# Three Pirates of Penzance

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Extracted from Saturday Evening Post 20 Aug 1910 pp. 3–6, 44–46. A Tish story.
Three Pirates of Penzance
The Story of an automobile, a Red-Haired Man and a Bureau
By Mary Roberts Rinehart
ILLUSTRATED BY F. R. GRUGER
I
IT WAS three o'clock in the morning when we got back to the lake, and it was twenty minutes before Carpenter heard us and started the ferry across. Tish had lost her glasses in the excitement at the Sherman House, and she did not see that Carpenter had forgotten to put the bar across the end of the boat. Aggie and I screamed, but it was too late: she drove the car down the bank in the moonlight and she did not stop in time. The first we knew we were sitting waist-deep in Lake Penzance, with Tish still holding the steering wheel and the stars making little twinkles in our laps.
As Tish said afterward, it was a fit ending to a sensational night, but, what with the wetting aggravating Aggie's hay fever, and my having bitten through the side of my tongue when the machine struck the bottom of the lake, it more nearly finished us. The engine drowned with a gurgle, and after Carpenter's first yell there wasn't a sound. Then we heard him come to the end of the ferryboat and look down at us, and the next moment he had dropped the lantern and was doubled up on the dock, laughing like the fool he is.
"Are you both there?" said Tish, without turning her head.
Aggie sneezed, as she always does after a shock, and a wave moved slowly in and raised the water level with my breastbone.
"We are both here," I said, with a bitterness that was natural under the circumstances. "No thanks to you, Tish Carberry. There's no fool like an old fool."
"What do you mean?" Tish demanded fiercely, twisting around in the water with her dust cap over her eye. "Who was it said I ought to buy the dratted thing? Drive it yourself if you think you can do any better."
"Row it," I corrected. "It's finished for good as a touring car, but by putting an awning over it we might make it into a tolerable gasoline launch."
Aggie was crying.
"I told you something would happen," she sniffled. "You'll kill us all yet, Tish Carberry—and me in my foulard silk that spots with a drop of rain!"
But Tish wasn't paying any attention. She picked up the wrench that she had kept by her as a sort of weapon and stood up on the seat. Tish is a large woman.
"Abraham Carpenter," she snapped, with as much dignity as she could with her clothes glued to her, "if you do not stop that noise I will brain you."
Carpenter eased down gradually, and holding his sides he leaned over the end of the ferry.
"What'll I do, Miss Tish?" he asked, beginning to jerk again, but with an eye on the wrench. "I can go around to the other dock and get a rowboat, but it'll take time."
"Don't bother about the other dock," Tish snapped. "Get that board there on the ferry and put one end of it down to the automobile. Then turn your back."
That's the way we got out. I went up the board first, on my hands and knees, and barring a few splinters I got up very nicely. Aggie came next, and as the board was getting wet she had more trouble. But Tish had the worst, for by that time the board was as slippery as a toboggan; twice she got as far as the middle, only to slide back on her stomach, and the last time she refused to try again. She sat down on one of the seats, with the water up to her waist, and said that she was skinned alive, and that she wished there was a tide to come up and drown her and the miserable machine. We got her up finally by throwing her a rope to put under her arms, and once up she collapsed on the ferry-bench. It was then that Aggie missed the money. Carpenter had slid down the board and was preparing to salvage the cushions when Aggie clutched at her stocking and yelled.
It Was Very Peculiar
"It's gone!" she screeched, and then she sat plump down on the floor of the ferry-boat and began to cry.
"What's gone?" Tish demanded.
"The money," Aggie said, feeling frantically around the tops of her shoes. "When we went over the edge something broke—I felt it—and the money's gone."
Tish had both her arms in the air and the rope over her shoulder, but she stopped struggling and stared at Aggie.
"Gone!" she said in an awful voice. "Aggie Pilkington, every dollar of that money was graft money. Only the prospect of stuffing it between that red-haired man's teeth has kept me alive through this terrible night. Don't tell me you've lost it."
"We can give him a check," said Aggie feebly.
"We can!" Tish snorted, and not another word did she say until Carpenter had taken us across the lake and we stood dripping on the front porch of the cottage, while Aggie got the key from under a flower-pot. Then Tish looked across the moonlit lake to where the cushions of the machine floated in a nest of stars at the end of the ferry-dock. "We averaged thirty miles an hour coming home," she said triumphantly, "and for the first time I feel that I have mastered the machine."
Wet as we were, we remembered to put the lantern in the window as we had promised, and we thought we saw a skiff shoot out in the starlight from the other side of the lake. Tish and I took some hot milk, and Aggie had a raw egg and some more baking soda, and we went to bed. The stars were fading by that time, but after I got into bed I distinctly heard footsteps on the gravel below my window.
"Are you sure you said the first house on the left?" Tish called to me. And then we heard Mr. Ostermaier's voice from the upper window next door, and we knew it was all right. I crawled out and tried to see into the preacher's parlor, but the shade was partly down. I could only make out a sleeve of Mrs. Ostermaier's kimono. It was disappointing after all we had gone through.
She—Mrs. Ostermaier—came over the next morning after breakfast, while Aggie's foulard silk was hanging on the clothes-line. She had been down with the other cottagers, looking across to where the red leather of Tish's machine stuck up above water-level.
"Be careful," Tish said under her breath when she saw her; "she's got something in her hand!"
"What a terrible accident, and how lucky nobody was hurt!" Mrs. Ostermaier began, holding the thing she was carrying against her skirt and staring from the three of us to Aggie's foulard. "The spots did run, didn't they? I told Mr. Ostermaier they would. He thinks you are wonderful women, to go around the country as the three of you do at all hours of the night."
Just then the sunlight caught the thing she held in her hand, and I knew in a moment what it was: it was Mr. Lewis' silver cigarette case. Tish saw it too, and ran her needle into her finger.
"We had an exciting night too," Mrs. Ostermaier went on. "Dear me, Miss Carberry, you've jabbed your finger!"
"An exciting night?" I asked, to keep her attention from Aggie. Aggie had just seen the cigarette case and she had gone blue around the nose.
"Most exciting. About three o'clock this morning—about the time you three ladies were having such a dreadful experience—a young couple came to our cottage and wakened Mr. Ostermaier. I think they threw gravel through the window. They wanted to be married."
"For Twenty Dollars I'd be Willing to Swallow My Tongue Backward" Tish sat up and tried to look scandalized.
"I hope your husband didn't do it," she said. I had to pinch Aggie; she was leaning forward with her eyes bulging.
That put Mrs. Ostermaier on the defensive. "Why not?" she demanded. "They had a license, and they were of age. I believe in encouraging young love; Mr. Ostermaier says it is the most beautiful thing in the world. Cousin Maggie and I were witnesses, and we threw rice after them. It was barley, really, but we didn't discover that until this morning."
Aggie gave a sigh of relief; we had guessed, but it was the first time we had really known.
