. It had been raining, and luckily Aggie put her plaid shawl
around her shoulders. What we should have done later without that shawl
I shudder to think. Tish put on a knitted cape and I tied a scarf over
my head. Then, with the dog--no longer a capital D--wobbling at the end
of a clothes-line, we started.
At the last minute Tish had a spell of conscience and hunted up a
bottle of cleaning fluid to put in the boat.
[Illustration]
“It’s mostly gasoline,” she said. “If it’s mange it won’t do any
harm, and if it’s fleas it will kill them. We can put it on just before
we leave him on Sunset Island. You start pouring it at his nose and
work along his back. The fleas will drop off his tail. Every creature
deserves a chance.”
None of us thought of the ether in the stuff, although, as it turned
out, it did not hurt the dog. _It was never used on the dog._
We got to the dock without incident, Aggie ahead with the dog, and Tish
and I feeling for the rope of Carpenter’s skiff. Tish had the scissors,
in case we couldn’t untie it. Just as we found it and stooped,
something splashed. Tish straightened and gripped me by the arm.
“Did you throw anything in?” she demanded in an awful tone.
“Stop pinching me, Tish Carberry!” I snapped, “or I will.”
There was silence for a minute; then there was a swirling whitish
appearance at our very feet, and something dark raised itself up in
the water and stood waving its arms. Then it gave a gurgle or two,
choked, coughed and finally sneezed. We knew the sneeze; it was Aggie!
It was when she got her breath that she said the incredible thing, the
thing she flatly denied afterward, but for which she was obliged to pay
five dollars into the fine box.
“That damned dog pulled me in!” she gurgled. “I’ve thwallowed--” She
clapped her hands to her mouth, and we knew at once. Her teeth!
We pulled them both out grimly--Aggie and the dog, and Tish ordered
Aggie to the house for dry clothes at once. “And it might be as well,
Agatha,” she added coldly, “if you would wash your mouth out with soap.
You can buy new teeth, but you can not buy another immortal soul.”
Agatha sloshed a half-dozen steps up the dock. Then she turned on us
both in the darkness.
“If _you_ had thwallowed two gallonth of dirty water, tho that you can
feel it thaking in you when you walk, and had lotht your thell back
comb and your betht upper teeth, you wouldn’t care, Tith Carberry,
whether you had an immortal thoul or not.”
Then she thtalked--stalked, I mean, up to the house. Tish was furious,
but luckily, I have a sense of humor. With Aggie’s soul hanging fire,
so to speak, I sat down on the dock in the rain and laughed. That was
the beginning of my deterioration; from that instant, when I braved
rheumatism and Tish’s displeasure, to that later moment just at dawn,
when we came back to the dock again, draggled, dirty and guilty, I was
forty-nine years young, reckless, disdainful of consequences, unmindful
of wet feet and the proprieties, forgetful even of law and order. That
awful, glorious night, when young Love--but that’s the story.
CHAPTER III
A WET YOUNG MAN
Well, Tish and I got the boat loose, and Tish dropped the scissors into
the water. Then when we got in, Tish insisted on rowing with her face
to the bow of the boat. She said she couldn’t see where she was going
if she didn’t, which, of course, was true enough. We dragged the dog in
by his tail and then sat and waited for Aggie. When she did come she
was sulky, and almost the only words she said that entire night were
“Kill him!” And that was under stress of great excitement, at three
o’clock in the morning.
The night was very black, but a light on the boat-landing at Sunset
Island gave us our direction. Tish and I rowed, I behind her, and as
she had an unexpected habit of scooping the top off a wave with her
oar and throwing it over my face and chest, finally, in desperation I
turned my back to her. It was really easier rowing that way, although
we did not keep very good time. But, as I explained when Tish objected,
it was really safer, for by rowing back to back we could see in both
directions at once.
When we were about a mile from shore, Aggie spoke for the first time.
“The boat’th leaking!” she said.
“Gracious!” I exclaimed, and felt my petticoats. They were sopping.
“Nonsense!” Tish sneered. “It’s the water Lizzie’s been ladling in with
her oars.” Then she caught a wave with her oar, and poured it down my
back. At that minute the dog moved uneasily in the bottom of the boat
and crawled up on the seat in the bow, where he sat and wailed.
