# The Red Book Magazine/Volume 25/Number 4/Sitting Up With Susan

Extracted from Red Book magazine, 1915 Aug, pp. 642–657. Accompanying illustrations by James Montgomery Flagg may be omitted. A “McGillicuddy” story.
Sitting Up With Susan
   THIS is the sort of story which shows in every line the joy the author found in writing it. If you read Meredith Nicholson's novels, “The House of a Thousand Candles" and “The Port of Missing Men,” you may imagine the delightful reading this story of a two-hundred-and-thirty-pound hero promises.
By Meredith Nicholson
Illustrated by James Montgomery Flagg
WHEN Roger G. McGillicuddy landed on Mackinac Island at three p.m. on the third of August, 1914, he was not the same McGillicuddy who had boarded the steamer at Chicago.
It might be assumed from this assertion that McGillicuddy had previously led a gay or vicious life and that he was seeking the bracing airs of the North in the hope of regaining his moral equilibrium. Such an assumption would be grossly unjust to one of the gentlest, most upright and amiable bachelors who ever engaged in the wholesale dry-goods business.
When you looked upon Roger G. McGillicuddy, you saw two hundred and thirty-two pounds of wholesomeness surrounding a sound character and lofty ideals. Bodily ills never troubled him. It was not his fault that he was fat; he ate sparingly, and neither malt nor vinous liquors tempted him. A life-long habit of exercising with dumb bells after his morning bath, and laborious work on the golf links had made his muscles firm. His weight was well distributed over his five feet six, and he walked with a light step. He carried his head a little high, which is permissible in a man whose name is a synonym for probity and honor in the dry-goods trade of the Mississippi Valley and Upper and Lower Lake regions. Nor was McGillicuddy the sort of fat man whom people dig in the ribs or jolly about his weight. He was a gentleman, a man of dignity, and anyone who tried to tell him a risqué story and saw the pained look upon his face never repeated the experiment.
But while McGillicuddy prospered and enjoyed the world's good will, the very tranquillity of his life palled upon him. In all his forty years nothing particularly interesting had ever happened. Early in life he had walked the dark vale of unrequited love and had thereafter turned his face from womankind. Still, he was far from being a woman-hater, and when his friends' wives asked him to dinner he sent them flowers and remembered their children generously at Christmas. He went trout-fishing every spring, and he had traveled as far east as Vienna; but such mild recreations had begun to bore him.
Indian summer was stealing upon him, and life was still only about so many yards of woolens, linens and muslins to McGillicuddy. He had been a devoted novel reader and yet his own life was as dull as a laundry list or the menus of the Michigan Avenue club where he had lived for twenty years. Heroes are always slim. The successful heroes of fiction have to be qualified for wild rides by night, the swimming of moats and other like achievements that delighted McGillicuddy's soul. He had observed, not without bitterness, that Gibson, Flagg, Christy, Underwood and other popular illustrators present only slim heroes, with a single firm chin. Men of his own figure when translated into fiction were turned over to the tender mercies of inferior artists to be caricatured. McGillicuddy meant to change all this. He would show the world that a man of forty, weighing two hundred and thirty-two pounds, could and would prove his mettle in every sort of adventure. When the trumpets called, he would not be snoring in an inn like a corpulent Falstaff but would take horse and ride where the battle waged hottest. He would heed the slightest beckoning of snowy hands in beleaguered towers or even from the windows of respectable flats. It was this new McGillicuddy that landed on Mackinac Island at three p.m. on the third of August, 1914.
On the steamer he had almost spoken to a girl in a long ulster who smiled at him encouragingly; but on second thought he decided that hers was only the tolerant, condescending smile that everyone has for a fat man. People smile at fat men as they smile at babies. McGillicuddy knew this and it rankled. But he meant to change the fat man's status. He would make Richard Harding Davis regret his failure to recognize the potential heroism and old-time chivalry of the corpulent man.
THE Hanleys drove him from the dock to their handsome cottage on the shore, which boasted one of the best views on the Island. They had asked him for a week, but the new McGillicuddy, having highly resolved to spend a month seeking adventure, had no idea of wasting more time with the Hanleys than politeness required.
The view from the Hanleys' broad verandas was fine, and McGillicuddy praised it.
“Oh, the view's all right,” remarked Hanley, biting savagely at his cigar.
Hanley's tone was hardly polite, but he and McGillicuddy were old friends and lunched together nearly every day in the city, so that it was not incumbent on him to play the agreeable host if he didn't feel up to it. And besides, everybody expects a fat man to be amiable in all circumstances.
Illustration: Most folks will consider this young woman, who found the two-hundred-and-thirty-two-pound bachelor sitting up with Susan, the heroine of the story, but in point of fact the real heroine is Susan, and Susan is a cow.
Hanley's son Jimmie, who had been out of Harvard a year and was a promising boy, joined them and talked of the weather (which was fine) as though it were a deadly enemy. He, like his father, seemed perturbed and unhappy. Mrs. Hanley brought out her sewing, and she too acted as though she had just heard bad news. McGillicuddy, always anxious to contribute his share to human enjoyment, talked until the sound of his voice became monotonous. Young Hanley rose abruptly and retired to the farthest corner of the veranda and pretended to read. It was only pretense; McGillicuddy, watching him out of the corner of his eye, noted that Jimmie was only pretending. Something was wrong with the Hanley household, and a chance question gave him a vague clue.
