The amazing adventures of Letitia Carberry
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’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. I was disappointed 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.”
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 work-basket.
“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.
“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.”
CHAPTER II
A BLUE RUNABOUT AND A BAD BRIDGE
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 sky-rocket, 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 collar-bone, 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