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, “andwe’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 Aggienever 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 youcan 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.
Clipping from theMorning Newsof May the seventh:
SHERIFF AMBUSHED
Remarkable Experience of Muldoon and Party in Thunder Cloud Glen
An extraordinary state of affairs was discovered by the relief party of constables, city and county detectives and state constabulary sent to the relief of Sheriff Muldoon and his posse, who have been on the track of the C. & L. train bandits since last Monday.
The relief party was sent out in response to a telephone message from a farmhouse in Thunder Cloud Glen, and transmitted from the farmer’s line to a long-distance wire. This message was to the effect that the sheriff and his posse, shut in a cave, were being held prisoners by the outlaws, being shot at steadily, and that so far every attempt at escape had been thwarted by the terrific fire of the bandits.
A relief party in automobiles was rushed at once to the scene.
Thunder Cloud Glen is a narrow valley between the Camel’s Back and Thunder Cloud Mountain. A mile or so from the entrance to the glen the road, always bad and now almost washed away by the recent heavy rains, became impassable. The party abandoned the machines and in skirmish order proceeded up the glen.
Within an hour’s time firing was heard, and the rescuers doubled their pace. Passing a bend in the valley, the scene of the outrage lay spread before them: On the left the low mouth of a cave, and across the valley, on a slope of the Camel’s Back, a faint cloud of smoke, showing where the outlaws had their lair. As the rescuers came in sight the firing ceased and an ominous stillness hung over the valley.
The relief expedition had been seen by the imprisoned party also. Muldoon’s well-known soft felt hat, tied to the end of a pole, was thrust from the cave mouth and waved vigorously up and down, showing that some of the imprisoned party still lived. One solitary shot was aimed at the hat, followed by profound quiet.
Using every precaution, Deputy Sheriff Mulcahy deployed his men with the intention of closingin on the outlaws from all sides at the same time.
At this time an interesting interruption occurred. From the underbrush at the foot of the Camel’s Back emerged three elderly women, their clothing in tatters, and in the wildest excitement. They insisted that the outlaws were in the cave, and hysterical with fright from their terrible experience, declared that they had been holding the bandits in check and demanded the reward for their capture. They were rational enough in other ways and explained that they had been on a walking tour with a donkey. There was, however, no donkey.
Deputy Sheriff Mulcahy, who is noted for his gallantry, sent the three women to a safe place at the rear of the party and detailed a guard to make them comfortable. It being thought possible that the women were accomplices of the outlaws, precautions were also taken to prevent their escape.
No trace of the outlaws was found. Sheriff Muldoon and his three deputies, now enabled to leave the cave, joined the searchers. Every inch of Thunder Cloud Glen was searched, but without result. Across from the cave mouth, behind a heap of fallen rocks, was found the spot from which the outlaws had been shooting. Theground was trampled and the rock chipped by the return fire from the cave. Here, too, was found a new automatic revolver, a small rifle and another gun of antique pattern. In a crevice of rock was discovered a flowered-silk bag, containing various articles of feminine use, including a packet of powders marked “hay fever,” a small bottle labeled “blackberry cordial,” and a dozen or so unexploded cartridges for the revolver.
Convinced now that the three women were accomplices of the outlaws—and this corroborated by Sheriff Muldoon’s statement that he had positively seen one of the three women peering over the rock and aiming a rifle at him, and that the same woman, two days before, had fired at him from the valley, knocking his gun out of his hand—Deputy Sheriff Mulcahy promptly arrested the women and had them taken in an automobile to the city.
At the jail, however, it was discovered that an unfortunate error had been made, and the ladies were released. They went at once to their homes. While their names have not been divulged it is reported that they are well known and highly esteemed members of the community, and much sympathy has been expressed for their disagreeable experience.
Up to a late hour last night no trace had beenfound of the outlaws. It is believed that they have left Thunder Cloud Glen and have penetrated farther into the mountains.
Charlie Sands came for us at the jail. He asked us no questions, which I thought strange, but he got a carriage and took us all to Tish’s. He did not speak a word on the way, except to ask us if we had no hats. On Tish’s replying meekly that we had left them in the cave, he said nothing more, but sat looking like a storm until we drew up at the house.
I dare say we did look curious. Our clothes were torn and draggled, and although we had washed at the jail we were still somewhat powder-streaked and grimy.
Charlie Sands led us into Tish’s parlor and shut the door. Then he turned and surveyed the three of us.
“Sit down,” he said grimly.
We sat. He stood looking down at each of us in turn.
“I’ll hear the story in a minute,” he said, still cold and disagreeable. “But first of all, Aunt Tish, I want to ask you if you realize that this last escapade of yours is a disgrace to the family?”
“Nothing of the sort,” Tish asserted withsomething of her old spirit. “It was all for Aggie’s missionary dime. I——”
“A moment,” he said, holding up his hand. “I’m going to ask a question. I’ll listen after that.Did you or did you not hold up the C. & L. express car?”
We were too astounded to speak.
“Because if you did,” he said, “missionary dime or no missionary dime, I shall turn you over to the authorities! I have gone through a lot with you, Aunt Tish, in the past year.”
Aggie and I expected to see Tish rise in majesty and point him out of the room. But to our amazement she broke down and cried.
“No,” she said feebly, “we didn’t rob the car. But oh, Charlie, Charlie! We nursed that wretch Muldoon, and fed him and sent him off on Modestine in Aggie’s gray alpaca, and he got away; and if you say to go to jail I’ll go.”
“Muldoon!”
“The wretch who said he was Muldoon. The—the train robber.”
Well, it took hours to tell the story, and when we had all finished and Aggie had gone to bed in Tish’s spare room with hysteria, and Tish had gone to bed with tea and toast, Charlie Sands was still walking up and down the parlor, stoppingnow and then to mutter: “Well, I’ll be——” and then going on with his pacing.