“That next house is the Donalds', isn't it?” he remarked casually. “I seem to remember that he had a place next to yours.”
This, on the face of it, was the most harmless of questions, but its effect on the Hanleys was disconcerting. Mrs. Hanley gave her rocking-chair an impatient hitch; Hanley snorted an affirmative expressive of contempt for all the Donalds, living and dead.
And this was surprising, for the name of Caleb S. Donald of Detroit was revered even in Chicago as a synonym for wealth and philanthropy.
“Those people,” blurted Hanley, “are an infernal nuisance on this island.”
Mrs. Hanley rose and vanished, with what seemed an admirable discretion in view of the fact that Hanley had reddened under his golf tan and showed signs of becoming profanely confidential with his guest.
“My God, Mac, we've been coming here for fourteen years; we come here for peace—peace!—you understand me? And that contemptible scoundrel over there is driving us all mad! Yes sir, mad! God knows I'd rather be locked up with a lot of gibbering lunatics than on this island.”
McGillicuddy tipped his hat over one ear and gurgled sympathetically. The sympathy was grateful to Hanley, who leaned forward and slapped his guest on a round fat leg and exploded:
“What you think those fools have done! They've bought a cussed cow here—a rotten silly beast that bawls all night, regular, and most of the day. Keep the blame' thing tied up in their back lot so it can sneak up under our windows for the midnight serenade. We haven't slept for a week! It's made a wreck of me. Fourteen years of peace, mind you, and now to have that blackguard make a stockyards of the whole bloomin' island! Mac, can you beat it?”
At this moment a faint moo floated to them, causing Hanley to glare fiercely into McGillicuddy's benevolent blue eyes.
“There she goes! Can't sit out here without that infernal bellowing starts up. People you've summered next door to for fourteen years come and do that to you!”
The vocal performance continued at intervals, with mournful discordance. McGillicuddy liked his sleep, and the prospect of a wakeful night depressed him.
“Why don't you do something about it?” he suggested. “Nobody's got a right to set up a nuisance in a summer resort like this. But a little diplomacy will probably clear the thing up—”
“Don't talk rot!” blared Hanley furiously. “Aint I done everything I could! Donald's as obstinate as a mule, and now that he knows their beast annoys us, he hangs on to it all the harder. It's spoiled my summer! Mary's a wreck from the row it's caused, and they've got the whole island laughing about it—laughing at us, Mac—that's the beautiful part of it. A cow on an island is a fool notion, anyhow. Why don't they buy their milk the way we do and always have done? This idea o' bringing a whole herd o' cattle up here just because old man Donald's got a weak stomach and has to have milk! Bah!” Hanley shook himself in his rage and flung his cigar toward the Arctic Circle.
The situation was difficult, McGillicuddy admitted; but he was grieved to find that his consolatory reflections and advice seemed only to increase his host's heat.
“The mischief is,” Hanley declared in a hoarse whisper and with a glance over his shoulder at the forlorn figure of his son, “that Jim kept the trail to Detroit hot last winter and got engaged to Dorothy Donald. And now we've got this row on, and we don't even speak to the family when we meet 'em in the road. And here Jim's just about not speaking to me—says I'm unreasonable, and that old Donald's got to have special milk from a high-priced bawling cow or he'll die! Well, I hope to God he dies soon, that's all! What's the matter with my stomach! What's the matter with my mind! To hear Jim talk, you'd think Donald was the only man on this island that suffered!”
At dinner Mrs. Hanley tried to appear cheerful, but her efforts only added to the general discomfort. Hanley was nervous and preoccupied; Jimmie wore a look of utter despair and merely pecked at his food. McGillicuddy discussed topics as remote as possible from bovine ruminants and neighborhood quarrels, but it seemed difficult to touch upon anything that was not in some way related to the Donalds and the blight they had cast upon the island. A harmless remark about the tariff aroused Hanley to a furious outburst; and it was several minutes before McGillicuddy realized that his friend's rage was due to the fact that Donald was a free-trader. Hanley had always been very broad minded on the tariff question himself, and McGillicuddy was not censurable for his ignorance of Hanley's change of heart.
“A funny thing happened at the club the other night—” McGillicuddy began hopefully; but at this point a heartbroken moo ending in a prolonged raucous sob cut short his anecdote.
“There it is again!” shouted Hanley, rising and casting his napkin upon the table. “If they wanted to bring that cow here, why didn't they bring it's calf too and not have the fool bellowing for it!”
He strode to the window and summoned the others to look out upon the hideous beast. There, in the lingering twilight, sure enough, was a cow, not to say the cow, discernible through the trees and shrubbery.
“A Holstein,” remarked McGillicuddy critically, as he caught a glimpse of the animal lifting her head for another bawl.
“Holstein nothing!” sniffed Hanley. “It's a cheap mongrel cow, a stock-yards left-over,—you may bet your boots on that,—a cheap stock-yards cow for a cheap man—a blundering, ignorant ass of a man!”
“Better sit down now and eat your desert, Roger,” mildly suggested Mrs. Hanley.
