The amazing adventures of Letitia Carberry
“Good gracious!” Aggie gasped. “I left my forms hanging to the gas-jet!”
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 gas-jet. 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.
CHAPTER VI
A BRIBE AND A BRIDE AND IT’S ALL OVER
Now I am not defending what followed. But the Lewis man had been nice
to us, and, as Tish said tartly to Charlie Sands, women who had lived
in single blessedness as long as we had, learned to think quick and
act quicker. As to the law, we sent a check to the farmer whose pig we
killed--and with pork at its present price it was ruinous, although
we were glad it had not been a cow; and as to using our missionary
money to make up for the packet Aggie lost--as we said, we considered
that it had been used in missionary work. It was hardest, of course,
on the _Morning Star_ reporter. Only a week or so ago we had to go to
Noblestown to get a new handle for the meat-chopper. We were in the
machine outside the store, and when we saw him it was too late. Tish
was wearing his necktie--having gathered it up with her clothes that
awful night, and not knowing his name she could not send it back to
him--and she clapped her hand over it. But he saw it.
“Good afternoon,” he said, grinning.
“What do you mean by addressing us?” Tish demanded, trying to pull the
collar of her duster over the tie.
“You don’t mean to say you’ve forgotten me already!” he exclaimed,
looking grieved. “Don’t you remember--your--our room at the Sherman
House?”
“Certainly not,” Tish said haughtily.
He pulled out a card and scribbled something on it. “My card,” he said.
He leaned over from the curb and gave it to Tish.
“Don’t bother about the tie,” he said. “I never liked it anyhow. But--I
lost a scarfpin that night. I--I suppose you don’t know anything about
it?”
Out of the corner of her eye Tish saw Aggie make a clutch at her neck,
and she threw her a warning glance.
“I am afraid you have made a mistake,” she said stiffly, and just then
the hardware man brought out the handle. Tish was so excited that she
started the car without paying for it, and when we looked back he and
the reporter were staring after us; and the reporter distinctly said,
“Those women will be wealthy some day.”
“Why didn’t you let me give him his pin?” Aggie demanded when we were
safely out of sight. “I--I feel like a thief.”
“Fiddle! And confess?” said Tish. “We’ll send it to him. I’ve got his
card.”
But all he had written on it, after all, was, “A. Dresser. Private
Bureau.” Charlie Sands has promised to return the pin.
Well, all this time I have left the three of us huddled in our
nightgowns on the side of the bed, with sheets draped over us, and
the _Morning Star_ gentleman with his ear to the connecting door and
taking down every word that was said, in shorthand. Robertson was
offering the girl, and enough money for Mr. Lewis to marry on, for his
vote on something or other. I reckon the balance between a man’s honor
and his cupidity hangs pretty even anyhow, and when you throw a girl to
one side or the other it swings the scale. The Lewis man was yielding
and Tish was breathing hard.
“The hussy!” she muttered.
“Did you notice how pretty her hair was in the sunlight?” whispered
Aggie.
Somehow it came over me then how young the girl was, and what kind of
moral sense could one expect of a girl with that red-headed scamp for a
father?
Strangely enough, the plot was gentle Aggie’s. Aggie is like baking
powder--she rises when she gets heated up. And she was mad clear
through. We had no trouble gathering our clothes in our arms, although
I could not find my shoe, which Tish had thrown at the bureau. Then we
sat and waited. At the last minute Aggie got a little weak and wanted
blackberry wine, but I had nothing in the satchel but arnica.
All we intended to do was to get the yellow notebook--to meet strategy
with strategy. The rest, while unexpected, followed naturally. But when
I look out the window from my desk and see Aggie’s placid face, and
Tish’s austere Methodist profile, it is difficult to associate them or
myself with the three partly dressed creatures who-- But to go back.
We had locked the door into the hall and each of us had her clothes.
When the two men in the next room went out Mr. _Morning Star_ turned to
us with a chuckle.
“Thanks for your forbearance, ladies,” he said, “we’ve got that villain
Robertson where he ought to have been a dozen years ago. And as for
Lewis--” He shut his notebook with a bang, and there was something in
his face besides exultation. “To buy a girl like that!” he said--and I
knew. He wanted the girl himself.
Aggie was to ask to see the notebook and then toss it over the transom
into the corridor. While the reporter was trying to get out the locked
door into the hall we could escape into the adjoining room, lock the
connecting door, walk around easily and get the notebook, and then make
our escape comfortably.
It would have been all right, but Aggie can not throw. The first
attempt failed by seven feet. The young man was so astonished, however,
that he stood with his mouth open, and the second trial sent it through.