Hannah brought me a cup of junket at eight o’clock, for none of us had eaten dinner. I was sitting there with the cup in my lap when the doorbell rang. Charlie Sands answered it. It was a letter addressed to all three of us.
We called Tish and Aggie and they crept in, very subdued and pallid. Charlie Sands opened the letter and read it:
Dear and Charming Ladies:I am abject. What can I say to you, who have just come through such an experience on my account? How can I apologize or explain? Especially as I am confused myself as to what really happened. Did Muldoon actually attack the cave? Were you in it when he arrived? Or is it possible that, with my foolish fabrication in your mind, you attempted—— But that is absurd, of course.Whatever occurred and however it occurred, I am on my knees to you all. Even a real bandit would have been touched by your kindness. And I am not a real bandit any more than I am a real sheriff.I am an ordinary citizen, usually a law-abiding citizen. But as a result of a foolish wagerat my club, brought about by the ease with which numerous trains have been robbed recently, I undertook to hold up a C. & L. train with an empty revolver, and to evade capture for a certain length of time. The first part was successful. The train messenger, on seeing my gun, handed me, without a word, a fat package. I had not asked for it. It was a gift. I do not even now know what is in it. The newspapers say it is money. It might have been eggs, as far as I know. The second part would have been simple also, had I not hurt my leg.Things were looking serious for me when you found me. I shall never forget the cave, or the omelets, or the tea, or the fudge. I can never return your hospitalities, but one thing I can do.The express company offers a reward of a thousand dollars for my little package. Probably they are right and it is not eggs. Whatever it is, it is buried under the tree where we tied our noble steed, Modestine. Please return the package and claim the reward. If you have scruples against taking it remember that the express company is rich and the Fiji Islanders needy. Turn it in as the increased increment on Miss Aggie’s missionary dime.(Signed)The Outlaw of Thunder Cloud.
Dear and Charming Ladies:I am abject. What can I say to you, who have just come through such an experience on my account? How can I apologize or explain? Especially as I am confused myself as to what really happened. Did Muldoon actually attack the cave? Were you in it when he arrived? Or is it possible that, with my foolish fabrication in your mind, you attempted—— But that is absurd, of course.
Whatever occurred and however it occurred, I am on my knees to you all. Even a real bandit would have been touched by your kindness. And I am not a real bandit any more than I am a real sheriff.
I am an ordinary citizen, usually a law-abiding citizen. But as a result of a foolish wagerat my club, brought about by the ease with which numerous trains have been robbed recently, I undertook to hold up a C. & L. train with an empty revolver, and to evade capture for a certain length of time. The first part was successful. The train messenger, on seeing my gun, handed me, without a word, a fat package. I had not asked for it. It was a gift. I do not even now know what is in it. The newspapers say it is money. It might have been eggs, as far as I know. The second part would have been simple also, had I not hurt my leg.
Things were looking serious for me when you found me. I shall never forget the cave, or the omelets, or the tea, or the fudge. I can never return your hospitalities, but one thing I can do.
The express company offers a reward of a thousand dollars for my little package. Probably they are right and it is not eggs. Whatever it is, it is buried under the tree where we tied our noble steed, Modestine. Please return the package and claim the reward. If you have scruples against taking it remember that the express company is rich and the Fiji Islanders needy. Turn it in as the increased increment on Miss Aggie’s missionary dime.
(Signed)The Outlaw of Thunder Cloud.
We found the package, or Charlie Sands found it for us, and the express company paid us the reward. We gave it to Aggie, and with the exception of fifty dollars she turned it all in at the church, where it created almost a riot. With the fifty dollars we purchased, through Charlie Sands, a revolver with a silver inlaid handle, and sent it to the real Sheriff Muldoon. It eased our consciences somewhat.
That was all last spring. It is summer now. Tish is talking again of flowering hedgerows and country lanes, but Aggie and I do not care for the country, and the mere sight of a donkey gives me a chill.
Yesterday evening, on our way to prayer meeting, we heard a great noise of horns coming and stopped to see a four-in-hand go by. A young gentleman was driving, with a pretty girl beside him. As we lined up at the curb he turned smiling from the girl and he caught our eyes.
He started, and then, bowing low, he saluted us from the box.
It was “Muldoon.”
TISH DOES HER BIT
TISH DOES HER BIT
From the very beginning of the war Tish was determined to go to France. But she is a truthful woman, and her age kept her from being accepted. She refused, however, to believe that this was the reason, and blamed her rejection on Aggie and myself.
“Age fiddlesticks!” she said, knitting violently. “The plain truth is—and you might as well acknowledge it, Lizzie—that they would take me by myself quick enough, just to get the ambulance I’ve offered, if for no other reason. But they don’t want three middle-aged women, and I don’t know that I blame them.”
That was during September, I think, and Tish had just received her third rejection. They were willing enough to take the ambulance, but they would not let Tish drive it. I am quite sure it was September, for I remember that Aggie was having hay fever at the time, and she fell to sneezing violently.
Tish put down her knitting and stared at Aggie fixedly until the paroxysm was over.
“Exactly,” she observed, coldly. “Imagine me creeping out onto a battlefield to gather up the wounded, and Aggie crawling behind, going off like an alarm clock every time she met a clump of golden rod, or whatever they have in France to produce hay fever.”
“I could stay in the ambulance, Tish,” Aggie protested.
“I understand,” Tish went on, in an inflexible tone, “that those German snipers have got so that they shoot by ear. One sneeze would probably be fatal. Not only that,” she went on, turning to me, “but you know perfectly well, Lizzie, that a woman of your weight would be always stepping on brush and sounding like a night attack.”