McGILLICUDDY returned to his seat while his host, kept at white heat by continued bawlings from the Holstein, snapped his napkin across his knees and ate ice cream as though he hated it. Jimmie, with his hands thrust into the pockets of his dinner coat, sighed occasionally. He refused dessert and told his mother that he wanted a large cup of coffee.
Here, McGillicuddy reflected, was a fine opportunity to begin his adventurous career—a chance to show his hand—the hand of the new Roger G. McGillicuddy. He pitied Hanley, who allowed a mere cow to bring him to the verge of nervous collapse. While Hanley was telling Mrs. Hanley all the frightful things he meant to do to the cow, to the Donalds, and to the Mackinac authorities for tolerating such a nuisance, McGillicuddy quietly smoked his cigar before the living-room fireplace and considered the Donald cow as a possible element of romance and adventure. It was absurd that a young fellow like Jimmie Hanley, who had played on the 'varsity eleven and broken track records, should pine away merely because his sweetheart's father kept a bawling cow at his summer place.
They drove through the woods to play bridge at the house of some Louisville people who had steadfastly refused to become embroiled in the cow controversy that was, apparently, shaking the island to its center. Hanley cheered up a trifle, and McGillicuddy, who enjoyed bridge, managed to have a good time and won the gentleman's prize.
THEY reached home at eleven, and McGillicuddy went to his room in haste for fear the offending cow might provoke another outburst from Hanley. While he was undressing, Jimmie came in to ask if he could do anything for him. Jimmy had been walking alone through the woods all evening to ease his troubled spirit, and he crumpled up in a rocker quite overcome with emotion when McGillicuddy addressed him sympathetically.
“See here, son, you oughtn't to let this thing crush you this way. Why in thunder don't you do something about it? You going to let a measly cow ruin your life? Going to lose your sweetheart because a cow gives your dad the willies? Cheer up, son; it isn't like a Hanley to be knocked out by a little thing like that. Why don't you set fire to the barn and make a burnt offering of that cow? Why don't you go over to Donald with a gun and tell him the cow's got to go or you'll plug him full of lead?”
Illustration: “Go to bed end get some sleep, son. Leave this to me. I'll take charge of the whole shooting match.”
The new McGillicuddy was speaking. He hardly knew his own voice. It seemed to strike Jimmie as unfamiliar, and he stared fearfully at his father's friend who was so placidly suggesting arson and murder. His amazement increased as McGillicuddy, having taken off his trousers and examined the creases, bent over him with an air of mystery.
“Go to bed and get some sleep, son. Leave this to me. I'll take charge of the whole shooting-match.”
He folded the trousers neatly, hung them over a chair and lighted a cigar. Jimmie was baffled. For McGillicuddy never drank; he had seen him lay a small, well-kept fat hand rejectingly upon his glass when the butler offered wine at dinner. Nor did it seem possible that the shrewd, substantial dry-goods merchant had suddenly lost his senses.
“Forget it, Jimmie; forget all about it, and by this time to-morrow it will all be over! It will have to be,” he added, crossing to his dressing-table and inspecting a timetable, “for I leave on the four-ten ferry.”
It was in this cocksure, jaunty fashion that the heroes of fiction gave assurances that they would, within a certain time, deliver the head of the king's enemy at the castle gate. McGillicuddy wobbled his cigar in his mouth and shook out a pair of pink pajamas. Jimmie, he noticed, was not unimpressed by his declaration that within twenty-four hours the war between the Donalds and Hanleys would be at an end. The young man rose and clasped McGillicudy's hand.
“This is going to kill me, Mac. That girl's the greatest girl in the world, and to think—to think—” He seemed at the point of tears.
“Don't think! Just forget it, Jimmie.”
Jimmie had always Mister-ed him before, and the sudden shift to “Mac” seemed to McGillicuddy conclusive proof that his metamorphosis into a gay adventurer had been effectively accomplished. And it was no small achievement to have impressed Jimmie, the ex-football hero, with the idea that he, Roger G. McGillicuddy, was competent to deal with perplexing situations. For in his secret soul McGillicuddy knew that he had not the faintest notion of how the thing could be done.
II
HE made himself comfortable in bath-wrapper and slippers and read until one o'clock. The profound silence was broken only by the occasional whistles of passing steamers. The cow made no sign, and McGillicuddy had concluded that Hanley had grossly misrepresented his annoyances when a faint moo aroused him, the tentative prelude of other mooings that increased in number and volume. Immediately he heard across the hall the bang of a window, which he assumed to be Hanley's protest to the high gods.
McGillicuddy thrust his feet into his shoes, tightened the cord of his wrapper and clapping a traveling cap on his head, opened the door and started down the hall. He heard Hanley swearing—also the voice of Mrs. Hanley raised in entreaty. McGillicuddy proceeded cautiously downstairs to the hall, fell over a chair and gained the front door. As he stepped out upon the veranda, the chill night air caused him to shiver, but he had keyed himself for adventure and steeled himself against small annoyances. The stars twinkled pleasantly overhead, and he heard the wash of waters upon the beach below. Save for the monotonous bawling of the cow, the world was at peace.
He followed a path that led round the house, found the fence that divided the Montagues from the Capulets, and clambered over. He was now on the enemy's preserves, and his soul exulted at the thought. Through the starlight the Donald barn loomed darkly before him, but the bawling would have marked it for ready discovery by a blind man. Hanley had averred that the cow bawled all night; and certainly she seemed capable of it. Her plaintive moo, with its rasping crescendo, continued with the deadly iteration of a foghorn.