We should have gone back. I said so then, but Tish is like all the
Carberrys--immovably obstinate. When I tried to row back to the
landing, _she_ was rowing for Sunset Island, and all we did was to
make as much splash as a paddle-wheel steamer, and not move an inch in
either direction. And just then Tish broke an oar.
“There!” she snapped, turning on me, of course. “Just look what your
pig-headedness--”
She never finished. She was staring, petrified, at the rim of the
boat, which was just visible. There were two white splotches on it
that looked like hands. The more I looked, the more I knew they _were_
hands! And then the boat tilted to that side until we all screamed,
and a head and shoulders appeared, fell back out of sight, upreared
themselves with a mighty heave, and--dropped into the boat.
It was a man--a young man. Even in the darkness he gleamed white from
head to foot. We shut our eyes and screamed. When we stopped he had
sat down on the dog, discovered him, slid him with a splash into the
bottom of the boat and had settled himself comfortably in the bow.
“I’m sorry I frightened you,” he was saying, “but--I’d been swimming
for a good while, and your boat was an oasis in the dusty desert.”
“Get back into the water instantly!” Tish commanded, turning her
profile to him. “Have you no shame?”
“Oh, as to _that_,” he said aggrieved, “I--I have something on, you
know. Of course, they are wet, and they stick to me, but--”
“Give him thith,” Aggie broke in, and unwound herself from her shawl. I
passed it to Letitia over my shoulder, and Letitia averted her face and
held it out to him.
“Thanks, awfully,” he said. “After all that exercise, the night air is
cold on a fellow’s back.”
At that Letitia turned on him in a rage.
“_Will_ you open that shawl out and cover yourself?” she asked
furiously. “_Cover_ yourself. Your _back_! Look at your _legs_!”
“As long as you sit quiet and behave yourself, you may stay in the
boat,” I added with as much composure as I could get over my trembling
lips. “Otherwise, I warn you, we have a dog.”
At that I think he prodded the dog with his foot, for he set up a
nauseated whine--the dog, of course--and the young gentleman laughed.
“Your dog is quite safe, madam,” he said. “I wouldn’t bite him for
anything.” Then he leaned forward in the darkness and stared at Tish
and myself.
“Upon my soul!” he muttered, and then aloud: “How in the name of all
that is nautical did you ladies get as far from shore as this, when you
are rowing in different directions?”
Tish refused to answer, and fell to rowing madly with her one oar, so
that we turned around and around in a circle. Aggie had not said a
word since she gave the young man her shawl. She was sitting in the
stern with the jug in her lap and her handkerchief over her mouth.
“This is a wonderful piece of luck,” he said finally. “I must have been
blown up the lake. I hope I didn’t startle you?”
“Not at all,” I said, as coolly as I could. At least he didn’t have a
revolver: there was no place to hide one, or a knife either. “Are you
out for a pleasure trip? Or did you have any definite objective point?”
This scathingly.
“Just land,” he said. “Any old land will do. Near a boat-house, if
possible.”
“We are going to Thunthet Island,” Aggie lisped, encouraged by his good
humor.
This seemed to surprise him, but after a minute he threw back his head
and laughed: it was almost a chuckle. Certainly, if he was a lunatic,
he was a cheerful one.
“To Sunset Island, then!” he exclaimed. “Forward, and God with us!”
The rain was over, and by the starlight we could make out a little
more about our intruder. He seemed large and not bad looking, and he
had a nice voice. (It was a disappointment, when we finally saw him in
the daylight, to find that his hair was red, but it was offset by an
attractive smile and exceedingly good teeth. Next to a nice nose, I
like a man to have good teeth.) But, of course, some of the greatest
rascals have all the physical attributes at the expense of the moral
ones. As to his good humor, every one knows that a man can smile and
smile and be a villain still. He wanted to take the oars, but an oar
is a mighty effective weapon: neither Tish nor I would give ours up.
Finally--
“I suppose you haven’t any gasoline with you?” he inquired, leaning
forward and hugging the shawl under his chin.
“There’th a quart bottle of cleaning fluid--” Aggie began, but Tish
interrupted her.
“Agatha!” she said.
“I suppose you don’t know of a boat-house near where we could steal
some, do you?” he reflected.