“Not at all,” I replied, slightly ruffled. “And for a very good reason. I should not be there. As to my weight, Tish, my mother was always considered merely a fine figure of a woman, and I am just her size. It is only since this rage for skinny women——”
But Tish was not listening. She drew a deep sigh, and picked up her knitting again.
“We’d better not discuss it,” she said. But in these days of efficiency it seems a mistake that a woman who can drive an ambulance and can’t turn the heel of a stocking properly to save herlife, should be knitting socks that any soldier with sense would use to clean his gun with, or to tie around a sore throat, but never to wear.
It was, I think, along in November that Charlie Sands, Tish’s nephew, came to see me. He had telephoned, and asked me to have Aggie there. So I called her up, and told her to buy some cigarettes on the way. I remember that she was very irritated when she arrived, although the very soul of gentleness usually.
She came in and slammed a small package onto my table.
“There!” she said. “And don’t ever ask me to do such a thing again. The man in the shop winked at me when I said they were not for myself.”
However, Aggie is never angry for any length of time, and a moment later she was remarking that Mr. Wiggins had always been a smoker, and that one of his workmen had blamed his fatal accident on the roof to smoke from his pipe getting into his eyes.
Shortly after that I was surprised to find her in tears.
“I was just thinking, Lizzie,” she said. “What if Mr. Wiggins had lived, and we had had a son, and he had decided to go and fight!”
She then broke down and sobbed violently, andit was some time before I could calm her. Even then it was not the fact that she had no son which calmed her.
“Of course I’m silly, Lizzie,” she said. “I’ll stop now. Because of course they don’tallget killed, or even wounded. He’d probably come out all right, and every one says the training is fine for them.”
Charlie Sands came in shortly after, and having kissed us both and tried on a night shirt I was making for the Red Cross, and having found the cookie jar in the pantry and brought it into my sitting room, sat down and came to business.
“Now,” he said. “What’s she up to?”
He always referred to Tish as “she,” to Aggie and myself.
“She has given up going to France,” I replied.
“Perhaps! What does Hannah report?”
I am sorry to say that, fearing Tish’s impulsive nature, we had felt obliged to have Hannah watch her carefully. Tish has a way of breaking out in unexpected places, like a boil, as Charlie Sands once observed, and by knowing her plans in advance we have sometimes prevented her acting in a rash manner. Sometimes, not always.
“Hannah says everything is quiet,” Aggie said. “Dear Tish has apparently given up all thoughtof going abroad. At least, Hannah says she no longer practises first aid on her. Not since the time Tish gave her an alcohol bath and she caught cold. Hannah says she made her lie uncovered, with the window open, so the alcohol would evaporate. But she gave notice the next day, which was ungrateful of her, for Tish sat up all night feeding her things out of her First Aid case, and if shedidgive her a bit of iodine by mistake——”
“She is no longer interested in First Aid,” I broke in. Aggie has a way of going on and on, and it was not necessary to mention the matter of the iodine. “I know that, because I blistered my hand over there the other day, and she merely told me to stick it in the baking soda jar.”
“That’s curious,” said Charlie Sands.
“Because—— Great Scott, what’s wrong with these cigarettes?”
“They are violet-scented,” Aggie explained. “The smell sticks so, and Lizzie is fond of violet.”
However, he did not seem to care for them, and appeared positively ashamed. He opened a window, although it was cold outside, and shook himself in front of it like a dog. But all he said was:
“I am a meek person, Aunt Lizzie, and I like to humor whims when I can. But the next time you have a male visitor and offer him a cigarette,for the love of Mike don’t tell him those brazen gilt-tipped incense things are mine.”
He then ate nine cookies, and explained why he had come.
“I don’t like the look of things, beloved and respected spinsters,” he said. “I fear my revered aunt is again up to mischief. You haven’t heard her say anything more about aeroplanes, have you?”
“No,” I replied, for us both.
“Or submarines?”
“She’s been taking swimming lessons again,” I said, thoughtfully.
“Lizzie!” Aggie cried. “Oh, my poor Tish!”
“I think, however,” said Charlie Sands, “that it is not a submarine. There are no submarine flivvers, as I understand it, and a full-size one would run into money. No, I hardly think so. The fact remains, however, that my respected and revered aunt has made away with about seven thousand dollars’ worth of bonds that were, until a short time ago, giving semi-annual birth to plump little coupons. The question is, what is she up to?”
But we were unable to help him, and at last he went away. His parting words were:
“Well, there is something in the air, and the only thing to do, I suppose, is to wait until itdrops. But when my beloved female relative takes to selling bonds without consulting me, and goes out, as I met her yesterday, with her hat on front side behind, there is something in the wind. I know the symptoms.”
Aggie and I kept a close watch on Tish after that, but without result, unless the following incident may be called a result. Although it was rather a cause, after all, for it brought Mr. Culver into our lives.
I think it important to relate it in detail, as in a way it vindicates Tish in her treatment of Mr. Culver, although I do not mean by this statement that there was anything of personal malice in the incident of June fifth of this year. Those of us who know Tish best realize that she needs no defence. Her motives are always of the highest, although perhaps the matter of the police officer was ill-advised. But now that the story is out, and Mr. Ostermaier very uneasy about the wrong name being on the marriage license, I think an explanation will do dear Tish no harm.
I should explain, then, that Tish has retained the old homestead in the country, renting it to a reliable family. And that it has been our annual custom to go there for chestnuts each autumn. On the Sunday following Charlie Sands’ visit, therefore, while Aggie and I were having dinnerwith Tish, I suggested that we make our annual pilgrimage the following day.
“What pilgrimage?” Tish demanded. She was at that time interested in seeing if a table could be set for thirty-five cents a day per person, and the meal was largely beans.
“For chestnuts,” I explained.
“I don’t think I’ll go this year,” Tish observed, not looking at either of us. “I’m not a young woman, and climbing a chestnut tree requires youth.”