"I told Mr. Ostermaier that it gave me quite a thrill, the way he looked at her as Harold pronounced them man and wife. 'All the world loves a lover,' and Cousin Maggie has been reading Ella Wheeler Wilcox diligently all morning."
She turned to go and we breathed easier. Now that we knew they were safely married—— Mrs. Ostermaier turned and started back.
"I nearly forgot what brought me," she called. "My Willie found this in the bed of your automobile, Miss Tish." She held out the cigarette case and Tish took it and dropped it into her workbasket.
"It belongs to my nephew, Charlie Sands," she said, looking Mrs. Ostermaier in the eye. Tish has plenty of courage, but I felt calamity coming.
"So I told Mr. Ostermaier," the creature said, with a smile. "But he insists on remarking the coincidence that the initials on the cigarette case are W. L. and that the young man's name on the license was Walter Lewis."
I have always thanked Heaven that at that moment her Willie fell off the dock, and although the child was not drowned, still, as Tish wrote to Maria Lee, her niece, "he had swallowed enough water to wash the initials off the tablets of his mother's memory." And so far as we know, although the papers came out with great headlines about the marriage, and another article about the post-office having been robbed—we had nothing whatever to do with that—and about three men disguised as women making their escape toward Canada in a red automobile and having run over a pig at Dorchester Junction—I told Tish at the time it was a pig, but she insisted it was a cow—although the papers came out with all this, nobody ever suspected the truth except Carpenter. He happened to find a menu from the Sherman House at Noblestown floating in the body of the car, and the good-for-nothing took a trip to the city and traced us.
He did not say anything, but about a week later he came to the cottage and put a package on the table in the kitchen.
"Come Out," Said Tish to the Bureau "Make No Resistance: We are Armed!"
"It's been puzzlin' me for four days, Miss Lizzie," he said, fumbling with the string of the bundle. "I sez to Mrs. C., sez I, 'It ain't possible,' I sez. 'She sez she lost her shoe when the automobile went into the water, and she's a truthful woman; and yet, two days after, the chambermaid at the Sherman House finds it high and dry under a bureau, forty miles away. It's spooky,' I sez."
Aggie was pouring hot water into the teapot, and she kept on pouring till it went all over the place.
"Nonsense," said Tish. "That shoe doesn't belong to Miss Lizzie."
But I looked at Carpenter's face and I knew it was hopeless.
"You've been a good friend to us, Mr. Carpenter," I said. "We've always felt we've owed you something. Here's a little present, and thank you for the shoe."
He took the money and we looked each other straight in the eye. Then he grinned.
"For twenty dollars, Miss Lizzie," he said, "I'd be willing to swallow my tongue backward. And the shoe ain't the tongue kind."
II
BOTH Aggie and I had objected when Tish talked of buying an automobile. But the more you talk against a thing to Tish the more she wants it. It was just the same the time her niece, Maria Lee, went to Europe for the whole summer and offered Tish her motor boat. Aggie and I protested, but the boat came, and Tish had a lesson or two and sent to town for a yachting cap. Then, one day when we were making elderberry jelly and ran out of sugar, Tish offered to take me to the mainland in the boat. That was the time, you remember, when the stopping lever got jammed, and Tish and I circled around Lake Penzance for seven hours, with people on different docks trying to lasso us with ropes as we flew past, and Aggie in hysterics on the beach below the cottage.
People of Penzance still speak of that day, for we figured out that we had enough gasoline to run one hundred and sixty miles, and after Peter Miller, at Point Lena, had lassoed us and was dragged for a quarter of a mile before he caught hold of a buoy and could let go of the rope, we got desperate. I was at the wheel and Tish was trying to stop the engine, pouring water over it and attempting to stick an iron rod in the wheels. And just as she succeeded, and the rod shot through the awning on the top of the launch like a skyrocket, I turned the thing toward shore, where it looked fairly flat.
"I'm going to get to land," I said with my teeth clenched. "I don't care if it crawls up and dies in a plowed field; I'm going to get my feet on dry land again."
I had not expected it to stop so suddenly, but it did, and Tish and I and the granulated sugar landed some distance ahead of the boat and well above high-water mark; in fact, Tish broke her collarbone, and that entire summer, whenever the doctor had to peel off the adhesive plaster, Tish would get ugly and turn on me.
Well, we should have known about the automobile. I had a queer feeling when I started out that morning. Tish had had the car out the day before by herself for the first time—both Aggie and I had had the good judgment to refuse—and she got home safely, although she had a queer-looking mark on her right cheek, and one of the mud-guards didn't look exactly right. She said she had had a lovely ride, and we helped her push the machine into the wash-house, where we had had Carpenter knock out a side, and then she went to bed and had a cup of tea. Aggie heard something moving that night, and she found Tish sitting up on the side of her bed, holding like death to the back of a chair and turning it around like a wheel. Aggie got her back to bed, but Tish only looked up at her and said:
"Four chickens!" and went to sleep again.
The next morning her left leg was quite stiff from what she called the clutch, and she sat on the porch peacefully and rocked. But at noon she went to the wash-house, and when she came back she was pale but determined.
"I'm going to take it out," she said solemnly. "If I don't I'll forget everything I've learned. Besides, we've been coming here every summer for ten years, and there are plenty of places we have never seen."
Aggie looked at me, but we knew it would have to come some time, and so we all went in and tied up our heads.
"We needn't go fast," Aggie said when she was putting on her bonnet. "We have all afternoon, and one doesn't really enjoy the scenery unless one goes very slowly."
Tish's face was pallid but resolved.
"It's a great deal easier to go fast than slow," she remarked. "I haven't quite got the hang of going slow. But there's one comfort about going fast: you get around much quicker."
At the foot of the stairs she stopped and called up. "I'm going to take a tablespoonful of blackberry wine," she said. "I feel chilly in the small of my back."
Aggie and I didn't say anything, but we each took a tablespoonful of blackberry wine also.
Tish had written out a list of things to do to start the car, such as "Turn A," "Push forward B," and so on. And she had pasted bits of paper marked A and B on the levers and plugs. So I read:
"Turn A; push up B, crank, and release C."
It started nicely.
"Just one thing," Tish said over her shoulder as we passed the Ostermaier cottage, and they waved to us from the porch: "Don't scream in my ears; don't lean over and clutch me around the neck; and if we run over anything try to look as if you didn't know we had."
Luckily she had not noticed my traveling bag. After the affair of the launch I was prepared for anything, and I had packed up three nightgowns, a balsam pillow, a roll of bandage, a bottle of arnica, a cake of soap, my sewing box and a prayer-book. Aggie had some sandwiches; so we felt we were prepared for everything, from sudden death to losing a button.
We got on to the ferry safely enough. Carpenter, who runs the cable drum of the ferry with a gas engine, examined the machine with a great deal of interest on the way over.
"It's a pretty hot day, Miss Tish," he called as we were starting off the boat. "You'll have to watch her; she'll boil."
