The amazing adventures of Letitia Carberry
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 to-night, 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.
THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF LETITIA CARBERRY
PART THREE
CHAPTER I
THE GREEN KIMONO
Nothing would have induced me to tell the scandalous story had it
not been for Letitia’s green kimono. But when it was found at the
Watermelon Camp, two miles from our cottage, hanging to the branch of a
tree, instead of the corduroy trousers and blue flannel shirt that one
of the campers said he had hung there overnight, it seemed to require
explanation. For _one of the men at the Watermelon Camp knew the
kimono_.
He brought it up the next morning, hanging over his arm, and asked
Letitia for the trousers and shirt! He said that the young man who
owned them had to wear a blanket until we returned them, not having
any other clothes in camp. Also, he said there was a particular kind
of bass hook in one of the pockets, and if there was any reason why we
could not return the trousers, would we be kind enough to send back the
hook.
Now Tish is a teacher in the Sunday-School and has been for thirty-five
years. But she looked up from the bowl she was wiping--we had made a
pretense at breakfast, although nobody could eat--and she _lied_.
“I don’t know what you mean by coming here for your corduroy trousers
and flannel shirt,” she said, with a three-cornered red spot in each
cheek. “As for that kimono, I _never saw it before_!”
Then she dropped the bowl. She had to pay twenty cents into the cottage
exchequer for it afterward, and she explained that she felt the bowl
going, and the falsehood slipped out before she knew what she was
saying. Anyhow, it did no good, for the young man in knickerbockers
and a bathing shirt held up the kimono, grinning and pointing to the
laundry tag. It said “Letitia Carberry,” as plain as ink could make it.
Aggie weakened at once. It is always Aggie that weakens. She sat down
on the porch step and began to cry. She had been crying off and on all
morning, having lost her upper teeth when the boat--but that brings me
to the boat.
Just as Aggie threw her apron over her face, we saw old Carpenter, the
boatman, coming up the path. I caught Tish’s arm as she was escaping
into the house. “Not a step,” I whispered sternly. “If they arrest one
of us, they take us all.”
“You see, it was like this,” the young man was saying, “Carleton, one
of our fellows, was out in his motor canoe last night, and it upset.
When he came in, he says he hung his trousers and shirt out on a branch
to dry. Anyhow, when he got up an hour or so ago, his clothes were
gone, and this--er--garment was there instead.” He was staring very
hard at Tish. “He didn’t notice the change, being half asleep, and he
got his feet in the sleeves all right, but when it came to drawing it
up, he noticed something strange about it.”
At the name “Carleton” Aggie threw me an agonized glance from her
apron. She would not speak without her teeth, and Tish was stooping
over the pieces of the bowl. I am a Christian woman, but seeing Aggie
weak-kneed and Tish as shaky as gelatine, I hoped that Carpenter,
the boatman, would have apoplexy or fall and break his leg before he
reached the porch. I turned on the young man at the foot of the steps.
“If you think,” I said indignantly, “that three ladies, past their
youth and with affairs of their own to look after, have nothing better
to do than to wander around at night stealing clothing that they
could not possibly wear, and leaving in exchange articles that they
er--cherish, go in and examine the house.”
Carpenter had come up and stood respectfully by, listening, and to my
horror I saw that he held the other half of Aggie’s broken oar.
“He won’t go into _my_ room!” Aggie said suddenly, and with amazing
clearness, considering her teeth.
“Nonsense,” I snapped. “This young man has seen an unmade bed before.”
But Aggie had gone pale, and suddenly I remembered. The handle of the
very oar Carpenter carried was lying on a chair beside her bed. All
that terrible night she had held on to it as a weapon.
The young man in the bathing shirt only smiled, however, and shifted
Tish’s kimono to the other shoulder.
“Certainly, if you say you haven’t seen Carleton’s clothes,” he said
easily, “the matter is settled. No doubt the same breeze last night
that blew the kimono down to the camp and hung it on the branch of
a tree took the trousers to make a sensation on one of the nearby
islands. I am sorry Carleton didn’t know they were going traveling, he
would at least have had them brushed.”