“You could get the farmer’s boy,” Aggie suggested, hopefully. Aggie is a creature of habit, and clings hard to the past.
“The farmer is not there any more.”
We stared at her in amazement, but she was helping herself to boiled dandelion at the time, and made no further explanation.
“Why, Tish!” Aggie exclaimed.
“Aggie,” she observed, severely, “if you would only remember that the world is hungry, you would eat your crusts.”
“I ate crusts for twenty years,” said Aggie, “because I’d been raised to believe they would make my hair curl. But I’ve come to a time of life when my digestion means more to me than my looks. And since I’ve had the trouble with my teeth——”
“Teeth or no teeth,” said Tish, firmly, “eating crusts is a patriotic duty, Aggie.”
She was clearly disinclined to explain about the farm, but on being pressed said she had sent the tenants away because they kept pigs, which was absurd and she knew it.
“Isn’t keeping pigs a patriotic duty?” Aggie demanded, glancing at me across the table. But Tish ignored the question.
“What about the church?” I asked.
Tish has always given the farm money to missions, and is therefore Honorary President of the Missionary Society. She did not reply immediately as she was pouring milk over her cornstarch at the time, but Hannah, her maid, spoke up rather bitterly.
“If we give the heathen what we save on the table, Miss Lizzie,” she said, “I guess they’ll do pretty well. I’m that fed up with beans that my digestion is all upset. I have to take baking soda after my meals, regular.”
Tish looked up at her sharply.
“Entire armies fight on beans,” she said
“Yes’m,” said Hannah. “I’d fight on ’em too. That’s the way they make me feel. And if a German bayonet is any worse than the colic I get——”
“Leave the room,” said Tish, in a furious voice, and finished her cornstarch in silence.
But she is a just woman, and although firm in her manner, she is naturally kind. After dinner, seeing that Aggie was genuinely disappointed about the excursion to the farm, she relented and observed that we would go to the farm as usual.
“After all,” she said, “chestnuts are nourishing, and might take the place of potatoes in a pinch.”
Here we heard a hollow groan from the pantry, but on Tish demanding its reason Hannah said, meekly enough, that she had knocked her crazy bone, and Tish, with her usual magnanimity, did not pursue the subject.
There was a heavy frost that night, and two days later Tish called me up and fixed the following day for the visit to the farm. On looking back, I am inclined to think that her usual enthusiasm was absent, but we suspected nothing. She said that Hannah would put up the luncheon, and that she had looked up the food value of chestnuts and that it was enormous. She particularly requested that Aggie should not bake a cake for the picnic, as had been her custom.
“Cakes,” she said, “are a reckless extravagance. In butter, eggs and flour a single chocolatelayer cake could support three men at the front for two days, Lizzie,” she said.
I repeated this to Aggie, and she was rather resentful. Aggie, I regret to say, has rather a weakness for good food.
“Humph!” she said, bitterly. “Very well, Lizzie. But if she expects me to go out like Balaam’s ass and eat dandelions, I’d rather starve.”
Neither Aggie nor I is inclined to be suspicious, and although we noticed Tish’s rather abstracted expression that morning, we laid it to the fact that Charlie Sands had been talking about going to the American Ambulance in France, which Tish opposed violently, although she was more than anxious to go herself.
Aggie put in her knitting bag the bottle of blackberry cordial without which we rarely travel, as we find it excellent in case of chilling, or indigestion, and even to rub on hornet stings. I was placing the suitcase, in which it is our custom to carry the chestnuts, in the back of the car, when I spied a very small parcel. Aggie saw it too.
“If that’s the lunch, Tish,” she said, “I don’t know that I care to go.”
“You can eat chestnuts,” said Tish, shortly. “But don’t go on my account. It looks like rain anyhow, and the last time I went to the farm inthe mud I skidded down a hill backwards and was only stopped by running into a cow that thought I was going the other way.”
“Nonsense, Tish,” I said. “It hasn’t an idea of raining. And if the lunch isn’t sufficient, there are generally some hens from the Knowles place that lay in your barn, aren’t there?”
“Certainly not,” she said stiffly, although it wasn’t three months since she had threatened to charge the Knowleses rent for their chickens.
Well, I was puzzled. It is not like Tish to be irritable without reason, although she has undoubtedly a temper. She was most unpleasant on the way out, remarking that if the Ostermaiers’s maid continued to pare away half the potatoes, as any fool could see around their garbage can, she thought the church should reduce his salary. She also stated flatly that she considered that the nation would be better off if some one would uncork a gas bomb in the Capitol at Washington, in spite of the fact that my second cousin, once removed, the Honorable J. C. Willoughby, represents his country in its legislative halls.
It is always a bad sign when Tish talks politics, especially since the income tax.
Although it had no significance for us at the time, she did not put her car in the barn as she usually does, but left it in the road. The housewas closed, and there was no cool and refreshing buttermilk with which to wash down our frugal repast, which we ate on the porch, as Tish did not offer to unlock the house. Frugal repast it was indeed, consisting of lettuce sandwiches made without butter, as Tish considered that both butter and lettuce was an extravagance. There were, of course, also beans.
Now as it happens, Aggie is not strong and requires palatable as well as substantial food to enable her to get about, especially to climb trees. We missed her during the meal, and I saw that she was going toward the barn. Tish saw it also, and called to her sharply.
“I am going to get an egg,” Aggie replied, with gentle obstinacy. “I am starving, Tish, and I am certain I heard a hen cackle. Probably one of the Knowles’s chickens——”
“If it is a Knowles’s chicken,” Tish said, virtuously, “its egg is a Knowles’s egg, and we have no right to it.”
I am sorry to relate that here Aggie said: “Oh, rats!” but as she apologized immediately, and let the egg drop, figuratively, of course, peace again hovered over our little party. Only momentarily, however, for, a short time after, a hen undoubtedly cackled, and Aggie got up with an air of determination.