Tish looked worried, but she said nothing.
"What is there to boil?" Aggie whispered to me.
"The gasoline," I told her; "and if it boils it'll explode. I'm no mechanic, but I know that much."
After a few minutes Aggie leaned forward.
"Tish," she said.
"Don't take my mind off this machine!" Tish shouted back. "Isn't that a buggy coming?"
"It's too far off to see. It's either a buggy or a wagon," I said. "Tish, where's the gasoline tank?"
But Tish wasn't listening. "Why doesn't that man turn out? Does he want the whole road?" she snapped. There was a silence while we neared the buggy ahead. Then Tish leaned over and began jerking at levers.
"I can't stop the thing," she gasped; "and there isn't room to pass!"
There wasn't time to pray. I saw Aggie shut her eyes, and the next moment there was a terrific jar. Aggie and I were flung together in a corner of the seat, a man yelled, and the next minute we had leaped out of the ditch again and were going smoothly along the road. I glanced behind. The man had halted his horse and was standing up in the buggy, staring after us.
"I didn't think I could do it," said Tish complacently.
"Only the glory of God took you into that ditch and out again, Tish Carberry," I snapped. "And if you are going to do any more circus performances I want to get out."
She could stop the car well enough when there was no crying need to, and now, to our alarm, she stopped every now and then and got out and held her hand over the front of the machine, like testing the oven for cake. Finally she said:
"It's boiling!"
Aggie got ready to jump.
"It'll explode, won't it?" she quavered.
"I don't see why it should explode," Tish replied, wetting her finger to see if it sizzled when she touched it. "But it's hot enough, in all conscience. A good rain would cool it."
The sun was blazing down on us, however, and there was no sign of rain. I said I would just as soon be blown up as melted down, and we got in again. The machine would not start. We all took a turn at the handle in front, but it was like winding a clock with a broken spring.
That is where the man and the girl and the little Pomeranian dog enter the story. For they came along in a blue runabout car just as Tish threw her book called Automobile Troubles over the fence and said she was going to walk home. The book said, "Beginners having trouble with their engines should look under the headings Ignition, Carburation, Lubrication, Compression, Circulation and Timing." As Tish remarked, the only one that was understandable was Circulation, and anybody could tell without a book that the car wasn't circulating to any extent.
Just as Tish threw the book away the young man in the blue runabout stopped and got out.
"In trouble?" he asked. "Can I do anything for you?"
"It was boiling," said Tish. "I suppose something has melted inside."
"Oh, I think not." He looked at the car, pushed something, went round and turned the handle—crank, Tish called it, and it's a good name—and the engine started.
"You didn't have your gas on," said the young man. "And don't worry; you're sure to heat up on a day like this, but nothing will melt."
"Or explode?" asked Aggie.
"Or explode."
He looked at the girl and smiled, and when we started off they were still there, watching us. The dog yelped, and the girl smiled and waved her hand. Aggie, who is farsighted, turned around a second time. "He reminds me of Mr. Simmons," she said with a sigh, still looking back. Aggie was engaged years ago to a young man in the roofing business, who fell off a roof.
After a minute, "He's kissing her!" she gasped. After that she nearly broke her neck watching them out of sight. Aggie is romantic. I turned around, but I had on my near glasses.
I don't know how we lost the Noblestown Pike. Tish blamed it on having to drive with one eye shut, on account of something getting into the other. Aggie's nose was sunburned and swelling, and I would have given a good bit for something heavy in my lap to anchor me. When I was a girl I rode horseback, and with any kind of a steady horse you can tell when the next jolt is coming; but Tish's machine has a way of coming up and hitting you when you are off guard, so to speak.
To go back, after an hour or so we found we were on the wrong road. It kept growing narrower, and when at last it became only a dusty country lane Tish realized it herself. There was a rickety farmhouse about two hundred feet from the road, with a woman bending over a washtub outside the door. I stood up and made a megaphone of my hands.
"Which way to the Noblestown Pike?" I yelled, while Tish got out and stuck a wet finger on the hood over the engine.
The woman looked up and pointed sullenly in the direction from which we had come. We looked at the road. There wasn't a spot to turn—not another road in sight to back into. It was hotter than ever. The engine hummed like a teakettle on a hot stove, and there were little clouds of blue smoke coming from somewhere or other about it. Aggie said she thought the gasoline tank was on fire.
"If it is you'll soon know it," said Tish grimly. "It's under the seat. I'm going to back up on to this bridge business over the gutter. I think I can make it."
"Do you know how to back up?" I asked; and just at that minute the woman left her tub and started to run down the walk.
"Ninety-Five Degrees of Heat, Seven Inches of Dust, Five Miles to a Telephone and Ten Miles to Town. With an Automobile Sittin' Down in Your Front Yard—That's All the Hell I Want"
Tish backed. With an awful grinding of wheels she got the right lever finally; the machine gave a jerk that would have decapitated a chicken, and we backed slowly on to the timbers that bridged the gutter and made a road toward the house. When it gave the first crack we shouted—Aggie and I. It might not have been too late, but Tish put on the emergency brake by mistake and for a minute we hung on the verge. Then we began to settle. We went down slowly, with Tish above us and rising; and when we stopped, there we were, Aggie and I and the rear of the machine, a good four feet below Tish and the engine, with something grinding like mad and clouds of smoke everywhere.
When we crawled out the woman who owned the bridge was standing on the bank looking down at us, and her face was something awful.
"You'll fix that bridge before you leave!" she said, shutting her mouth hard on the last word.
"You'll fix that automobile before I'm through with you!" said Tish, pointing at the thing, which looked like a horse sitting down in a gutter.
"Oh, rats!" the woman said rudely. "That's four of them things that's gone through that bridge this week, and I'm good and sick of it. Ain't there any other bridges in Chester County?"
"Not like that," retorted Tish, eying the ruins. "You don't call that a bridge, do you?"
"It was," said the woman.
She came forward and a ferocious-looking dog stepped from behind her.
Tish looked at the dog.
"It wasn't much of a bridge," she said, more politely. "If you've got any men on the place I'll give them a dollar apiece to get my machine out of there."
"No men around," said the woman shortly. "Theodore"—to the dog—"don't you go around bitin' until I give you the word. Sit down."
The dog sat down.
"Before you leave," she said to Tish, "you'll mend that bridge or I'll know the reason why. Meantime your automobile is trespassin', and the fine is twenty dollars."
Then she sat down on the bank and began to tickle the dog's ears with a blade of grass.
"Theodore," she said, "if them three old maids think they can bluff us, they don't know us, do they?"
I had stood about as much as I could, so I walked around in front of her and glared at her.
"I wouldn't sit so close to the automobile if I were you," I remarked emphatically. "Something is likely to explode."
"I feel like it," she said. "When I get mad I'm good an' mad. Anyhow, I own this place, and I'll sit where I please. Theodore, let's put the washing-machine on wheels and go round the country bustin' down folks' bridges and playin' hell generally!"