McGillicuddy opened the barn door without difficulty, and as he stepped inside, the cow paused chokingly in the midst of a particularly distressing bawl. He fished in his bath-wrapper for a match and struck a light. His appearance seemed to exert a soothing spell upon the mourning bovine, and he put out his hand and patted her nose, muttering “So, boss”—which he had heard somewhere prescribed as the proper formula for addressing cows. This particular specimen responded promptly by rubbing her moist nose across his face. He struck another match and surveyed the animal critically. She was a healthy-looking cow, with beautiful appealing eyes, and outwardly she gave no hint of the inner grief and stress that prompted her to make the night hideous. She was immured in a box-stall, and her surroundings were decent and comfortable.
He carefully extinguished a third match and was brooding upon the situation, when a door at the further end of the barn opened furtively, and some one walked toward the stall swinging a lantern.
It had not entered into McGillicuddy's calculations that he would be caught in his benevolent efforts to relieve the Hanleys of the nocturnal horror, and he ducked down behind the stall.
“Poor Susan! Nice old Susan! Did you want a drink of water, Susan? Here's a nice drink for the poor girl. That's a nice little Susan! Nobody's going to hurt you, Susan!”
McGillicuddy gasped. It was a woman's voice, a gentle, agreeable, lady-like voice which it seemed a shame to waste upon a cow. Its owner entered the stall and placed her lantern on the floor and lifted a pail of water into the manger-trough.
“Wasn't it a drink you wanted, Susan?”
Evidently it was not a drink that Susan wanted. The pail rattled as Susan rudely overturned it; there was a splash followed by a cry of disgust.
“Naughty Susan!”
McGillicuddy peered over into the stall as the kind-hearted but vexed bearer of the pail lifted her lantern from the floor, and he saw her clearly—a tall, fair girl, with a tennis blazer drawn over a blue kimono. The light struck goldenly in her hair as she stood, with the lantern under her arm, pondering some further effort to mitigate Susan's sufferings.
Susan, finding herself the object of friendly observation, continued calm; indeed, the quiet was so tense for a moment that when McGillicuddy, moving slightly, knocked over a shovel, it fell with a hideous bang that caused the girl to jump. Susan promptly expressed her resentment that anyone should interfere with her monopoly as a creator of noise by bawling loudly. The girl swung round and turned a frightened face toward McGillicuddy.
“Please don't be alarmed,” he said, as though any normal girl wouldn't be alarmed by the sight of a strange man's head, thrust over a cow-stall at midnight.
She sprang out of the stall in haste, but McGillicuddy called to her beseechingly.
“I beg you to wait a moment! Allow me to ask whether you are Miss Donald—if you are—”
His voice had always been praised for its gentleness, and its effect upon the girl was immediate. She paused and held up the lantern, and when she saw him she laughed and said:
“Gracious! Who are you?”
As he stepped round the stall and the light fell fully upon him, she stared in astonishment and then laughed again.
McGillicuddy, feeling his dignity affronted, frowned and lifted his cap to establish himself as a person of breeding and good manners—a courtesy which evoked from the girl another disconcerting laugh; and her mirth was pardonable, for McGillicuddy suggested nothing so much as a fat monk, save for the cap, which, drooping over one ear, gave him a distinctly unclerical appearance.
“The—er—cow seems to be in pain,” he remarked, more to gain time for thought than to impart information. “I'm sorry to say that her—er—performances are rather distressing to the neighbors.”
“The neighbors,” retorted the girl with asperity, “have been outrageous about it! I suppose you are a guest of the Hanleys, and if you are, you may say to them for me—”
“Now, Miss Donald,” began McGillicuddy in his most benevolent tone, “there is not the slightest occasion for hard feeling. The affair is most unfortunate, of course; but as an old friend of the Hanleys I assure you they have no wish to be ugly. But I confess that they have been—er—slightly annoyed. I came out in the hope of finding some way of relieving the—er—cow. It's preposterous—old friends and neighbors to be upset by a little thing like this!”
“My father,” said Miss Donald, with dignity, “has been very ill, and we had to have fresh milk for him. And you might suppose that people who pretended to be friends and neighbors would not make a fuss just because the cow bawled occasionally.”
Susan, as though waiting for this prompting, bawled the most disconcerting bawl with which she had yet saluted the night.
BY the time the reverberations had died away, McGillicuddy had determined to be firm. Susan must be got rid of. The Hanleys were all in a highly nervous state, and the conditions called for drastic measures. The new McGillicuddy had no intention of being balked in his efforts to bring peace to their troubled household. Still, he would be gentle with Miss Donald. She was a pretty girl. Even with her hair in disarray, and clad in a kimono with a boyish jacket buttoned over it, she was beyond question a pretty girl and a girl of spirit. Jimmie was a boy of taste, and the romance that the unfeeling Susan seemed bent upon destroying must not be allowed to go to ruin.
“Jimmie is taking this very hard,” remarked McGillicuddy, as a feeler; “I've known Jimmie since he was a baby, and there isn't a finer chap on earth—no, sir!”
Susan gasped a smothered, forlorn moo at this, and the girl shrugged her shoulders and laughed.