“_We!_”
Tish lifted her oar out of the water and leaned on it. There is no
space here to set down what she said, but she did it thoroughly. She
told him what she thought of his going around in his present costume;
she told him that two of us were Methodist Protestants and one an
Episcopalian, and that we would not assist him to steal anybody’s
gasoline, or his wife or his silver spoons: and she ended up by
demanding that he go back where he came from immediately: that we
could not compromise ourselves by landing him anywhere in his existing
undress--only Tish called it negligée.
He listened meekly.
“If that’s the way you feel,” he said finally, “of course I’ll drop
back into the water. Drowning’s an easy death. But if during your
excursion you happen to come across a motor-boat containing a girl, I
wish you would tell her that I did the best I could.”
He stood up and began to take off the shawl. Tish poked at him with her
oar.
“Don’t be a young idiot,” she snapped. “We’re not making you walk the
plank. What about the young lady?”
“It’s rather a story,” he said, drawing the shawl around him again and
sitting down. “But the idea is this: when a fellow starts to elope
with a girl, and then funks it, by getting drowned or running out of
gasoline or anything of that sort, and leaves her sitting in a dead
motor-boat in the middle of the night, she’s--she’s apt to be touchy
about it.”
“Lord have mercy!” said Tish. “You were abducting a young woman!”
“Penitentiary offense,” he confirmed coolly.
“When she didn’t want to be eloped with!” I added. I confess I had a
queer thrill up and down my back.
“Well,” he considered, “hardly that. She only thought she didn’t.
She has been told so many times that she mustn’t like me that now she
thinks she doesn’t. Pure power of suggestion. If she hadn’t pitched a
can of gasoline overboard in a temper, we’d have been miles away by
this time,” he finished, with his first suggestion of gloom.
In the darkness I heard Aggie draw a long breath. Aggie is romantic,
having been engaged a long time ago to a young man in the roofing
business, who fell off a roof.
“How you mutht love her!” she said, and one could imagine her clasping
her hands. “And how alarmed _the_ mutht be for you.”
“She said she hoped I would drown,” he said, more cheerfully, “but
that’s only girl’s talk. When she gets over thinking she doesn’t like
me, she’s going to be crazy about me. When a girl hates a fellow, she’s
next door to loving him.”
“‘Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings,’” Tish snorted with scorn,
and just then the dog began to whine again and tried to crawl up into
Aggie’s lap. The young man in the shawl started to say something about
having a minister waiting at Telusah, and stopped suddenly.
“It isn’t raining now,” he said, “and yet this boat is filling. Does
she leak?”
She did: we knew it then. The water that had been sloshing around in
the bottom was almost to the top of our overshoes, and an instant later
Aggie, with a fine disregard of the proprieties, had her feet up on the
thwarts. We are all vague about the next few minutes, but after a great
deal of screeching and tipping of the boat, our young man, with the
shawl belted around him as a petticoat, was in Tish’s seat, rowing like
mad, and we were all bailing like mad with our rubber shoes.
We headed the boat straight for Sunset Island, which was as near as
any place, but in spite of us it kept on getting fuller. And just when
Aggie had lifted her jug into her lap to lighten her end of the boat,
and the water was well above our shoe tops, and climbing, and Tish was
muttering the alphabet under the impression that she was praying, the
boat stopped suddenly and the young man said:
“Why don’t you women bail? What are you doing? Tickling the ribs of the
boat? We’ll never get to shore at this rate!”
Aggie began to sniffle, and the man in the shawl stood up and peered
over the water.
“Lillian!” he shouted. “Wave the lantern! Coo--ee!”
We all heard it. From far down the lake came a distant “coo--ee” that
was not an echo. The shawl man muttered something and lurched where he
stood: the boat tipped, of course, and more water came over the edge.
Aggie began fervently, “For what we are about to receive, O Lord, make
us duly thankful,” when the boat bumped without warning into something.
It was just in time. As I, the last, was hauled into the motor-launch,
the _Witch Hazel_ slid greasily under the surface, to rise no more.
(The loss of the _Witch Hazel_ was deplorable, and later on we sent
Carpenter, anonymously, money to buy a new boat. He has one, which he
calls the _Urticaria_, but the ghost of the _Witch Hazel_ still walks,
a sort of Pond’s Extract in his memory.)