An oath always rouses Tish. She got the engine stopped. Then she came around beside me with her goggles shoved up on her forehead.
"Woman," she said sternly, "how dare you mention the place of punishment so lightly!" Tish has been superintendent of a Sunday-school for thirty years.
The woman stared at her. Then she got up slowly.
"I wasn't alludin' to the next world," she said bitterly. "Ninety-five degrees of heat, seven inches of dust, five miles to a telephone and ten miles to town, with an automobile sittin' down in your front yard—that's all the hell I want."
Then she walked up the path. We stared after her; between her shoulder-blades her blue wrapper was wet through with sweat, and the dog trailed at her heels. Aggie, who is always sentimental, took a step after her.
"I say," she called. "If we come back for you some nice afternoon will you let us take you for a ride?"
But she got no answer. To our amazement, the woman turned around at the top of the path and put her thumb to her nose!
We did not see her again for some time, but after Tish had climbed in twice and started the engine, to see if the car couldn't climb out—the only result being that it almost turned over backward—the woman appeared again. She carried a board that looked like a breadboard nailed to a broom-handle, and on it fresh ink, as if she had done it with her finger, were the words:
"Trespassing—fifty dollars."
"You said twenty before," I protested.
"That was for those little dinky, one-seated affairs," she said, jabbing the broom-handle into the dirt beside the road. "Two seats, forty dollars; two seats and a folded-back buggy-top, fifty." She adjusted the sign carefully, looked up and down the road, and then went back to the house.
So we sat down on the bank and Tish explained how she happened to do it. I am a Christian woman, and Aggie is so gentle that she has to scratch twice to light a match, but I must say we were bitter. We told Tish we didn't care how she happened to do it, and that some day she would be punished for a temper that made her throw away books that she would be sure to need some time; and that, anyhow, an unmarried woman of fifty has no business with an automobile.
"It's my belief," Tish retorted, "that she keeps her old bridge for that very purpose. She could make a good living off it, and all the work she'd have to do would be to build it up after every accident."
"Oh, no," Aggie said bitterly. "We are going to repair it, I believe."
The back of my neck began to smart from the sun and the dust eddied around us. A white hen came down the path, hopped on to the sloping step of the machine, perked its head at us, and then, with a squawk, flew up into Tish's seat behind the wheel. I was thirsty and my neck prickled.
Early in the afternoon we had a difference of opinion about who should walk the five miles to telephone for help, and after that we did not speak to each other. Tish talked to the machine and Aggie to the chicken. Every now and then Tish, after staring at the machine for a while, would get up and pick up the soundest of the bridge timbers, put it under the dropped end of the car and push with all her might.
"Call this a bridge?"—push—"Why, this is nothing"—push—"but a rotten old fence-rail!"—bang!—the timber broke. Tish stood with her back to us and kicked the pieces; then she turned on us. "As far as I'm concerned," she snapped, "the thing can sit there till it takes root. You're very much mistaken if you think I'm going to walk to that telephone, after bringing you out on a pleasure trip."
"Pleasure trip!" Aggie retorted. "I can get more pleasure out of a three-dollar rocking-chair. The next time you ask me to go on a pleasure trip, Tish Carberry, just push me off the porch backward. It's a good bit quicker."
By four o'clock I had a rash out all over my shoulders and chest, and my mouth was so full of dust that my teeth felt gritty. I had not cared particularly about going up to the house, but every few minutes between three and four the woman had come out, pumped some water, making a mighty splash, and gone back into the house again. It was more than human nature could stand. At a quarter after four o'clock I got up from the baked earth, glared at Tish, looked through Aggie, and walked with as much dignity as I could muster up the path to the well. There was a sign hung on it by a string around the nail in the top. It read, "Water, one dollar a tin. For automobiles, five dollars a bucket."
The woman came out and pumped some. The water ran cool and clear into a trough and then spread over the ground in dreadful waste. I could have lapped it up out of the trough; every bit of skin on me and lining membrane in me yelled "Water!" and—I had no money with me! The woman stood and waited, Theodore beside her.
"That's an outrage," I fumed. "How dare you put up such a sign! I—I shall report you!"
"Who to?" she asked indifferently. "I ain't askin' you to drink it, am I? It's my well, ain't it?"
"I'll send the money to you by mail." I had lost all my pride. "I'll come back and pay you."
"Cash in advance," said the creature; and pumping enough into a tin basin to have cooled me inside and out she put it down for the dog to drink!
III
I HAVE always felt that we did the right thing that night. It was all very well for Charlie Sands, Tish's nephew, when he heard the story, to say: "And they talk about giving women the vote! Why, for sense they would substitute sentiment; they would buy their opinions at the department stores along with their bargains, and a little two-penny love affair could upset the Government!"
Tish was raging.
"It does not matter whether you approve or not, Charlie," she said loftily, "as long as our consciences approve."
"Approve!" He nearly fell back out of his chair. "My dear ladies, you should every one have been jailed! As for conscience, I'd give a thousand dollars to have a conscience that would set the seal of its approval on assault and battery, highway robbery and abduction."
"The end justifies the means," I retorted; "and when did you get a conscience, Charlie Sands?"
"I think I've got the one Aunt Tish used to have," he said, and I got up and went into the house.
Well, I left the dog drinking. To go back, at that instant I happened to look at Tish, and she was standing on the bank waving her handkerchief at something in the road. I stepped to the corner of the house, and saw what it was—creeping along a lane we had not noticed was the blue runabout car. Creeping is the word. It would crawl forward a dozen feet and stop, and it kept on repeating the performance. But what puzzled me was a spot of pink, just in front of the car and moving slowly forward.
At the end of the lane the pink spot hesitated and then turned our way. Once beyond the hedge, it proved to be the girl with her pink motor veil. She was walking with her hands in the pockets of her ulster, and she was limping. About a dozen feet behind her, and stopping every now and then so as not to overtake her, came the runabout. It was very peculiar. The young man had his jaws set tight, and as he was staring at the girl, and as she was staring straight ahead, neither of them saw us on the bank just above their heads.
The girl—she was a very pretty girl, although streaky just then—had a tight grip on the Pomeranian. She had it tucked under her arm and it was wriggling and yelping to be free. Just after the blue machine had turned the corner the little beast got loose, and with a yelp he dashed to the car and into the empty seat.
The girl stopped. So did the car. She faced about and the young man looked over her head.
Suddenly the girl looked up and saw us, and with a quick glance she spied the lamps of Tish's machine around a curve. No one would have guessed from the front end of the thing that the rear had died in a gutter.
"Oh!" she said. "Oh, I'm so glad you're here! Are you going back to town?"
"We are not going anywhere," Tish said shortly, "unless your young man can help us."
"He is not my young man," the girl retorted, with distinctness; "but if there isn't very much the matter I dare say he can do something."