“Jimmie's heart-broken over all this,” McGillicuddy resumed. “The fact is his father's in a run-down condition, and the loss of sleep has made a wreck of him. Now, it occurs to me that—er—possibly—quite possibly—you could get good milk—certified and absolutely pure—from Detroit—Chicago—any number of places. In fact, Miss Donald, this—er—milk diet isn't recommended any more by the best physicians. Why, I know a man at my club—”
A dog howled somewhere near; it was the howl of a dog that has been asleep on his job and has suddenly roused to a sense of his responsibilities.
“If you don't mind, Miss Donald,” said McGillicuddy, torn with sudden apprehension by the sound, “I'll just move the cow back in the woods somewhere until morning; and then we—you and I—can have a quiet talk and see what we can do to straighten out the trouble.”
Miss Donald interposed no objection. Indeed, having failed in her own efforts to bring peace upon the land, she seemed relieved that some one else was at hand to deal with the difficulty. And McGillicuddy seemed animated by the noblest motives. In fact, in his brown wrapper, with his check cap tipped over one ear, he was the funniest looking human being she had ever seen.
She held the lantern high as he entered the stall and unfastened Susan's rope. Susan, finding herself free, whirled round suddenly and knocked McGillicuddy against the stall with a thwack that caused the planks to boom like a drum.
“Are you hurt?” asked Miss Donald, anxiously.
“Not in the least,” gasped McGillicuddy, who remembered just then stories he had heard of cattle trampling men to death. But he was alive, and no cow should thwart him, particularly under the lovely brown eyes of this golden-haired girl.
Miss Donald, with an amused smile on her face, guided him to the door. McGillicuddy, rope in hand, followed with Susan thumping noisily at his heels. A sense of relief and pride possessed McGillicuddy as they emerged into the open. It was not perhaps the most heroic of undertakings upon which he had engaged, and yet it marked a deviation from the eventless course of his life. He was happy; he felt an unusual elation of spirit; and he meant to see the thing through.
Several dogs now began barking in various quarters, and a sudden threshing in the shrubbery that veiled the Hanley house indicated that one at least had appointed himself a committee of investigation.
“Oh,” cried the girl, as the dog began dancing about McGillicuddy, “don't let him hurt you!”
McGillicuddy shuddered, but he concealed his feelings. His right hand grasped the rope at the end of which Susan was tugging; his left for a moment caught Miss Donald's arm.
Another dog appeared out of nowhere, viciously barking and snapping at McGillicuddy's legs.
“Don't be afraid,” commanded McGillicuddy; “I—”
“Let me go!” she pleaded, evidently not attributing her detention to a perfectly honorable desire on McGillicuddy's part to protect her.
As she freed herself, a bracelet slipped over her wrist and remained in his grasp. He thrust it into his pocket and kicked a dog. The girl disappeared, and McGillicuddy thought he heard her laughing as she ran.
Susan now galloped madly toward the unseen, with McGillicuddy panting behind. They passed through an open gate, and still Susan seemed bent upon flight. The dogs meanwhile yelped and danced about her when they were not tearing McGillicuddy's bath-wrapper. They seemed on the whole to prefer the woollen wrapper to fresh beef. It was darker in the tree-lined road that ran behind the cottages than in the Donald's yard, but Susan seemed not in the least dismayed. Recent rains had left the road in a slippery state, and occasionally Susan's hoofs splashed mud upon her captor.
Illustration: Another dog appeared out of nowhere, viciously barking and snapping at McGillicuddy's legs. “Don't be afraid,” commanded McGillicuddy. “I—”
The dogs that had started from the barn-lot wearied in time, but relays of dogs seemed to have been planted along the road merely to stimulate Susan's flight.
At one point a coachman, roused from his slumbers by the barking, threw up a window and challenged McGillicuddy in a harsh Irish voice.
“Nothing the matter! I'm just out walking,” panted McGillicuddy—though at the moment he was fox-trotting and not enjoying it particularly.
McGILLICUDDY'S knowledge of rural life had been gained solely in languid observations from limited trains, and the sprinting powers of the common or domestic cow were a revelation to him. Susan galloped; Susan trotted; Susan walked occasionally to rest herself; but she pressed steadily on, with McGillicuddy clinging sturdily to the rope. He did not know where Susan was going; he did know, however, that she was putting considerable distance between herself and the Hanley's, and as this was what he had started out to accomplish, he was not ungratified with the result.
Illustration: The dignity of a man tipping the scale at two hundred and thirty-two is bound to suffer when he plays tag with a cow.
He had expected to entice Susan to some lonely woodland and tie her until morning; but he was fully conscious by this time that he was not leading Susan; Susan was leading, not to say dragging, him; and as her rapid pace was telling upon him, he grabbed at a tree that loomed substantially by the roadside, and attempted to pass the rope around it. But Susan had no intention of suffering herself to be hitched to a tree. When McGillicuddy flung his arm around the towering pine and the rope tautened, Susan with a wrench of her head jerked the rope from his hands and continued her pilgrimage.
McGillicuddy's efforts to recapture her caused Susan to display traits of character that he had never associated with her sex or species. No sooner would he approach near enough to the trailing rope to grasp it, than Susan would run; and every time she eluded him, she mocked him by bawling.