While I was glaring at him Carpenter stepped forward and placed the oar
blade on the porch. When Aggie saw the name “Witch Hazel” she opened
her mouth like a fish, and I daresay if I had not pinched her she would
have told the whole miserable story then and there. Not that I am
ashamed of it--I am not too old, thank the Lord, to know real love when
I see it--but Aggie has no sense of proportion, and in her telling,
what was pure romance would have become merely assault and battery,
with intent to compound a felony.
“I reckon, Miss Lizzie,” Carpenter said, addressing me, “that you and
Miss Tish and Miss Aggie didn’t take the _Witch Hazel_ out last night
and forget to bring her back, did you?”
Aggie shut her mouth and swallowed.
“Certainly,” I retorted sarcastically. “We decided to take a midnight
row yesterday evening, but the boat leaked. In the middle of the lake
it filled and sank under our feet.”
Tish gave me an awful look, and snapped:
“I suppose if we’d taken your boat out, we’d have brought it back, not
being mermaids.”
“That’s what I argued down at the camp,” he meditated. “I said to them,
‘you boys have been up to some devilment or other, and I’ll git you
yet. It ain’t likely that them three old--them three ladies that can’t
row a stroke or swim a yard would take the _Witch Hazel_ out in the
middle of the night in a storm, sink the boat, and swim home four miles
in time to put up their crimps and get breakfast.’”
“Thirtainly not,” Aggie said with injured dignity, “I can’t thwim a
thtroke.”
Carpenter spat on one of our whitewashed cobblestones. “It’s what
you might call _ree_markable,” he observed. “Not another soul on the
island, and won’t be ’til the Methodist camp meeting next week; one of
the boys at the Watermelon Camp with a blanket on instead of his pants
and a bandage on his head, and the _Witch Hazel_ stole last night by
somebody who cut through her painter with a pair of scissors and takes
her out with two oars that ain’t mates.”
The young man with the kimono dropped it carelessly into Aggie’s lap
and straightened with a glance at her stricken face.
“Scissors!” he repeated. “Oh, come, Abe, you’re no detective. How the
mischief do you know whether the rope was cut with scissors or chewed
off?”
Abe dived into his pocket and brought up two articles on the palm of
his hand.
“Scissored off or chewed off,” he said triumphantly. “Take your choice.”
There, gleaming in the sunlight, were _Tish’s buttonhole scissors and
Aggie’s upper teeth_!
“Found them in four feet of water at the end of the boat dock,” he
said, “where I left the _Witch Hazel_ last night. If them teeth ever
belonged in a fish, then I’m a dentist.”
I remember the next ten minutes through a red haze; I knew in a dim way
that Aggie had clutched at her teeth and disappeared; I heard from far
off Tish’s voice, explaining that Aggie had dropped the scissors in the
water the previous afternoon, and had lost her teeth while lying on the
dock trying to fish them up--the scissors, of course--with a hairpin
on the end of a string. And finally, with the line of the waterfront
undulating before my dizzy eyes like a marcel wave--which is a figure
of speech and not a pun--I realized that Carpenter and the sleeveless
and neckless young man from the camp were retreating down the path, and
I knew that the ordeal was over.
I believe I fainted, for when I opened my eyes again Tish was standing
in front of me with a cup of tea, and she had been crying.
“You needn’t feel so badly about it,” I said, when I had taken a sip of
the tea. “There are times when to lie is humanity.”
“It isn’t that,” Tish whimpered, breaking down again, “but--but the
wretches didn’t believe me!”
“No,” I echoed sadly, “they didn’t believe you.”
“I could think of so many better ones now,” she wailed.
“Never mind,” I said, with a feeble attempt to console her, “they won’t
jail us for lying, anyhow. We are reasonably safe, Tish, unless Mr.
Carleton has Aggie arrested for assault and battery.”
But he did not. The only court concerned was the marriage license
court, from which you will know that this is a love story. Even if it
does begin with a mangy dog.
At least Aggie said it was mange; her parrot had the same moth-eaten
look before it died. But Tish has always maintained that it was fleas.
She says they breed in the grass, and attack dogs in swarms in hot
weather.
CHAPTER II
IT WAS THE DOG
The dog was put ashore under our very noses, by the crew of a passing