"I am not an automobile expert," he said, "but I dare say I can help a little, as, for instance, stuffing a puncture with rags until we get back to the city." The girl flushed. It was evidently a personal allusion."
"We haven't any rags," said Aggie, "and it isn't a puncture."
"There are two things we might do," said the young gentleman: "I might go to the nearest telephone and have help sent out from town, but as it's almost sunset it's pretty late for that; or, with a jack and a little help, we might fix it ourselves."
"A jack!" Tish said with scorn. "What kind of a jack—a bootjack or a jackass? I dare say they have them both at that farmhouse; I know they have one."
"A jack—a lever," explained the young man, beginning to work at the lock of the tool-box. "Where are you going—to Noblestown?"
"To the lake," I replied. Tish was fumbling for the keys to the machine which she kept in a pocket in her petticoat. "We have a summer cottage there."
"I'll make a bargain with you," he suggested. "The—the—er—young lady refuses to go back in my car. We—the fact is we have had a small difference of opinion; and—she insists on walking home. If I get your machine in shape will you take her to the city?"
We would have taken her anywhere short of a planet to get away ourselves, and that was how it began; for the young gentleman took off his coat and fell to work immediately. Once, when he had raised the car on the jack and Tish was holding the ends of the boards that he shoved under, while Aggie and I pushed, something gave way and the whole thing settled back with a jerk. Mr. Lewis—that was his name—lifted the broken fence-rails off Tish and helped her to her feet.
"There's something almost alive about automobiles occasionally," he said. "They are so blamed vicious."
"If it was alive," Tish gasped, hunting for her glasses, "I'd kill it." But it never occurred to her that she was going to drown it that very night!
By seven o'clock we had lifted the thing on five fence-rails and the breadboard sign, and Mr. Lewis announced it was now or never. The girl had not come near us. She had taken off her veil and smoothed up her hair, and was busy with a bit of a silver mirror. She was very pretty.
Mr. Lewis got into the car and put on the power. There was a terrible grinding, but nothing moved. From behind the three of us shoved, and Aggie said between gasps that if anything gave way her niece was to have her amethyst pin.
"Anne!" cried the young gentleman. But Miss Anne was powdering her nose and we all saw her turn it up.
"Anne!" called the young man who was not her young man, "you'll have to help here."
"Help yourself," said Anne coolly, and moistening her finger she proceeded to wipe the powder off her eyebrows.
Mr. Lewis shut off the engine, got out of the car and put on his coat. The girl did not turn her head, but she was watching through the mirror, for as he picked up his cap she rose lazily, put away her toilet things and started in our direction.
"What shall I do?" she asked Tish, ignoring him.
"Push," said Tish sharply—"unless you are too lame."
"My being lame won't matter, unless you wish me to kick the machine out," retorted the girl sweetly; and with that, the power being on, she put her brown arms against the car and her shoulder-muscles leaped up under her thin dress, and before I had planted my feet in the ditch the car rose, clung for a minute to the edge, and was over into the road. The girl said nothing. She looked at her hands, stepped out of the ditch, patronizingly helped Aggie out of it and swung up the path with her head in the air. When I saw her again she had taken the sign off the pump and thrown it in the grass, and was washing her hands unconcernedly while the woman stood in the door and yapped at her.
If she had a mite of sense she would have gone back to the city in the blue car and let us go home to bed. But when she had come back to the road and the young man suggested it—not to her, of course, but casually to us—she whistled to her dog and started to limp down the road. You can't do anything with a girl in that state of mind. I took her in the tonneau with me, and Aggie, who prefers a love affair to a scandal and always reads the marriage licenses with the obituaries—Aggie went in the blue car to keep Mr. Lewis from being lonely.
IV
WE DIDN'T talk very much. Tish was anxious to show she could drive, for all she had sat us down in a ditch, and after she took a wrong turning and stampeded a herd that was being milked in a barnyard I could not keep my mind off the road. Once I looked at the girl, and there were tears running down her nose and dropping into her lap. I gave her my smelling salts, which I always carry in Tish's machine, and after a while she reached over and slid her hand into mine.
"I shouldn't care if the car went to pieces," she said. "I'd be happier dead."
"If you are always as unpleasant to that young man as you were this evening, I doubt it," I snapped.
"Didn't you ever quarrel with your husband before you were married?" she demanded, looking at me sideways.
"I thank Heaven I never had a husband," I replied, and with that she looked uncomfortable and drew her hand away.
"Is your—friend married?" she inquired. And it took me a moment to realize that she meant Aggie and that the minx was jealous. Aggie is fifty, and so thin that when she wears a tailor-made suit she has to build out with pneumatics. You remember, at the Woman's Suffrage Convention, how Mrs. Bailey pinned a badge to Aggie, and how there was a slow hissing immediately, and Aggie caved in before our very eyes?
Mr. Lewis checked our wild career after a few miles by getting ahead of us, and we got into town about eight. But after we had left the girl at her house—an imposing place, with a man at the door and a limousine at the curb—it was too late to go back home. Aggie and the blue car were waiting down the street, and they piloted us to the hotel.
Now Tish belongs to the Ladies' Relief Corps of the G. A. R., and when Mr. Lewis said we looked tired and that he was going to order supper for us all, and three Martinis, Tish said it was all right, although she didn't see why we needed guns. It looked like a safe place. But they were not guns—that's part of the story.
While we were washing for supper Aggie told us what the quarrel was about.
"They are—were—engaged," she said, "and the girl's father is Robertson—the boss of the city, Mr. Lewis called him. And Mr. Lewis is the youngest councilman—they call him 'Baby' Lewis and he hates it—and there's something to be voted for tomorrow; and if Mr. Lewis is for it he is to get the girl."
"And the girl refuses to be sold!" Tish said triumphantly. "Quite right too. I admire her strength. That's the typical womanly attitude these days—right before anything, honor above all." Tish waved the hairbrush and then she turned on the maid. "Girl," she snapped, "why is this brush chained?"
"The ladies steal them," said the girl. Tish stared at the chain.
"You are so quick, Letitia," Aggie protested. "It was the other way round. The girl was angry because he wouldn't sell his vote, even for her."
Tish sat down in a chair, speechless; but just then Mr. Lewis came to the door and said that supper and the Martinis were ready. The Martinis proved to be something to drink, and after Mr. Lewis had raised his hand and sworn there was no whisky in them we drank them. He said they were appetizers, and the other day Tish said she was going to write to the Sherman House for the recipe before she has the minister to dinner next week.
Never did I eat so delightful a meal. Tish forgot her sprained shoulder and the splinter under her nail, and Aggie talked about the roofer. And the food! I recall distinctly shaking hands with Tish and agreeing to come to the hotel to live, and asking the waiter to find out from the cook how something or other was made. And when Aggie had buried the roofer, and Tish said it was funny, but Mr. Lewis had four brown eyes instead of two, he suggested that we must be tired, and a boy took us to our room. Room, not rooms. We could only get one. The last things I remember are our shaking hands with Mr. Lewis, and that Tish tried to get into the elevator before the door was opened.