CHAPTER IV
CLEANING FLUID TO THE RESCUE
It was some time before we could realize that eternity had ceased
staring us in the face and had taken a back seat, so to speak. The
first thing Tish said was that, man or no man, her shoes were going to
come off, and while Aggie was wringing alternately her hands and her
petticoats, I happened to notice the Shawl Man. He was standing holding
his garment around him and staring over the dark water ahead.
“You needn’t feel so badly,” I said to him. “We’re only glad Aggie had
the shawl, and now, if you can run the launch, why don’t you hunt up
your own, with the young lady in it?”
“_This_ is the boat!” he said heavily, and, sitting down, he dropped
his chin in his hands.
Well, there was no girl. Dark as it was, we could all see that. Tish
looked up suspiciously from where she was stuffing her wet shoes with
her stockings to keep them in shape.
“I don’t see any clothes either,” she said tartly. “I suspect your lady
friend tied them into a bundle and swam ashore with them in her teeth!”
“I left her there in that chair!” he affirmed. He looked dazed.
“She--she didn’t want to--to go, you know, and she threw the extra
gasoline can overboard. When we stalled there was nothing to do
but swim ashore, borrow a skiff, and steal some gasoline from the
boat-house on one of the islands. I wasn’t going to sit out there in a
dead motor-boat and let her people stand on the bank in the morning and
pot at me with a target rifle.”
“Thirtainly not!” said Aggie, who had shamelessly allied herself with
him.
“Not only that,” he went on defiantly, “but when a man cares for a girl
the way I care for--her, he either carries her off and marries her or
he dies trying.”
“And quite right, I’m thure.” Thus Aggie. She was still clutching her
jug; the dog, the first to be saved, had sniffed the cork, got a whiff
of the ether, and retired with a moan to the corner.
“If she tried to swim to shore,” began the Shawl Man, and groaned. But
Aggie had forgotten her lisp in her rôle of comforter.
“Nonthenth!” she said. “Probably Mithther Carleton came along with hith
motor canoe and took her home. He’th alwayth mooning around the lake
late at night.”
The Shawl Man jumped to his feet and the boat rocked.
“Denby Carleton!” he said. “Hell!”
Then he went to pieces. As Tish wrote to her niece, Martha Ann Lee,
afterward, “his composure went to pieces on the rocks of adversity,
and sank in a sea of woe.” He raged up and down the launch, muttering
strange and awful things, and every now and then he stooped over the
engine in the middle of the boat and gritted his teeth and turned
something. And the engine would draw a quick breath and turn over
on its other side and settle down to sleep again. And then, when he
finally gave up, he declared he was going to swim after the canoe and
kill Carleton for stealing the girl and throwing his clothes overboard.
(Yes, we found a soft hat floating, and the rest were gone.)
He stood up on the front peak of the launch and began to untie the
shawl, but Tish pulled him back and told him if the girl wanted Mr.
Carleton instead of him he was well rid of her. And she asked him his
name. This brought him around a little. He said, “Mansfield, Donald
Mansfield,” and stalked back and sat down in the stern squarely on the
dog.
“Keep away from that dog!” Aggie exclaimed. “He hath mange.”
“Fleas!” Tish snapped.
“Mange!” said Aggie.
“Upon my word, Aggie Pilkington,” Tish sniffed, “if the creature has
mange, why on earth are you still hugging that jar of gasoline?”
Then, of course, the Shawl Man, who shall be Mansfield now, gave a
whoop and seized the jug.
“Ith cleaning fluid,” Aggie protested. “Thereth ether and alcohol--”
“Never mind what’s in it,” he said excitedly. “I know this engine.
It’ll run on the gas out of a bottle of Apollinaris.” And while he
poured the stuff into the tank he explained his plan. If the engine ran
on the mixture, and didn’t get something that he called a “bun on,”
we could get back to Sunset Island, which I gathered belonged to the
girl’s father, get into somebody’s boat-house (preferably the father’s)
and obtain some gasoline. Also, he would try to find some clothes. It
shows how thoroughly demoralized we were that not one of us objected
to his stealing anything he needed, and that Tish asked him to bring
her a blanket if he happened on one!
The engine would not start at once. And after he had explained that
he had only one hand to crank with, having to hold on the shawl with
the other, we turned our backs, and almost immediately there was an
explosion. The boat jumped out of the water and dropped back with a
thud. I could not scream. Then there came a series of reports, and
I sat waiting for the floor to separate and drop me into sixty feet
of water and mud and crawly things with the family burial lot full,
provided my body was ever found, unless they moved Cousin James beside
his first wife, where he ought to be anyhow. And then I realized that
we were moving.