“Tish,” she said, “that may be a Knowles’s hen or it may be one belonging to this farm. I don’t know, and I don’t give a—I don’t care. I’m going to get it.”
“The barn’s locked,” said Tish.
“I could get in through a window.”
I shall never forget Tish’s look of scorn as she rose with dignity, and stalked toward the barn.
“I shall go myself, Aggie,” she said, as she passed her. “You would probably fall in the rain barrel under the window. You’re no climber. And you might as well eat those crusts you’ve hidden under the porch, if you’re as hungry as you make out you are.”
“Lizzie,” Aggie hissed, when Tish was out of hearing, “what is in that barn?”
“It may be anything from a German spy to an aeroplane,” I said. “But it’s not your business or mine.”
“You needn’t be so dratted virtuous,” Aggie observed, scooping a hole in the petunia bed and burying the crusts in it. “Whatever’s on her mind is in that barn.”
“Naturally,” I observed, “while Tish is in it!”
Tish returned in a short time with one egg, which she placed on the porch floor without a word. But as she made no effort to give Aggie the house key, and as Aggie has never learned toswallow a raw egg, although I have heard that they taste rather like oysters, and slip down in much the same way, Aggie was obliged to continue hungry.
It is only just to record that Tish grew more companionable after luncheon, and got into a large chestnut tree near the house by climbing on top of the hen house. We had always before had the farmer’s boy to do the climbing into the upper branches, and I confess to a certain nervousness, especially as Tish, when far above the ground, decided to take off her dress skirt, which was her second best tailor-made, and climb around in her petticoats.
She had to have both hands free to unhook the band, and she very nearly overbalanced while stepping out of it.
“Drat a woman’s clothes, anyhow,” she said. “If we had any sense we’d wear trousers.”
“I understand,” I said, “that even trousers are not easy to get out of, Tish.”
“Don’t be a fool, Lizzie,” she said tartly. “If I had trousers on I wouldn’t have to take them off. Catch it!”
However, the skirt did not fall clear, but caught on a branch far out, and hung there. Tish broke off a small limb and poked at it from above, and I found a paling from a fence and threw it up todislodge it. But it stuck tight, and the paling came down and struck Aggie on the head. Had we only known it, this fortunate accident probably saved Aggie’s life, for she sat down suddenly on the ground, and said faintly that her skull was fractured.
I was bending over Aggie when I heard a sharp crack from above. I looked up, and Tish was lying full length on a limb, her arm out to reach for the skirt and a most terrible expression on her face. There was another crack, and our poor Tish came hurtling through the air, landing half in Aggie’s lap and half in the suitcase.
I was quite unable to speak, and owing, as I learned later, to Tish’s head catching her near the waist line, Aggie had no breath even to scream.
There was a dreadful silence. Then Tish said, without moving:
“All my property is to go to Charlie Sands.”
“Tish!” I cried, in an agony, and Aggie, who still could not speak, burst into tears.
However, a moment later, Tish drew up first one limb and then the other, and observed that her back was broken. She then mentioned that Aggie was to have her cameo set and the dining room sideboard, and that I was to have the automobile, but the next instant she felt a worm onher neck and sat up, looking rather dishevelled, but far from death.
“Where are you hurt, Tish?” I asked, trembling.
“Everywhere,” she replied. “Everywhere, Lizzie. Every bone in my body is broken.”
But after a time the aching localized itself in her right arm, which began to swell. We led her down to the creek and got her to hold it in the cold water and Aggie, being still nervous and unsteady, slipped on a mossy stone and sat down in about a foot of water. It was then that our dear Tish became like herself again, for Aggie was shocked into saying, “Oh, damn!” and Tish gave her a severe lecture on profanity.
Tish was quite sure her arm was broken, as well as all the ribs on one side. But she is a brave woman and made little fuss, although she kept poking a finger into her flesh here and there.
“Because,” she said, “the First Aid book says that if a lung is punctured the air gets into the tissues, and they crackle on pressure.”
It was soon after this that I saw Aggie, who had made no complaint about Tish falling on her, furtively testing her own tissues to see if they crackled.
Leaving my injured there by the creek, I went back to the tree and secured my paling again.By covering it with straw from the barn I was quite sure I could make a comfortable splint for Tish’s arm. However, I had but just reached the barn and was preparing to crawl through a window by standing on a rain barrel when I saw Tish limping after me.
“Well?” she said. “What idiotic idea is in your head, Lizzie? Because if it is more eggs——”
“I am going to get some straw and make a splint.”
“Nonsense. What for?”
“What do you suppose I intend it for?” I demanded, tartly. “To trim a hat?”
“I won’t have a splint.”
“Very well,” I retorted. “Then I shall get some straw and start a fire to dry Aggie out.”
“You’ll stick in that window,” Tish said, in what, in a smaller woman, would have been a vicious tone.
“Look here, Tish,” I said, balancing on the edge of the rain barrel, “is there something in this barn you do not wish me to see?”
She looked at me steadily.
“Yes,” she said. “There is, Lizzie. And I’ll ask you to promise on your honor not to mention it.”
That promise I am glad to say I have keptuntil now, when the need of secrecy is past, Tish herself having divulged the truth. But at the time I was greatly agitated, and indeed almost fell into the rain barrel.
“Or try to find out what it is,” Tish went on, sternly.
I promised, of course, and Tish relaxed somewhat, although I caught her eye on me once or twice, as though she was daring me to so much as guess at the secret.
“Of course, Lizzie,” she said, as we approached Aggie, “it is nothing I am ashamed of.”
“Of course not,” I replied hastily. I took my courage in my hands and faced her. “Tish, have you an aeroplane hidden in that barn?”