About eleven o'clock I heard some one groaning and I sat up in bed. It was Aggie, whom, being the thinnest, we had put on the cot. She said her nose was smarting from the sunburn and she had heartburn something awful. We rang for some baking soda, and she drank some in water and made a plaster for her nose with the rest. After a while she felt better, but we were all wide awake and the heat was terrible. We could look out and see there was a breeze, but not a breath came in.
We sent for the bell-boy again, and he said there wasn't another room and nobody he could move around to give us a room on the breezy side of the house.
We took the rules and regulations card off the door and fanned with it, but it did not help much. After half an hour or so Tish got up, pushed the washstand in front of a door that connected with the next room and crawled up on it.
"If I had a chair," she said, measuring the distance with her eye, "I could see if that corner room next door is occupied. I could tell by that boy's face that he was lying."
Aggie was trying to hold down the baking soda, so although I didn't feel any too well myself I held the chair and Tish climbed up on it.
"What did I tell you?" she demanded when she got down. "That room's empty, and what's more there's nobody belonging there. There's nothing on the dresser but the towel; and there's a breeze coming in that sends the curtains straight into the room."
The connecting door was locked, and Tish put a bed sheet around her and tried the hall door. That was locked too. And all the time we were getting hotter and hotter, and by putting our ears to the key-hole we could hear the breeze blowing on the other side. It was too much for Tish.
"I'm going over the transom," she announced, after we had tried the dresser key in the door without any effect. And go over she did, after putting on her stockings to keep her legs from being scraped.
It was much cooler. We brought in our clothes and Aggie's cot, and spread up the bed in the room we had left. Then we locked the connecting door again and after Aggie had had some more baking soda, in and out, we went to bed.
Well, as I was saying, I went to sleep. I was awakened by Tish sitting up in bed and clutching me somewhere about the diaphragm. By the light from the hall over the transom I could see Aggie sound asleep, with her mouth open, and Tish's arm stretched out and pointed at the yellow hotel bureau. I sat straight up and looked. I couldn't see anything, and at first I thought Tish was dreaming. Then I saw it too. The front of that bureau on the left side moved out a good six inches, stayed that way while I could count ten and then closed up again without a sound.
Tish had put a leg out of bed, but she jerked it in again, and just at that awful moment a clock outside boomed twelve. And then, over in her corner, Aggie began to talk in her sleep.
"Turn around and run over it again," she said, with startling distinctness. "It isn't quite dead."
Tish put her hand up and held her shaking lower jaw.
"I—It's those dr-dratted Martinis," she quavered. "I've—no—d-doubt Mr. Lewis meant well, Lizzie, but I've b-been feeling very strange all evening."
"Your stomach being upset needn't affect my eyes," I retorted in a whisper. "I saw it move."
"Are you sure?" she insisted. "I didn't say anything, Lizzie, but while we were eating supper downstairs I distinctly saw the piano move out six feet from the wall and go back again."
I didn't say anything to Tish, but the fact was that I distrusted my own vision—not that I had seen anything so ridiculous as pianos walking, but I had had a peculiar feeling in the dining-room that my eyes were looking in different directions, and when I focused them on anything I saw double at once. It had got so bad that when I wanted my fork I had to shut my eyes and feel for it. And so, neither of us being certain the bureau had moved, and nothing more occurring, we lay back again. The next minute Tish clutched me and I looked over. Something had happened to the bureau.
It looked phosphorescent, or as though it was on fire inside. There was a glow all around it. The keyholes stood out like dots of flame, and every crack gleamed. It was the most awful thing I have ever seen.
"Look!" gasped Tish, and reaching over the side of the bed she picked up a shoe and flung it with all her might at the thing. The thump was followed by a thud inside the bureau. Aggie stirred.
"The milkman's knocking," she said thickly, and sat up and yawned with her eyes shut. Tish and I leaped out of bed and I turned on the light. That gave us new courage, and the dresser stood there, just like any other dresser, with a towel on its yellow-pine top and fly-specks on the mirror. Tish and I looked at each other and smiled in a sickly way. We felt foolish. But Tish wasn't satisfied. She picked up a hairbrush and banged it on the top.
"Coming, Mr. Gibbs," bawled Aggie, still with her eyes shut, and she began to fumble around on the floor for her slippers.
"Wake her!" Tish commanded. "There's something moving in this thing. Lizzie, give me that pitcher of scalding water."
Of course there wasn't any hot water nearer than the bathroom, which was three turns to the right, one to the left and down a flight of stairs.
And at that minute the bureau spoke.
"Don't, for God's sake, ladies!" it said.
V
I SCREAMED, and, as was perfectly natural, I backed away from the thing. My tripping over Tish's water-pitcher and sitting down was what wakened Aggie. She says she never will forget how she felt when she saw me prostrate and Tish holding a chair aloft and begging the bureau to come out so she could brain it. Of course she thought Tish had gone crazy, what with the sun and excitement of the day.
"Tish!" she screeched.
"Come out," said Tish to the bureau. "Make no resistance; we are armed!"
As Aggie says, when she saw the left-hand side of that bureau move slowly forward like a door when Tish spoke to it, she thought she had a touch of sun herself. But when she saw a human figure crawl out of that place on its hands and knees, and opened her mouth to scream, her breath was gone as completely as if she had been hit in the stomach.
The figure got to its feet, and it had neither horns nor tail. It had curly light-brown hair and blue eyes, and it was purplish red as to face. We stood paralyzed while it stood erect and blinked. Tish lowered her chair slowly and the apparition dropped down on it. It was masculine and shaking. Also young.
"Ladies," it said, "could I—could I thank you for a drink of water? I have been almost stifled."
When the haze cleared away from my eyes I saw that the young man had on a light gray suit, and that in his hand he carried his collar and an electric flashlight. Perspiration was pouring off his face and we could see that he was as scared as we were.
"Give him a drink, Lizzie," Tish said firmly, "and then press that button."
But the young man jumped to his feet at that and looked at us earnestly.
"Ladies," he said earnestly, "please do not raise an alarm. I am not a thief. The manager of the hotel put me in that bureau himself."
"The hotel must be crowded," Tish scoffed. "I hope they don't charge you much for it."
From the street below came a sudden confusion of men's voices and the sound of feet on the pavement. The young man threw up his hands.
"Madam," he said to Tish, "you look like a woman of large mind." Tish stopped putting the bedspread around her and stared at him. "By your unfortunate—er—invasion here tonight you are preventing the discovery of a crime against civic morality. The councilmanic banquet downstairs is over; in a few minutes Robertson—well, probably you don't understand, but I represent the Morning Star. The Civic Purity League has learned that in this room, after the banquet, a bribe is going to be offered. That bureau has been ready for a month. Ladies, I implore you, go back to the other room!"