“What in the name of Heaven did you do that for?” he demanded, thinking
Aggie had suddenly gone mad. Then he rushed to the door. It was locked
and I had the key! We were all in the next room and a bolted door
between us before he realized what had happened.
We had expected, of course, to get the notebook, to dress, and to leave
in the machine quietly, but from that time on there was no time to
think of the conventions. The young man began to hammer on the door
and other doors opened along the hall. Then a bell-boy came up and ran
off in a hurry for a key. I saw Tish putting on her ulster over her
petticoat, and Aggie and I did the same. The next thing we knew we were
down in the empty lobby, and Tish had forgotten the spark plugs!
We got started finally with a steel hairpin for a plug, and as we moved
away I heard the chase coming down the stairs after us. They were
howling “Stop thief!” We were hardly well under way when the bell-boy
came in sight with the bureau man at his heels and a collection of
people in all sorts of costumes following.
Tish says we did forty miles an hour going down the main street. I
should have guessed more than that. I had a fearful exaltation: Aggie
had advanced her speed limit since morning from four miles an hour to
the capacity of the engine, and kept bawling to Tish a phrase she had
caught from Charlie Sands.
“Letter out!” she cried, over and over. “Letter out!”
We stopped on a quiet side street and listened, but there was no noise
of pursuit. Tish got out and stuck her wet finger on the hood, but it
wasn’t boiling.
“There’s nothing coming,” she said. “I’m going to stop long enough to
put on my stockings.”
“I don’t see why you couldn’t have flung your own shoe, Tish,” I
snapped. “What use is one shoe?--unless I lose a leg, and that’s as
like as not before this night’s over.”
“Do you see where we are?” Aggie asked. “Isn’t this where we brought
Miss Anne?”
It was, for Anne opened the door just then and peered down at the car.
“Is that you, father?” she called. She came down the steps, and
the light from the hall fell full on us. We must have looked rather
strange, with Tish putting on her stocking in the driving seat and the
most of our clothing in our laps instead of on us.
“Something has happened!” she said, catching her breath. “Ted!”
“Something _has_ happened,” Tish retorted grimly, and held up the
notebook. “Here’s the _Morning Star’s_ shorthand report of the
interview in which your Ted sold his honor for a mess of pottage--you
being the pottage.”
“Oh, no,” said Miss Anne, going wobbly. “Oh, he wouldn’t--he didn’t do
such a thing!”
“Upon my soul!” I broke in. “Weren’t you fighting him all day to do it?”
“You couldn’t understand,” she said, looking at me with the eyes of a
baby. “I didn’t want him to do it; I wanted him to want to do it.”
“Well, if that’s being in love, thank Heaven for the mind of a
spinster,” I retorted angrily.
“You’ve won,” Tish said. “You’ve got him kneeling at your feet, as
you wanted. But he went down in the mud to do it. And the only reason
the newspapers won’t be slinging some of that very mire to-morrow
is because three elderly women, who ought to have more sense, have
resorted to thievery and lost their reputations and parts of their
garments to save him!”
“I hate him,” said the young woman, with her chin quivering. “I knew
all along I should hate him if he did it. I--I’ll never marry him.”
And with that she turned and started up the steps. Half way up she
turned.
“I’m sorry you went to so much trouble,” she said. “I don’t think he is
worth saving.”
Aggie’s early experience with the roofer stood her in good stead then.
She understood; Tish and I never would have. She got out of the
machine and went up into the vestibule, and a minute later, against the
hall light, we saw the girl’s head on Aggie’s shoulder. Then they both
came down again with their arms wrapped around each other, and Aggie
asked me to move over.
“We’re going to Mr. Lewis’ apartment,” she announced, with a thrill in
her voice. She was maudlin with romance. “It will be proper enough, I
think, with three chaperons. She wants to see him.”
“Not until I put on my other stocking,” Tish put in grimly. “And we
don’t get out of the machine; I’ve been compromised once to-night.”
“They are both young,” Aggie rebuked her gently. “I think, having begun
this thing, we ought to see it through. We will have to be mothers to
her, for she has none.”
Well, we passed Mr. Robertson at the corner of the next street, and
the girl shrank back and covered her face. And then she directed us,
and we overtook the other one as he was going into his doorway. The
girl jumped out and ran after him. We distinctly heard him say, “Anne!
Darling!” And then, what with anxiety and excitement, Aggie took the
worst sneezing spell of the summer, and the rest was lost.
He was terribly ashamed and humiliated, and he said he would take the
girl away and be married right off, only he had that wretched package
of bribe money that made him think, every time he saw it, how unworthy
he was of her! He was going to put it down a sewer drop, but Tish
suggested that they be married and go on a honeymoon, and let us return
the bribe to Mr. Robertson.