“No,” she replied promptly. She might have enlarged on her denial, but Aggie took a violent sneezing spell just then, pressing herself between paroxysms to see if she crackled, and we decided to go home at once.
Here a new difficulty presented itself. Tish could not drive the car! I shall never forget my anguish when she turned to me and said:
“You will have to drive us home, Lizzie.”
“Never!” I cried.
“It’s perfectly easy,” she went on. “If children can run them, and the idiots they have in garages and on taxicabs——”
“Never,” I said firmly. “It may be easy, but it took you six months, Tish Carberry, and three broken springs and any number of dead chickens and animals, besides the time you went through a bridge, and the night you drove off the end of a dock. It may be easy, but if it is, I’d rather do something hard.”
“I shall sit beside you, Lizzie,” she said, in a patient voice. “I daresay you know which is your right foot and which is your left. If not, I can tell you. I shall say ‘left’ when I want you to push out the clutch, and ‘right’ for the brake. As for gears, I can change them for you with my left hand.”
“I could do it sitting in a chair,” I said, in a despairing voice. “But Tish,” I said, in a last effort, “do you remember when you tried to teach me to ride a bicycle? And that the moment I saw something to avoid I made a mad dash for it?”
“This is different,” Tish said. “It is a car——”
“And that I rode about a quarter of a mile into Lake Penzance, and would likely have ridden straight across if I hadn’t run into a canoe and upset it?”
“You can alwaysstopa car,” said Tish. “Don’t be a coward, Lizzie. All you have to do is to shove hard with your right foot.”
Yet, when I did exactly that, she denied she had ever said it. Fond as I am of Tish, I must admit that she has a way of forgetting things she does not wish to remember.
In the end I consented. It was against my better judgment, and I warned Tish. I have no talent for machinery, but indeed a great fear of it, since the time when as a child I was visiting my grand-aunt’s farm and almost lost a finger in a feed-cutter. In addition to that, Tish’s accident and her secret had both unnerved me. I knew that calamity faced us as I took my place at the wheel.
Tish was still in her petticoat, as we were obliged to leave her dress skirt in the tree, and Aggie was wrapped in the rug to prevent her taking cold.
“When we meet a buggy,” Tish said, “we’d better go past it rather fast. I don’t ache to be seen in a seersucker petticoat.”
“Fast,” I said, bitterly. “You’d better pray that we go past it at all.”
However, by going very slowly, I got the thing as far as the gate going into the road. Here there was a hill, and we began to move too rapidly.
“Slower,” said Tish. “You’ve got to make a turn here.”
“How?” I cried, frantically.
“Brake!” she yelled.
“Which foot?”
“Right foot.Right foot!”
However, it seems that my right foot was on the gas throttle at the time, which she had forgotten. I jammed my foot down hard, and the car seemed to lift out of the air. We went across the ditch, through a stake and rider fence, through a creek and up the other side of the bank, and brought up against a haystack with a terrific jolt.
Tish sat back and straightened her hat with a jerk.
“We’d better go back and do it again, Lizzie,” she said, “because you missed one or two things.”
“I did what you told me,” I replied, sullenly.
“Did you?” said Tish. “I don’t remember telling you to leap the creek. Of course, cross-country motoring has its advantages. Only one really should have solid tires, because barbed wire fences might be awkward.”
She then sat back and rested.
“Well?” I said.
“Well?” said Tish.
“What am I to do now?”
“Oh!” she said. “I thought you preferred doing it your own way. I don’t object, if youdon’t. You are quite right. Roads do become monotonous. Only I doubt, Lizzie, if you can get over this stack. You’d better go around it.”
“Very well,” I said. “My own way is to walk home, Tish Carberry. And if you think I am going to steer a runaway automobile you can think again.”
Aggie had said nothing, but I now turned and saw her, pale and shaken, taking a sip of the blackberry cordial we always carry with us for emergencies. I suggested that she drive the thing home, but she only shook her head and muttered something about almost falling out of the back end of the car when we leaped up out of the creek. She had, she asserted, been clear up on the folded-back top, and had stayed there until the jolt against the haystack had thrown her forward into the seat again.
I daresay we would still be there had not a young man with a gun run suddenly around the haystack. He had a frightened look, but when he saw us all alive he relaxed. Unfortunately, however, Aggie still had the bottle of blackberry cordial in the air. His expression altered when he saw her, and he said, in a disgusted voice:
“Well, I be damned!”
Tish had not seen Aggie, and merely observed that she felt like that and even more. She thenremarked that I had broken her other arm, and her nose, which had struck the wind shield. But the young man merely gave her a scornful glance, and leaning his gun against the haystack, came over to the car and inspected us all with a most scornful expression.
“I thought so!” he said. “When I saw you leaping that fence and jumping the creek, I knew what was wrong. Only I thought it was a party of men. In my wildest dreams—give me that bottle,” he ordered Aggie, holding out his hand.
Now it is Aggie’s misfortune to have lost her own teeth some years ago, owing to a country dentist who did not know his business. And when excited she has a way of losing her hold, as one may say, on her upper set. She then speaks in a thick tone, with a lisp.
“Thertainly not!” said Aggie.
To my horror, the young man then stepped on the running board of the car and snatched the bottle out of her hand.
“I must say,” he said, glaring at us each in turn, “that it is the most disgraceful thing I have ever seen.” His eyes stopped at Tish, and traveled over her. “Where is your clothing?” he demanded, fiercely.
It was then that Tish rose and fixed him with a glittering eye.
“Young man,” she said, “where my dress skirt is does not concern you. Nor why we are here as we are. Give Miss Pilkington that bottle of blackberry cordial.”
“Blackberry cordial!” jeered the young man.
“As for what you evidently surmise, you are a young idiot. I am the President of the local branch of the W. C. T. U.”
“Of course you are,” said the young man. “I’m Carrie Nation myself. Now watch.”