It was too late. At that moment there were voices in the hall and somebody put a key into the lock of the door. There was no time to put the light out. The young man dropped behind the foot of the bed, the door swung open and a red-haired man stepped into the room.
"Suffering cats!" he exclaimed, and stared at us.
"Go out immediately!" I said, pointing to the door. Tish was unwinding herself from the counterpane. She took it off airily and flung it over the foot of the bed, so that it covered the young man. It looked abandoned, but the necessity was terrible. As Tish said afterward, fifty years of respectable living would not have prevented the tongue of scandal licking up such a spicy morsel as that compromising situation.
The red-haired man retreated a step or two, opened the door partway, and went out and looked at the number. Then he came in again.
"Madam—ladies," he said, "this room belongs to me. There must be some mistake."
"I don't believe it belongs to you," Tish snapped. "Why haven't you got some brushes on the dresser?"
"If you were a gentleman," Aggie wailed from the cot, "you would go out and let us get to sleep. I never put in such a night. First the other room is too hot, and we crawl over the transom to get a cool place, and then——"
"Over the transom," said the red-haired gentleman. "Do you mean to say——" Then he laughed a little and spoke over his shoulder.
"I'm sorry, Lewis," he said, "but my room's taken."
"Kismet," said our Mr. Lewis's voice, but it sounded reckless and strained. "Fate has crooked her finger; I'm going home."
"Don't be an ass," said the red-haired gentleman. "These women in here came over the transom from the next room. It's empty."
"Good gracious! " Aggie gasped. "I left my forms hanging to the gasjet!"
The red-haired man backed into the hall, but he still held the door.
"I'm going home," said our Mr. Lewis again. "I'm sick of things around here, anyhow. I've got a chance to get an orange grove cheap in California."
"Fiddlesticks!" retorted the red-haired man. "Why don't you stick by the plum tree here at home?"
On that the door closed, and we could hear them talking guardedly in the hall.
"The wretches!" Tish fumed. "Oh, why haven't women the vote? I tell you"—she fixed Aggie and me with a gesture—"the day of conscience is coming. Women stand for civic purity, for the home, for right against might!"
It was the "right against might" that we repeated to her afterward, when we had stolen—but that is coming soon.
"But he loves the girl," said Aggie, beginning to sniffle. "I—I think as much of ci-civic purity as you do, Tish Carberry, but I th-think he is just p-pig-headed."
"The girl's a fool and so are you," said Tish, beginning to take the counterpane off the reporter. And at that second there was a knock and the red-haired man opened the door again.
"I beg your pardon," he apologized, "but will you give me the key to the other room?"
We did. Aggie unlocked the connecting door and brought back the key to our old room and the things she had left on the gasjet. In the excitement she threw the key on the dresser and was just about to reach the other articles through the crack in the door when Tish caught her arm.
VI
NOW I am not defending what followed. But the Lewis man had been nice to us, and, as Tish said tartly to Charlie Sands, women who had lived in single blessedness as long as we had, learned to think quick and act quicker. As to the law, we sent a check to the farmer whose pig we killed—and with pork at its present price it was ruinous, although we were glad it had not been a cow; and as to using our missionary money to make up for the packet Aggie lost—as we said, we considered that it had been used in missionary work. It was hardest, of course, on the Morning Star reporter. Only a week or so ago we had to go to Noblestown to get a new handle for the meat-chopper. We were in the machine outside the store, and when we saw him it was too late. Tish was wearing his necktie—having gathered it up with her clothes that awful night, and not knowing his name she could not send it back to him -and she clapped her hand over it. But he saw it.
"Good afternoon," he said, grinning.
"What do you mean by addressing us?" Tish demanded, trying to pull the collar of her duster over the tie.
"You don't mean to say you've forgotten me already!" he exclaimed, looking grieved. "Don't you remember—your—our room at the Sherman House?"
"Certainly not," Tish said haughtily.
He pulled out a card and scribbled something on it. "My card," he said. He leaned over from the curb and gave it to Tish.
"Don't bother about the tie," he said. "I never liked it anyhow. But—I lost a scarf pin that night. I—I suppose you don't know anything about it?"
Out of the corner of her eye Tish saw Aggie make a clutch at her neck, and she threw her a warning glance.
"I am afraid you have made a mistake," she said stiffly, and just then the hardware man brought out the handle. Tish was so excited that she started the car without paying for it, and when we looked back he and the reporter were staring after us; and the reporter distinctly said, "Those women will be wealthy some day."
"Why didn't you let me give him his pin?" Aggie demanded when we were safely out of sight. "I—I feel like a thief."
"Fiddle! And confess?" said Tish. "We'll send it to him. I've got his card."
But all he had written on it after all was, "A. Dresser. Private Bureau." Charlie Sands has promised to return the pin.
Well, all this time I have left the three of us huddled in our nightgowns on the side of the bed, with sheets draped over us, and the Morning Star gentleman with his ear to the connecting door and taking down every word that was said, in shorthand. We heard enough ourselves to know that Robertson was offering the girl, and enough money for Mr. Lewis to marry on, for his vote on something or other. I reckon the balance between a man's honor and his cupidity hangs pretty even anyhow, and when you throw a girl to one side or the other it swings the scale. The Lewis man was yielding and Tish was breathing hard.
"The hussy!" she muttered.
"Did you notice how pretty her hair was in the sunlight?" whispered Aggie.
Somehow it came over me then how young the girl was, and what kind of moral sense could one expect of a girl with that red-headed scamp for a father?
Strangely enough, the plot was gentle Aggie's. Aggie is like baking powder—she rises when she gets heated up. And she was mad clear through. We had no trouble gathering our clothes in our arms, although I could not find my shoe, which Tish had thrown at the bureau. Then we sat and waited. At the last minute Aggie got a little weak and wanted blackberry wine, but I had nothing in the satchel but arnica.
All we intended to do was to get the yellow notebook—to meet strategy with strategy. The rest, while unexpected, followed naturally. But when I look out the window from my desk and see Aggie's placid face, and Tish's austere Methodist profile, it is difficult to associate them or myself with the three partly dressed creatures who—— But to go back.
We had locked the door into the hall and each of us had her clothes. When the two men in the next room went out Mr. Morning Star turned to us with a chuckle.
"Thanks to your forbearance, ladies," he said, "we've got that villain Robertson where he ought to have been a dozen years ago. And as for Lewis——" He shut his notebook with a bang, and there was something in his face besides exultation. "To buy a girl like that!" he said—and I knew. He wanted the girl himself.
Aggie was to ask to see the notebook and then toss it over the transom into the corridor. While the reporter was trying to get out the locked door into the hall we could escape into the adjoining room, lock the connecting door, walk around easily and get the notebook, and then make our escape comfortably.
It would have been all right, but Aggie cannot throw. The first attempt failed by seven feet. The young man was so astonished, however, that he stood with his mouth open, and the second trial sent it through.