We did not float. We got to shore by a distinct species of leaps; once
or twice I am quite sure we left the surface of the lake. If that stuff
had ever been put on the dog, the fleas would have killed themselves
jumping. And all the time there was a combination of odors that as Tish
said afterward reminded one individually of burnt brandy sauce and an
operating room, and collectively of something that has died in the
alley. And whenever we stopped Mr. Mansfield would do something that he
called “spinner again.”
When we got near enough to shore we could see that the big white Lovell
house was lighted up, late as it was, and there were people on the boat
dock with lanterns. Mr. Mansfield saw it too, and changed the course of
the launch, so we stopped at a smaller landing, half a mile or so down
the beach, and tied up there.
“You are perfectly safe here,” he said, “and I’ll be back in ten
minutes. The only way Major Lovell could recognize this boat in the
dark would be by the sound of the engine, and if he heard this racket
he’ll take us for a battle in a moving picture show. Just sit tight and
keep warm.”
He threw the shawl to us and dived into the darkness. Somebody
was shouting at the Lovell dock, but we sat in safe obscurity and
listened to the wash of the water against the piles. The absurdity of
the situation began to dawn on me, and the sight of Tish and Aggie,
luminous in the starlight--it had stopped raining--trying to get into
their wet shoes, made me fairly hysterical. To add to it all, the
patter of Mr. Mansfield’s bare feet on the boards of the dock waked our
sleeping dog, and with a series of staccato barks he was at our unlucky
young man’s heels. He seemed to have a fondness for feet.
“If you could see yourself, Lizzie, I might understand your mirth,”
Tish said scathingly. “But I fail to see anything funny.”
“Then for goodness sake, Tish,” I cried, “stop dangling that shoe on
your toe and see what is the matter with your figure. It has slipped up
under your chin.”
“Good heaventh!” said Aggie. “They are coming down the beach after uth!”
It was true. The lanterns had left the Lovell dock and were bobbing
wildly along the waterfront in our direction, guided by the barking
of the dog. Of all the hours of that awful night, that was the most
terrible. We sat there shivering and helpless and watched Nemesis
chasing and bobbing down on us. About half way to us the first lantern
stopped and fired a gun, and back along the beach new lanterns kept
adding themselves to the line that stretched out like the tail of a
comet.
Tish thought she was very cool, but both Aggie and I distinctly heard
her say that the stars had stopped raining. And once she said that she
had always been a respected member of the community, and that nobody in
his sober senses would believe her if she told the true story. And when
the first lantern was so close that we could see a vague outline of
the man behind it, desperation gave me a courage that has appalled me
since.
I went over to the engine and tried to “spinner.”
What is more to the point, I did it. The wheels began to revolve with
a sickening speed: the whole frame of the boat jarred and quivered. I
sank back on my knees and closed my eyes.
“We’re not moving,” Tish said with awful calmness.
And at that a white figure hurled itself from the darkness at the end
of the landing and flew down the dock to us. It had a can in one hand
and a lantern in the other. It hesitated a second to throw off the
rope, which was why we hadn’t moved, of course, and, as the engine was
going full, he had only time to catch one of the awning supports as it
flew past. It went as if it had been shot out of a gun, and when Aggie
and Tish and I had assorted ourselves from a heap on the floor, we
were well out from shore.
It was lucky that Aggie took one of her awful sneezing spells just
then, as she always does when she is excited, for by the time she was
breathing easily again the shore was well behind and Mr. Mansfield had
put on the shawl again.
CHAPTER V
THE CAVE-MAN AND HIS WOMAN
It is a little difficult, looking back, to explain our state of mind
that night. It was only our second taste of romance--Aggie’s roofer
being too far back to count. Now, with six months of perspective, I
think we were intoxicated with adventure to the point of abandon. For
when Mr. Mansfield offered to take us home, before starting on his
pursuit of the motor canoe, we refused to go. As Tish said:
“No doubt when you do overtake them, Mr. Mansfield, the young woman
will feel the need of some of her own sex, women of--er--maturity and
experience, to advise her. I consider it our duty to go.”