He then selected a large stone and smashed the bottle on it.
“Now,” he observed, “come over with the rest of it, and be quick.” But here he seemed to realize that Tish’s face was rather awful, for he stopped bullying and began to coax. “Now see here,” he said. “I’m going to help you out of this if I can, because I rather think it is an accident. You’ve all had something on an empty stomach. Go down to the creek and get some cold water, and then walk about a bit. I’ll see what I can do with the car.”
Aggie was weeping in the rear seat by that time, and I shall never forget Tish’s face. Suddenly she got out of the car and before he realized what was happening, she had his gun in her good hand.
“Now,” she said, waving it about recklessly,“I’ll teach you to insult sober and God-fearing women whose only fault is that one of them hasn’t all the wit she should have and let a car run away with her. Lizzie, get out of that seat.”
It was the young man’s turn to look strange.
“Be careful!” he cried. “Be careful!It’s loaded, and the safety catch——”
“Get out, Aggie.”
Aggie crawled out, still holding the rug around where she had sat down in the creek.
“Now,” Tish said, addressing the stranger, “you back that car out and get it to the road. And close your mouth. Something is likely to fly into it.”
“I beg of you!” said the young man. “Of course I’ll do what I can, but—please don’t wave that gun around.”
“Just a moment,” said Tish. “That blackberry cordial was worth about a dollar. Just give a dollar to the lady near you. Aggie, take that dollar. Lizzie, come here and let me rest this gun on your shoulder.”
She did, keeping it pointed at the young man, and I could hear her behind me, breathing in short gasps of fury. Nothing could so have enraged Tish as the thing which had happened, and for a time I feared that she would actually do the young man some serious harm.
He sat there looking at us, and he saw, of course, that he had been mistaken. He grew very red, and said:
“I’ve been an idiot, of course. If you will allow me to apologize——”
“Don’t talk,” Tish snapped. “You have all you can do without any conversation. Did you ever drive a car before?”
“Not through a haystack,” he said in a sulky voice.
But Tish fixed him with a glittering eye, and he started the engine.
Well, he got the car backed and turned around, and we followed him through the stubble as the car bumped and rocked along. But at the edge of the creek he stopped and turned around.
“Look here,” he said. “This is suicide. This car will never do it.”
“It has just done it,” Tish replied, inexorably. “Go on.”
“I might get down, but I’ll never get up the other side.”
“Go on.”
“Tish!” Aggie cried, anguished. “He may be killed, and you’ll be responsible.”
Aggie is a sentimental creature, and the young man was very good-looking. Indeed, arriving at the brink, I myself had qualms. But Tish has awill of iron, and was, besides, still rankling with insult. She merely glued her eye again to the sight of the gun on my shoulder, and said:
“Go on!”
Well, he got the car down somehow or other, but nothing would make it climb the other side. It would go up a few feet and then slide back. And at last Tish herself saw that it was hopeless, and told him to turn and go down the creek bed.
It was a very rough creek bed, and one of the springs broke almost at once. We followed along the bank, and I think Tish found a sort of grim humor in seeing the young man bouncing up into the air and coming down on the wheel, for I turned once and found her smiling faintly. However, she merely called to him to be careful of the other springs or she would have to ask him to pay for them.
He stopped then, in a pool about two feet deep, and glared up at her.
“Oh, certainly,” he said. “I suppose the fact that I have permanently bent in my floating ribs on this infernal wheel doesn’t matter.”
At last he came to a shelving bank, and got the car out. I think he contemplated making a run for it then and getting away, but Tish observed that she would shoot into the rear tires if hedid so. So he went back to the road, slowly, and there stopped the car.
However, Tish was not through with him. She made him climb the chestnut tree and bring down her dress skirt, and then turn his back while she put it on. By that time, the young man was in a chastened mood, and he apologized handsomely.
“But I think I have made amends, ladies,” he said. “I feel that I shall never be the same again. When I started out today I was a blithe young thing, feeling life in every limb, as the poet says. Now what I feel in every limb does not belong in verse. May I have the shotgun, please?”
But Tish had no confidence in him, and we took the gun with us, arranging to leave it at the first signpost, about a mile away. We left him there, and Aggie reported that he stood in the road staring after us as long as we were in sight.
Tish drove the car home after all, steering with one hand and taking the wheel off a buggy on the way. I sat beside her and changed the gears, and she blamed the buggy wheel on me, owing to my going into reverse when I meant to go ahead slowly. The result was that we began to back unexpectedly, and the man only saved his horse by jumping him over a watering trough.
I have gone into this incident with some care, because the present narrative concerns itself withthe young man we met, and with the secret in Tish’s barn. At the time, of course, it seemed merely one of the unpleasant things one wishes to forget quickly. Tish’s arm was only sprained, and although Aggie wore adhesive plaster around her ribs almost all winter, because she was afraid to have it pulled off, there were no permanent ill effects.
The winter passed quietly enough. Aggie and I made Red Cross dressings for Europe, and Tish, tiring of knitting, made pajamas. She had turned against the government, and almost left the church when she learned that Mr. Ostermaier had voted the Democratic ticket. Then in January, without telling any one, she went away for four days, and Sarah Willoughby wrote me later that the Honorable J. C., her husband, said that a woman resembling Tish had demanded from the gallery of the Senate that we declare war against Germany and had been put out by the Sergeant-at-arms.
I do not know that this was Tish. She returned as unannounced as she had gone, and went back to her pajamas, but she was more quiet than usual, and sometimes, when she was sewing, her lips moved as though she was rehearsing a speech. She observed once or twice that she wanted to do her bit, but that she considered diggingtrenches considerably easier than driving a sewing machine twelve miles a day.
I remember, in this connection, a conversation I had with Mrs. Ostermaier some time in January. She asked me to wait after the Red Cross meeting, and I saw trouble in her eye.