"What in the name of Heaven did you do that for?" he demanded, thinking Aggie had gone suddenly mad. Then he rushed to the door. It was locked and I had the key! We were all in the next room and a bolted door between us before he realized what had happened.
We had expected, of course, to get the notebook, to dress and to leave in the machine quietly, but from that time on there was no time to think of the conventions. The young man began to hammer on the door and other doors opened along the hall. Then a bell-boy came up and ran off in a hurry for a key. I saw Tish putting on her ulster over her petticoat, and Aggie and I did the same. The next thing we knew we were down in the empty lobby, and Tish had forgotten the spark plugs!
We got started finally with a steel hair-pin for a plug, and as we moved away I heard the chase coming down the stairs and after us. They were howling "Stop thief!" We were hardly well under way when the bell-boy came in sight with the bureau man at his heels, and a collection of people in all sorts of costumes following.
Tish says we did forty miles an hour going down the main street. I should have guessed more than that. I had a fearful exaltation: Aggie had advanced her speed limit since morning from four miles an hour to the capacity of the engine, and kept bawling to Tish a phrase she had caught from Charlie Sands.
"Letter out!" she cried, over and over. "Letter out!"
We stopped on a quiet side street and listened, but there was no noise of pursuit. Tish got out and stuck her wet finger on the hood, but it wasn't boiling.
"There's nothing coming," she said. "I'm going to stop long enough to put on my stockings."
"I don't see why you couldn't have flung your own shoe, Tish," I snapped. "What use is one shoe?—unless I lose a leg, and that's as like as not before this night's over."
"Do you see where we are?" Aggie asked. "Isn't this where we brought Miss Anne?"
It was, for Anne opened the door just then and peered down at the car.
"Is that you, father?" she called. She came down the step, and the light from the hall fell full on us. We must have looked rather strange, with Tish putting on her stocking in the driving seat and the most of our clothing in our laps instead of on us.
"Something has happened!" she said, catching her breath. "Ted!"
"Something has happened," Tish retorted grimly, and held up the notebook. "Here's the Morning Star's shorthand report of the interview in which your Ted sold his honor for a mess of pottage—you being the pottage."
"Oh, no," said Miss Anne, going wobbly. "Oh, he wouldn't—he didn't do such a thing!"
"Upon my soul!" I broke in. "Weren't you fighting him all day to do it?"
"You couldn't understand," she said, looking at me with the eyes of a baby. "I didn't want him to do it; I wanted him to want to do it."
"Well, if that's being in love, thank Heaven for the mind of a spinster," I retorted angrily.
"You've won," Tish said. "You've got him kneeling at your feet, as you wanted. But he went down in the mud to do it. And the only reason the newspapers won't be slinging some of that very mire tomorrow is because three elderly women, who ought to have more sense, have resorted to thievery and lost their reputations and parts of their garments to save him!"
"I hate him," said the young woman, with her chin quivering. "I knew all along I should hate him if he did it. I—I'll never marry him."
And with that she turned and started up the steps. Halfway up she turned.
"I'm sorry you went to so much trouble," she said. "I don't think he is worth saving."
Aggie's early experience with the roofer stood her in good stead then. She understood; Tish and I never would have. She got out of the machine and went up into the vestibule, and a minute later, against the hall light, we saw the girl's head on Aggie's shoulder. Then they both came down again with their arms wrapped around each other, and Aggie asked me to move over.
"We're going to Mr. Lewis' apartment," she announced, with a thrill in her voice. She was maudlin with romance. "It will be proper enough, I think, with three chaperons. She wants to see him."
"Not until I put on my other stocking," Tish put in grimly. "And we don't get out of the machine; I've been compromised once tonight."
"They are both young," Aggie rebuked her gently. "I think, having begun this thing, we ought to see it through. We will have to be mothers to her, for she has none."
Well, we passed Mr. Robertson at the corner of the next street, and the girl shrank back and covered her face. And then she directed us, and we overtook the other one as he was going into his doorway. The girl jumped out and ran after him. We distinctly heard him say, "Anne! Darling!" And then, what with anxiety and excitement, Aggie took the worst sneezing spell of the summer, and the rest was lost.
He was terribly ashamed and humiliated, and he said he would take the girl away and be married right off, only he had that wretched package of bribe money that made him think, every time he saw it, how unworthy he was of her! He was going to put it down a sewer drop, but Tish suggested that they be married and go on a honeymoon, and let us return the bribe to Mr. Robertson.
So he gave us the package; and, as you know, Aggie lost it later. Then he asked us if there was a minister in the summer colony at Penzance, and Tish mentioned Mr. Ostermaier. "I don't like him," she remarked, "and his wife is a dowdy, but I suppose you don't expect an organ prelude and floral decorations. Get in."
I did not mind their sitting back with me, and his kissing her hand whenever he thought I was not looking. But the thing I objected to was this: I distinctly overheard him say:
"I was desperate tonight, sweetheart; and oh, my love, you saved me!"
She saved him!
At a crossroads near Penzance Tish made them get out, and we directed them to a landing where they would find a rowboat. We all kissed the bride; and Mr. Lewis said he had nobody to cheer him on his way, and wouldn't we kiss him too. So we did, and after they had gone we prepared for Carpenter's sharp eyes by going into the bushes and putting on the rest of our clothes.
It was the first thing Carpenter said that caused the accident. He brought in the ferry-boat and came up the bank to us.
"I've been expectin' you," he said, with a grin. "I was thinkin' you might come over by the Carrick Ferry, and the folks there wouldn't know you."
"I guess they'd take my money without knowing me," Tish said sharply.
"Well," he drawled, with a sharp eye on the three of us, "I didn't want you to have any trouble. We got a telephone message from Noblestown not very long ago to look out for an automobile containing three female desperadoes. The police wants them."
That was when Tish sent the car over the end of the ferry.
Well, as I said early in the narrative, after Tish and Aggie had dried off and gone to bed I stood at my window and tried to see into Ostermaier's parlor, but all I could see was the sleeve of Mrs. Ostermaier's kimono.
As I stood there shivering, the door opened and two shadowy figures came out of the house and crossed the lawn. Just under my window they stopped and the tall shadow held open its arms. The smaller one went into them with a little cry, and they stood there a disgraceful time. Then they lifted their heads and looked up at our cottage.
"Bless their dear romantic hearts!" said the girl. I was glad Tish was asleep.
"They should have been pirates!" said the man. "They are true old sports. I suppose they've had their catnip tea by now and are sound asleep. Beloved!" he said, and held out his arms again.
Pirates! I went back to bed in a rage, but I couldn't sleep. Somehow I kept seeing that young idiot holding out his arms, and I felt lonely. Finally I filled the hot-water bottle and put it at my back.
"It's all over, Aggie!" I called—but the only response was a snore that turned into a sneeze.
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 1958, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 65 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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