“Oh, leth go!” said Aggie. “Mr. Carletonth a large man. Do you think
you will have to fight him for your lady?” Aggie’s tone was cheerfully
bloodthirsty, and she clutched the end of the broken oar like a club.
Aggie, the apostle of peace!
“Frankly, I should like to see the end of the affair myself,” I
admitted. “I should like to see the young lady’s face when she finds
you eloping with three maiden ladies, and--I am curious to know how
your cave-man theory works out.”
He was working over the engine, and we were headed down the lake. While
I was speaking he moved to the other side of the launch, and it tilted
villainously. He loomed very large in the darkness, and the strength of
his bare arms and heavy chest, his sinewy legs, made him not unlike his
prototype.
He did not answer me at once. He had found some cigarettes in the boat,
and he lighted one. Only when it was well aglow did he show that he had
heard me.
“The original cave-man was no fool,” he observed, calmly looking ahead.
“A man doesn’t carry a woman off unless he’s crazy about her, in the
first place. If he’s got sufficient force of character to dare her
daddy’s stone club--jail, in this case--and enough physical strength to
hold her to him with one arm and fight off pursuit and rivals with the
other, it--well, it doesn’t matter much what the girl thinks of him in
the beginning: she’ll die for him, in the end.”
Aggie positively thrilled in the darkness beside me, and even Tish was
silenced by the vision of this masculine point of view. As for me, just
at that instant I quite agreed with the young savage!
“Ith--ith the very pretty?” Aggie ventured, after swallowing hard.
“I don’t know,” he said indifferently, straining his eyes ahead.
“Oh--yes, I suppose she is. I never thought about it. I haven’t thought
of anybody else--_anything_ else, for the week I’ve known her.”
“The week!” we all repeated faintly.
“When her groom lifts her off her horse, I want to kill him. If that
ass Carleton gets her to Telusah first and marries her, I’ll take her
from him. She’s my woman.”
Tish stood right up in the boat and pointed her finger at him. “You
d-don’t know what you are talking about,” she stuttered. “How--how dare
you speak of taking a married woman from her husband!”
“Figs!” he said disrespectfully. “In the first place, if the engine
holds out, we’ll run them down at least a mile from Telusah, and in
the second place, while I judge you are talking by the book and not by
experience--a few words said over a man and a woman don’t make them
husband and wife. It gives the woman the man’s name, but--the man don’t
necessarily get the woman. Mine--or nobody’s,” he added under his
breath.
Tish collapsed into her chair. I admit I felt queer all over, and
Aggie’s heart had fluttered back to the thin young man with the
curled-up mustache and a dimple in his chin, who had fallen off a roof.
“Mister Wigginth usthed to talk exactly that way!” she said softly.
That is the way we went down toward Telusah: the prehistoric gentleman
in the bow steering and watching the engine, now and then stopping
it dead to listen for the throb of the motor canoe ahead. Aggie
twitteringly in the past, with her bare feet tucked under her for
warmth and the broken oar in her lap. Tish blazing with indignation and
excitement, and I saved by my sense of humor from going into violent
hysteria and embracing the hot-headed, mad, ridiculous and altogether
satisfactory young animal at the wheel. I merely said:
“I wish somebody had wooed me like that thirty years ago. I wouldn’t be
earning my own living, young man.”
“That’s what she wants to do--stay single and work for a livelihood,”
he said with disgust. “I told her it was all fool nonsense; that the
place for her kind of woman was in some man’s home--”
“Cave,” I suggested.
“Bearing his children--”
“Silence!” Tish shouted, and even Aggie was roused out of a dream.
He shut down the engine just then, and we all heard it: a faint
throbbing that one felt in the ears, rather than heard. He leaped up on
the peak of the boat and stared into the darkness ahead.
“Better than I expected,” he said with suppressed excitement. “They’re
not a mile ahead. I wish I had a stick of some sort: I may have to
knock that chump on the head.”
Luckily he did not see Aggie’s oar, and to his everlasting honor be it
said, he went dauntlessly into the battle with his bare hands. “And
bare arms and legs,” Tish ironically suggests that I add.
For battle it was.
We overtook the canoe somewhere about Long Point, and our lantern
showed two people, as we expected. It was Mr. Carleton, who evidently
hadn’t dressed to elope, and who wore the shirt of a bathing suit and a
pair of corduroy trousers, and the Girl. She was in a white party frock
of some sort. She stopped paddling and stared up at us defiantly as we
must have loomed black behind our lantern. She was very pretty, and she
had two triangular red spots in her cheeks. Our gentleman pulled the
shawl around him and stepped on the thwarts, and even at that distance
we could see the angry fear in the girl’s eyes.