“Miss Lizzie,” she said, “do you think Miss Tish really enjoys sewing?”
“Not particularly,” I admitted. “But it is better than knitting, she says, because it is faster. She likes to get results.”
“Exactly,” Mrs. Ostermaier observed. “I’ll just ask you to look at this pajama coat she has turned in.”
Well, there was no getting away from it. It was wrong. Dear Tish had sewed one of the sleeves in the neck opening, and had opened the sleeve hole and faced back the opening and put buttons and buttonholes on it.
“Not only that,” said Mrs. Ostermaier, “but she has made the trousers of several suits wrong side before and opened them up the back, and men are such creatures of habit. They like things the way they are used to them.”
Well, I had to tell Tish, and she flew into a temper and said Mrs. Ostermaier never could cut things out properly, and she would leave the society. Which she did. But she was very unhappyover it, for Tish is patriotic to her finger tips.
All the spring, until war was declared, she was restless and discontented, and she took to long trips in the car, by herself, returning moodier than ever. But with the announcement of war she found work to do. She made enlisting speeches everywhere, and was very successful, because Tish has a magnetic and compelling eye, and she would fix on one man in the crowd and talk at him and to him until all the men around were watching him. Generally, with every one looking he was ashamed not to come forward, and Tish would take him by the arm and lead him in to the recruiting station.
It was on one of these occasions that we saw the young man of the blackberry cordial again.
Tish saw him first, from the tail of the wagon she was standing in. She fixed him with her eye at once, and a man standing near him, said:
“Go on in, boy. You’re as good as in the trenches already. She landed me yesterday, but I’ve got six toes on one foot. Blessed if she didn’t try to take me to a hospital to have one cut off.”
“Now,” said Tish, “does any one wish to ask any questions?”
I saw the blackberry cordial person take a step forward.
“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. Itwouldn’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 Ihavegot 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. Butwhen 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.”
I put down my knitting.
“Perhaps that is the reason she wants it done,” I suggested.
“By George!” he exclaimed.
Well, thatwasthe reason. I may as well admit it now. Tish is a fine and spirited woman, and as brave as a lion. But it was soon evident to all of us that she was going to keep Charlie Sands safe if she could. She was continually referring to his having been a sickly baby, and I am quite sure she convinced herself that he had been. She spoke, too, of a small cough he had as indicating weak lungs, and was almost indecently irritated when the chest specialist said that it was fromsmoking, and that if he had any more lung space the rest of his organs would have had to move out.
One way and another, she kept him from enlisting for quite a time, maintaining that to run a newspaper and keep people properly informed was as patriotic as carrying a gun.
I remember that on one occasion, when he had at last decided to join the navy and was going to Washington, Tish took a very bad attack of indigestion, and nothing quieted her until after train time but to have Charlie Sands beside her, feeding her peppermint and hot water.
Then, at last, the draft bill was passed, and she persuaded him to wait and take his chance.
We were at a Red Cross class, being taught how to take foreign bodies out of the ear, when the news came. Tish was not paying much attention, because she considered that if a soldier got a bullet or shrapnel in his ear, a syringe would not help him much. She had gone out of the room, therefore, and Aggie had just had a bean put in her auditory canal, and was sure it would swell before they got it again, when Tish returned. She said the bill had passed, and that the age limit was thirty-one.
Mrs. Ostermaier, who was using the syringe,let it slip and shot a stream of water into Aggie’s right eye.
“Thirty-one!” she said. “Well, I suppose that includes your nephew, Miss Tish.”
“Not at all,” said Tish. “He will have his thirty-second birthday on the fifth of June, and he probably won’t have to register at all. It’s likely to be July before they’re ready.”
“Oh, the fifth of June!” said Mrs. Ostermaier, and gave Aggie another squirt.
Now Tish and I have talked this over since, and it may only be a coincidence. But Mrs. Ostermaier’s cousin is married to a Congressman from the west, and she sends the Ostermaiers all his speeches. Mr. Ostermaier sends on his sermon, too, in exchange, and every now and then Mrs. Ostermaier comes running in to Tish with something delivered in our national legislature which she claims was conceived in our pulpit.
Anyhow, when the draft day was set,it was the fifth of June!
Aggie and I went to Tish at once, and found her sitting very quietly with the blinds down, and Hannah snivelling in the kitchen.
“It’s that woman,” Tish said. “When I think of the things I’ve done for them, and the way I’ve headed lists and served church suppers and madepotato salad and packed barrels, it makes me sick.”
Aggie sat down beside her and put a hand on her knee.
“I know, Tish,” she said. “Mr. Wiggins was set on going to the Spanish war. He said that he could not shoot, but that he would be valuable as an observer, from church towers and things, because he was used to being in the air. He would have gone, too, but——”
“If he goes,” Tish said, “he will never come back. I know it. I’ve known it ever since I ran over that black cat the other day.”
Well, we had to leave her, as Aggie was buying wool for the Army and Navy League. We went out, very low in our minds. What was our surprise, therefore, on returning late that afternoon, to find Tish cheerfully hoeing in the garden she had planted in the vacant lot next door, while Hannah followed her and gathered up in a basket the pieces of brick, broken bottles and buried bones that Tish unearthed.
“You poor dear!” Aggie said, going toward her. “I know just how you feel. I——”
“Get out!” Tish yelled, in a furious tone. “Look what you’re doing! Great heavens, don’t you see what you’ve done? That was a potato plant.”
We tried to get out, although I could see nothing but a few weeds, but she yelled at us every moment and at last I gave it up.
“I’d rather stay here, Tish,” I said, “if you don’t mind. I can keep the dogs away, and along in the autumn, when it’s safe to move, you can take me home, or put me in a can, along with the other garden stuff.”