The dignity of a man tipping the scale at two hundred and thirty-two is bound to suffer when he plays tag with a cow, particularly on a lonely road after midnight. But McGillicuddy, having put his hand to the cow, would not turn back. And besides, he was angry,—not in the vulgar, vituperative manner of lean, nervous men, but after his own deliberate fashion, McGillicuddy was mad. Twice in this pleasant sport of catch-the-rope he tumbled over on his nose; and each time Susan unfeelingly chose a mud-puddle for his fall. It was only when, presumably in excess of joy at his discomfiture, she ran into a cul de sac of some sort and had to back out, that he was able to establish communication with the rope; and then it was by the unsportsmanlike trick of holding her tail while he groped for the rope on the ground.
As Mackinac Island observes the strict law pertaining to islands in being surrounded by water, this onward march could not last forever. This had just occurred to McGillicuddy when something white loomed before him, and Susan trotted through a covered gateway, and he saw across her back the lights of the harbor, and heard a big steamer squealing as she warped herself into the dock. McGillicuddy, peering about dazedly, decided that Susan had introduced him to Fort Mackinac by the postern gate, and this at least was a well defined terminus.
Susan for the moment seemed contented and began nibbling the grass on the old parade ground. McGillicuddy seized the moment to fling the rope round a post and wipe the perspiration and mud from his face.
Reduced to the fewest terms, what he had accomplished thus far in his efforts to bring peace and good will to the Donalds and Hanleys had been to steal one cow, which had lowered the long-distance walking, trotting and running records for the cows of all time; to run away with a bracelet belonging to a girl he had never seen before; and to bruise various portions of his body by violent contacts with inanimate objects encountered in the dark. His arm was numb from much pulling at the rope, and his hand burnt as though he had been holding a hot poker. But bodily suffering was nothing when weighed against the joy of having actually entered upon an adventure. It was, he judged, two o'clock, and there remained abundant time for disposing of his captive before daybreak.
With his eye on a lighthouse that flashed red and white alternately, he left Susan and started for the ramparts to compose his mind and rest. He had gone not more than ten yards, when he detected a human form pacing steadily to and fro, and a voice rang out sharply:
“Who goes there?”
It was McGillicuddy who was going; he was going; very rapidly for one of his weight. He plunged headlong into something white and soft that yielded, fell over a tent-peg, picked himself up and ran with all his might. A gun-shot echoed loudly round the old fort and threw him into a panic. He struck a cannon like a cavalry charge, bounced off, rolled a few yards and then began crawling along the ramparts.
He remembered now that, as his steamer approached the island, there had been wigwagging between a training-ship in the harbor and a detachment of the State Militia Signal Corps encamped at the fort. He was chagrined that he had forgotten this; but after all, it didn't matter greatly. It was a condition, not a theory, that confronted McGillicuddy.
The sentry's shot had roused the camp, and he heard voices and saw shadowy figures moving about excitedly. He jammed himself into a sentry-box, which had been made for soldiers of less girth, and waited, not wholly displeased with himself. Another item was to be added to the night's achievements: He, Roger G. McGillicuddy, had been fired upon—fired upon by men-at-arms! Lanterns danced over the parade ground, and alarmed signalmen were demanding angrily what the row was all about.
As they continued to beat about, looking for him, he found, in the pocket with the confiscated bracelet, a badly damaged cigar, upon which he began chewing meditatively.
In a few minutes half a dozen men reached the wall, and he listened with satisfaction to their speculations as to his whereabouts and identity. An officer began abusing the sentry for firing.
“You idiot! You haven't any business to be letting off a gun that way. I don't believe you saw anybody, unless it was a stewed Indian.”
“I tell you, Captain, somebody fell over my tent,” protested another voice. “It felt like a baby elephant.”
“Oh, rot!” sniffed the captain, contemptuously.
They were not more than ten feet from McGillicuddy, and peering out, he saw them plainly. Being a fair-minded man, it seemed unjust to allow the sentry to be scolded for firing unnecessarily. He stepped boldly out upon the wall and walked toward the group of debaters. The star-filled southern sky made a fitting background for McGillicuddy in his monkish robe. The ghost of Hamlet's father patrolling the bleak ramparts of Elsinore was not a more august apparition. The group dispersed with shrieks of fright, and he heard them stumbling over one another in their haste.
One of the company, more daring than the others, turned back and sprang upon the wall. At that moment the intrepid adventurer struck a match and proceeded to light the cigar-fragment with which he had been solacing himself. The match flame flaring unexpectedly in his face caused the militiaman to howl dismally and tumble over backward.
The heights surmounted by the historic forts are, at this point, precipitous, and the signal-man vanished as completely as though the night had swallowed him.
But the others might return to seek their comrade, and McGillicuddy had now decided that it would be unwise to suffer himself to be caught, to be subjected to embarrassing questions. Besides, the man who had fallen off the ramparts might be dead. He began a stealthy detour of the camp, sneaking behind the whitewashed buildings till he found Susan, demurely nibbling grass.
He would not abandon Susan; on that he was determined. He resolved to leave the reservation as he had entered it, and take Susan with him. Susan was much more tractable now and meekly suffered him to lead her down a precipitous road that led into the village.