“Lillian,” Mr. Mansfield said cheerfully, “I am not going to do that
puppy with you the honor of asking you to choose between us. I give you
your choice--either get into the launch comfortably, or stay where you
are--in which case I shall run you down and pick you out of the water.”
[Illustration]
“You coward!” said Mr. Carleton from the stern of the canoe. “You can’t
try your high-handed methods with me. Run us down if you like. It’s
a penitentiary offense to kidnap a girl and marry her.”
“Oh, piffle!” said Mr. Mansfield rudely. “I suppose you didn’t intend
to marry her yourself at Telusah!”
“I intended to return her to her parents in safety, by way of the
trolley,” retorted Carleton stiffly.
The Mansfield man threw back his head and laughed.
“Did you hear that, Lillian?” he called. “That’s love for you! Why, the
idiot didn’t even intend to marry you! He was going to take you home to
your people!” He laughed again in pure delight.
But the girl had plenty of spirit.
“I don’t intend to be married at all,” she flared at him. “Certainly
not to you, Donald Mansfield. Run us down if you like. I would rather
die than marry you.”
“You hear what she says,” said Carleton, from the darkness. “If you
are a gentleman you will take your boat and your ruffianly accomplices
back to where you came from--or to hell, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Ruffian yourself,” Tish said furiously, but I pulled her down. There
was silence, then--
“Lillian,” Mr. Mansfield said very gently, “‘Lady’ Carleton is right.
If it’s as bad as that I’ll take you home. I had a sort of fool idea
that you would know it was inevitable--that you were my woman. If I’ve
been a bit raw about it, it’s because the thing seemed so clear to me.
Give me your hand.”
“I shall not get into the launch,” the girl said haughtily.
“Your hand.”
“Confound you, Mansfield, can’t you see she hates you?” This was
Carleton, of course.
“The girlth a fool,” Aggie muttered angrily, behind me. In the instant
that I turned my head, something happened--I don’t know just what. For
the girl was alone in the canoe, we were alone in the launch, and just
below me the water was boiling into white spray. Now and then an arm
shot into the air, or a leg, and occasionally, not often, both heads
were above water at the same time. And it was then that Aggie, the
president of the Civic Club and corresponding secretary of the Working
Girls’ Home, with her draggled skirts pinned up above her bare feet,
stood up suddenly and banged Mr. Carleton on the head with what was
left of her oar!
But if that was amazing, the most surprising thing followed. The Girl
stood up in the canoe and--
“Oh, you’ve killed him!” she screeched. “Oh, Don! Don!” _Donald being
the Mansfield man!_
Then, of course, the canoe turned over, and the rest of what she was
saying ended in a gurgle.
CHAPTER VI
“I WILL GO WITH YOU”
We got them all into the launch finally, for there was only five feet of
water, which explained much that we had not understood about the fight,
and they were as disconsolate looking a lot of lovers as I ever wish
to see. Mr. Carleton sat in the stern and held his head, which Aggie’s
oar had almost broken, and the girl dripped and shivered in a corner by
herself and stared at the Mansfield man, who was coaxing Tish for one
of her petticoats so he could give the girl his shawl.
Aggie was for trying to explain to the girl how we came to be there
at all, and without our shoes at that. But it was such a long story,
beginning with the dog that had fleas (“mange,” says Aggie) and
extending through robbery to attempted murder (“I only meant to stun
him,” says Aggie), that I advised her not to begin it.
The launch would not start after all, and it developed that the
propeller shaft was choked with weeds. This meant that the Mansfield
man must crawl overboard, get on his back under the launch (which
is much more unpleasant, I should think, than getting under an
automobile), and clear off the shaft. And while he was holding his
breath under the boat, and while Tish had turned her back on everybody
and with the aid of the lantern was trying to take a splinter out of
the sole of her foot, the Carleton man got up dizzily and went over to
the girl.
“Surely, Lillian,” he said, steadying himself by the awning frame,
“you--you don’t intend to let that--”
“Please go away,” she said. “I don’t want to talk. How funny you look
with that bandage around your head.” And then, to me (she had accepted
the presence of three bare-footed maiden ladies in the launch without
comment): “Oh, do you think he might be caught in the weeds and--and
_drown_?”