A great resolution possessed the soul of McGillicuddy. While meditating in the sentry-box, he had determined upon a disposition of Susan that would forever eliminate her from the island landscape. She rubbed her nose on his back confidingly as she shuffled along down the steep path, little knowing the dark fate that was in store for her.
A LARGE steamer was discharging freight, and as McGillicuddy approached, two horses were led off. Several of the officers of the boat eyed Susan and her guardian with unfeeling glee as they crossed the lighted dock.
“I want to send this cow to Duluth,” he announced to a young man with a big book in his hand, who was superintending the discharge of freight.
“Shove her on, then, and be in a hurry,” snarled the clerk without looking up.
“I wish to prepay the charges,” explained McGillicuddy, impressively.
“We haven't any time to weigh cows,” interposed the captain, who ran up and flourished a lantern at Susan, who stood patiently chewing her cud.
“Have to carry er maximum weight, then,” said the young man with the book. McGillicuddy assured him that this was entirely satisfactory; whereupon the young man yelled into the bowels of the ship. Two men jumped out and urged Susan aboard.
“Who you sending 'er to?” demanded the young man, wetting his thumb and digging it into the leaves of the book.
“To the Pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, Duluth,” said McGillicuddy without a moment's hesitation.
“What?” snapped the young man.
McGillicuddy repeated Susan's destination with the confident air of a man who is in the habit of shipping cows to pastors of churches.
“What's the preacher's name?”
“The name has for the moment escaped me,” replied McGillicuddy apologetically.
“Name consignor?” snarled the clerk.
“John B. Smith,” said McGillicuddy, choosing the simplest name possible, to facilitate the literary labors of the clerk.
“Charges guaranteed?” mumbled the young man, as though quoting from a ritual, and eying McGillicuddy suspiciously.
“They are,” said McGillicuddy, haughtily.
“Duluth's Inter-state Commerce—she aint got no disease, has she?” asked the clerk, scribbling furiously.
“That cow,” said McGillicuddy gently, “has always enjoyed the best of health. There's a certificate of the Michigan veterinary that she's O.K. tied to her tail.”
Illustration: The ghost of Hamlet's father, patrolling the bleak ramparts of Elsinore, was not a more august apparition. The group of soldiers dispersed with shrieks of fright.
This was a fabrication, as the clerk might have seen, but he tore a sheet of paper from his book, thrust it into McGillicuddy's hand and made a flying leap aboard as the last hawser was cast off.
As the steamer backed away, a vociferous bellow reached McGillicuddy as he turned his face toward home.
III
WHEN McGillicuddy went down to breakfast at eight o'clock, the Hanleys were on the veranda. His host greeted him with something approximating his old-time good nature. Mrs. Hanley also had lost her worn and troubled air; and when Jimmie joined them at the breakfast table, he too seemed on better terms with the world. “Well, I got some sleep last night for the first time in a week,” said Hanley, as he sugared his strawberries. ”That beast tuned up once, but I hadn't got started cussing good and hard before she shut up. I hope you weren't troubled, Mac?”
“Not in the least,” said McGillicuddy, who, having slept for three hours and taken his accustomed shower, seemed even rosier than usual.
“I've got a good mind,” said Hanley, “to take your advice and go over and see Donald this morning. Think maybe a gentle suggestion that he keep his cow back in the woods somewhere might appeal to him. He's really a pretty decent sort of chap, and I suppose stomach trouble does make a man peevish.”
Jimmie's face brightened. Mrs. Hanley seemed relieved as she poured the coffee.
“No sugar,” said McGillicuddy, “and only a spoonful of cream, please. About the cow, Sam: I've changed my mind about your proper course in the matter. I'd go over and give Donald a good jolly this morning. Throw a good scare into him about the foot-and-mouth disease and tell him a milk diet is the worst thing possible for a man with his trouble. I've heard you talk at directors' meetings, and you're a good persuader, Sam.”
“I'll tell him,” said Hanley, stabbing a piece of bacon savagely, “that the cow has got to go!”
“That,” remarked McGillicuddy with well-affected carelessness, “would be very foolish.”
“Yes, Sam; Mac is right,” said Mrs. Hanley, anxious to preserve the peace. “If you go over there and tell him he can't keep the cow, you'll only make matters worse.”
“For heaven's sake, Father, don't do anything about it at all, if you mean to tell Mr. Donald to send the cow away. He has every legal right to keep seven cows if he likes.”
“Legal right! The law!” blustered Hanley, thoroughly aroused again. “I'm going to bring the best lawyers in Chicago up here, and I'll show that punk-headed dyspeptic what the law is!”
MCGILLICUDDY lifted his hand deprecatingly.
“Don't get excited, Sam. The only way you can get Susan into court—”
“Susan!” shouted Hanley, upsetting his egg-cup.
“Susan,” said McGillicuddy sweetly, “is the name of the cow. I sat up with Susan last night, and I'm disposed to sympathize with Donald in his troubles. I could see that in time I might become fond of Susan. She's a nice cow.”
“So that's why she didn't bawl all night as usual: you were kept awake by that beast—you, a guest in my house, and had to go out and throttle 'er before you could get to sleep. This is an outrage! How long—”
McGillicuddy asked quietly for another cup of coffee. His sensations were, he fondly imagined, those of a bold knight who has ridden far and performed valorous deeds, and yet presents an unruffled front at the breakfast table.