But he did not drown. He came magnificently over the edge of the boat
in a few minutes, with a string of green water-weeds clinging to his
head. Aggie, who, as you have seen, is romantic, muttered something
about “grape leaves in his hair,” which she said afterward was Ibsen,
although the only use I have ever known for grape leaves was to wrap
pats of butter in, in the country.
He turned the launch around and we started for home. I do not recall
that any one spoke on the way back, except Tish, who asked me if I had
any castor oil at the house: she wanted it to soften her shoes if they
dried stiff. The Girl sat by herself and watched the big fellow in
the shawl-toga. And once or twice, when he glanced up and saw her, he
smiled over at her, but he did not go near her or speak to her.
[Illustration]
It was pale dawn when we stopped at the dock of the Watermelon Camp.
We, who had been sodden shadows in the night, were now damp and
shivering outlines. Mr. Mansfield, having given the girl the shawl,
drew around him still closer the awning curtain with which he had
draped himself, and Aggie, still clutching the oar, held up one hand in
the gray light to hide the deficiencies of her mouth. No one stirred in
the camp.
Mr. Carleton got up stiffly and glanced around at all of us. Then
he stalked over to the man at the wheel, who was staring ahead and
whistling under his breath.
“Will you give me your word to take her home?” he said.
“Ask her if she _wants_ to go home.” He threw this over his shoulder,
between whistles, as it were. Then the girl, looking very pretty, but
slim and slinky in her wet things, went over to the Mansfield man and
put her hand on his shoulder.
“I--I think I will go with you, Don!” she said. And that practically
ends the story.
We left Mr. Carleton on the dock, staring after us through the mist,
and we all went back to the cottage and put the girl to bed. We gave
Mr. Mansfield a pillow by the sitting-room wood fire, and _Tish’s
green kimono_ to sleep in. And after that we all three took a mustard
foot-bath and some camphor sprinkled on sugar and went to bed.
Aggie wakened me at nine o’clock the next morning by hunting in my
bureau for her second best teeth, and it was then that we found our
lovers had gone. In the girl’s room there was a letter of thanks. She
said she did not wish to disturb us after that awful night, but that
she could not sleep, and that she and Mr. Mansfield were going down to
Telusah to be married.
Tish read the letter aloud and stared at us, while Paulina whined for
her breakfast.
“Upon my soul,” Tish gasped, when she could speak. “Instead of clapping
him into jail, she’s going to marry him!”
“Do you thuppoth he went to Telutha in that kimono?” Aggie said in a
husky whisper. She had taken a terrible cold.
But Mr. Mansfield did not go to Telusah in Tish’s kimono.
After all, the beginning of this story is also the end. For now you
can understand why Tish dropped the bowl when the young man brought
her kimono back from the Watermelon Camp and asked for Mr. Carleton’s
trousers!
I have told the story in defense of Tish and the rest of us. I wish to
brand as false the story told by the man from the hotel who happened to
be fishing for muskalunge early that morning. He said, you remember,
that he saw Miss Carberry _in her green kimono_ leave our cottage just
after dawn and go stealthily along the beach through the mist to the
Watermelon Camp. When she got there, he said, to his horror he saw her
strip off the green kimono and hang it to a tree. Just then the mist
shut down and he saw nothing more.
In his anxiety for Miss Carberry’s sanity he was on the point of
landing to investigate, when he hooked the largest ’lunge of the season
(registered weight at the hatcheries, thirty-seven pounds four ounces),
and when he looked again at the shore all he saw was a red-haired man
hurrying along the beach in a pair of corduroy trousers and a bathing
shirt!
Tish closed the incident with one comment.
“Young millionaire!” she snapped when she saw the newspapers. “Young
scamp, _I_ say, stealing poor Mr. Carleton’s sweetheart and then his
trousers. As for my green kimono, after all we did for him, he might at
least have had the grace to roll it up and stick it under a barrel. I
shall burn it.”
But she did not. Aggie saw it only the other day, put away in
a lavender silk sachet, with a bundle of newspaper clippings, a
half-eaten bath sponge, and a particular kind of bass hook, which we
had found on the sitting-room floor.
THE END
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.