“You make too much of all this, Sam,” he remarked, soothingly. “In such trifles—a little strategy, a little patience, and the cause of your troubles is removed.”
“Removed!” Hanley caught him up. “That beast is going to be removed—I tell you that! You, a guest in my house—obliged to get up in the dead of night and go out and choke a neighbor's bawling cow! It's too much, I tell you; it's the last straw that's going to break that cow's back.”
“Just be patient for a moment, Sam. It gives me pleasure to tell you that Susan has gone—the Donalds haven't got any cow any more!”
“No cow!”
“Susan,” continued McGillicuddy, placidly buttering a muffin, “needed a change of air. It's too damp on an island for cows. Goats are all right on islands, but not cows. Susan is now on board the Northern Pine, headed for Duluth, the zenith city of the unsalt seas.'
“My God!” cried Jimmie, “you stole the cow!” He rose and began pacing the floor with long strides. “Where,” he demanded, pausing menacingly beside the placid McGillicuddy, “—where do you think this leaves me with Dorothy? Don't you see what you've done—oh, my God!”
“Dorothy,” continued McGillicuddy pleasantly, “is one of the nicest girls I ever met, and she's as sensible as she is nice. We talked the whole business over last night—”
“You talked to her—last night!” they chorused wildly.
“Certainly! At my age I hope I may talk to girls without having my motives questioned. Before I leave this afternoon—”
“You're going!' cried Hanley. “After getting us into this mess and stealing their cow, you're going off and leave us to face it.”
“Don't be alarmed,” said McGillicuddy. “It's not my way to leave unfinished business behind me. Before I leave, I'll straighten out everything. And besides, I've got to go, you see, because I've got a date with a lady in Duluth—”
“A lady,” exclaimed Mrs. Hanley, bewilderedly.
“Susan is the name,” replied McGillicuddy, “—care the Pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, Duluth.”
DOROTHY DONALD, hearing a step on the walk, peered out of the vines behind which she had been listlessly turning the pages of a magazine, and watched McGillicuddy's blithe approach with deep concern.
She intercepted him at the door and eyed him with apprehension as he accepted a seat she timorously offered him. He laid his straw hat gently on a chair and played with his stick.
“Well,” she said, inquiringly, “I suppose you are the gentleman—”
“The same,” said McGillicuddy, “that you met in the barn early this morning.” He glanced about guardedly. “Are we alone?”
“We are,” said the girl, concealing a smile.
“It's about Susan,” said McGillicuddy, “and all this fuss between you and Jimmie. It grieved me, as an old friend of the family, to find them so upset—and Jimmie—Jimmie's eating his heart out.”
Miss Donald frowned at the mention of Jimmie.
“It seemed a pity—a nice boy like Jimmie—and a girl like you—to have everything kicked to smithereens by a cow.” He bent forward, and his voice sank to a whisper. “Susan—Susan is no more!”
“You killed her—you've killed Susan!”
“Oh, bless you, no! She's merely traveling a little—the condition of her throat made it necessary; that's all.”
His eyes opened and shut while he waited for her to grasp the idea that Susan no longer inhabited the island. Then she laughed—the merriest of laughs. And McGillicuddy so far forgot his rôle as to smile, as a child smiles in its sleep. She began to ask questions, and he confided to her all that happened after they parted in the barn lot. And Jimmie, sitting pigeon-toed on the veranda, heard Dorothy's laughter—heard also faintly McGillicuddy's gurgles. He did not understand McGillicuddy; neither, for that matter, did his father, who, unable to find his guest, had gone in a towering rage to the golf links.
“The joke of it all is,” said Dorothy, “that Father took the early train for a sanitarium in Maine, and so you had all your trouble for nothing.”
“Susan,” said McGillicuddy, meeting her laughing eyes squarely, “is only a small factor in this affair.”
He thrust his hand into his pocket, drew out the bracelet and held it in his palm deliberatingly.
“I'm going to tell Jimmie to come over to see you—in about five minutes. And I want him to see that bracelet first thing.”
She allowed him to draw it over her hand, and when she had shaken it back on her wrist, she looked at him quizzically.
“Who are you, anyhow?” she demanded.
“Ask Jimmie,” he replied.
DOROTHY and Jimmie drove him in her trap to the dock when, at four-ten, McGillicuddy shook the dust of the island from his feet. Hanley did not know what had happened, but Mrs. Hanley, having spent half an hour with Dorothy, knew most of it.
Dorothy stuck a big red carnation into McGillicuddy's button-hole as they lingered by the gangplank of the ferry-boat. The happiness so plainly written on the faces of Jimmie and his sweetheart seemed to McGillicuddy adequate compensation for all his hardships and perils.
“You're a good knight out of a story-book,” said Dorothy. “Jimmie and I can't ever thank you. I'm ever so sorry, though, that Susan caused you so much trouble. But if you hadn't gone out to the barn to see Susan, we might never have got acquainted.”
“The very thought of that grieves me,” said McGillicuddy.
He drew out a roll of bills.
“I've decided not to go to Duluth at present, and there's a little thing I wish you'd do for me, Jimmie. Here's a hundred dollars conscience-money I wish you'd send to the Pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Duluth. You see, the rate on blooded cows like Susan is high, and somebody's got to pay the freight!”
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1947, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 76 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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