The amazing adventures of Letitia Carberry
launch. We were knitting on our veranda that afternoon, looking across
at Sunset Island, which is four miles away. Carpenter was not in sight,
and from down the beach came the yells and splashes that told that the
college boys at the Watermelon Camp were bathing. We were sitting with
our backs to them, when Tish said suddenly:
“There is a launch coming in.”
There was, a very fine one, although handsome is as handsome does, as
the colored man said about the hippopotamus. For as the launch steamed
past, a man in a white uniform threw something with a thud on to the
dock. It was a dog. The next moment they headed out into the lake
again, paying no attention to Tish, who ran down the path and tried to
signal them with the raffia basket she was making.
The dog came up and sniffed at her.
Now we never had any dogs on the island, even in the season. Tish’s
uncle had been bitten by a dog once, and although he never had
hydrophobia, he was always strange afterward. They say that when he
coughed it was exactly like a bark, and the very sight of a cat upset
him terribly. Also, although the family never said much about this, I
have heard that after he died they found quite a collection of bones
in his upper washstand drawer. And my grandmother saw him once eating
raw meat mixed with onion, between slices of bread! So when we bought
the island, and sold parts of it for cottages, we always put in the
agreement of sale: “No intoxicants, no phonographs and no dogs.”
You may imagine how we felt, therefore, when we saw the dog following
Tish up the path, and biting at her heels. (When a dog bites at your
heels, and isn’t wagging his tail, he is not playing; he is in earnest.
It is much like that line in _The Virginian_--“When you say that,
smile!” But this dog did not smile.)
Tish shouted to us, as she came, to run and shut Paulina, her cat, in
the spare room, and to give her her catnip ball (the cat, not Tish).
And then she came up and dropped on the porch step and covered up her
feet, and the creature sat down before her and dared her to move.
That was the most terrible afternoon of my life. He sat there and
drooled over the step, and growled now and then, and Tish told about
her uncle, and Aggie said she knew a man who had been attacked by a
bulldog, and the only way they got him loose was to give him--the
dog--a hypodermic of poison and pry him off after he died.
To make matters worse, there did not seem to be a soul on the island.
The boys from the camp had disappeared; Carpenter’s cabin was closed
and locked. At tea time the dog heard Paulina wailing up-stairs and he
made a hole in the screen door and went after her. He had chewed almost
through the guest room door before Aggie called him off with the chops
for supper.
That decided us.
About eight o’clock that evening, while the creature was gnawing
at a leg of the dining-room table, we held a whispered conference,
and Tish came forward with a plan. It was very daring, and Aggie
immediately objected. “It’s all very well,” she said, “to sit here in a
rocking-chair and talk about rowing four miles to Sunset Island, with
not one of us knowing anything about a boat, and Lizzie told by that
fortune teller last spring that she would die by drowning. Not only
that. _How are you going to get the dog into the boat?_”
Tish leaned forward cautiously. The Dog was still gnawing in the next
room.
“Chloroform him!” she whispered. “Wait until he gets sleepy. Then take
Lizzie’s bath sponge, soak it with your chloroform liniment, Aggie, and
when he’s stupefied, carry him down and dump him in the boat.”
“Why not let Carpenter do it, in the morning?” Aggie objected. She was
green with nervousness.
“Carpenter!” Tish snorted. “If he ever sees that flea-bitten creature
he will keep him.”
(Carpenter, being an original settler, had never subscribed to the
liquor, phonograph and dog clause.)
At eleven o’clock the Dog turned over on his side and went to sleep. We
were ready. My sponge, saturated with Aggie’s liniment and impaled on
the end of Tish’s umbrella, was held to his nostrils, and we each drew
a long breath. But we had counted without Aggie’s hay fever. Just as
the creature seemed about settled and was growing limp, Aggie began to
sneeze, and by the time the paroxysm was over the dog was awake and
had eaten part of the sponge. It was a terrible disappointment. As Tish
said afterward, we should have anæsthetized Aggie first.
However, perhaps it was for the best, after all, for it made him very
ill, and when, after Tish had washed the floor, she prodded him with
the wooden handle of the mop and he only groaned, he had ceased to be
formidable.
“It’s now or never,” Tish said, with determination, and put on her
overshoes. It had been raining, and luckily Aggie put her plaid shawl
around her shoulders. What we should have done later without that shawl
I shudder to think. Tish put on a knitted cape and I tied a scarf over
my head. Then, with the dog--no longer a capital D--wobbling at the end
of a clothes-line, we started.
At the last minute Tish had a spell of conscience and hunted up a
bottle of cleaning fluid to put in the boat.
“It’s mostly gasoline,” she said. “If it’s mange it won’t do any
harm, and if it’s fleas it will kill them. We can put it on just before
we leave him on Sunset Island. You start pouring it at his nose and
work along his back. The fleas will drop off his tail. Every creature
deserves a chance.”
None of us thought of the ether in the stuff, although, as it turned
out, it did not hurt the dog. _It was never used on the dog._
We got to the dock without incident, Aggie ahead with the dog, and Tish
and I feeling for the rope of Carpenter’s skiff. Tish had the scissors,
in case we couldn’t untie it. Just as we found it and stooped,
something splashed. Tish straightened and gripped me by the arm.
“Did you throw anything in?” she demanded in an awful tone.
“Stop pinching me, Tish Carberry!” I snapped, “or I will.”
There was silence for a minute; then there was a swirling whitish
appearance at our very feet, and something dark raised itself up in
the water and stood waving its arms. Then it gave a gurgle or two,
choked, coughed and finally sneezed. We knew the sneeze; it was Aggie!
It was when she got her breath that she said the incredible thing, the
thing she flatly denied afterward, but for which she was obliged to pay
five dollars into the fine box.
“That damned dog pulled me in!” she gurgled. “I’ve thwallowed--” She
clapped her hands to her mouth, and we knew at once. Her teeth!
We pulled them both out grimly--Aggie and the dog, and Tish ordered
Aggie to the house for dry clothes at once. “And it might be as well,
Agatha,” she added coldly, “if you would wash your mouth out with soap.
You can buy new teeth, but you can not buy another immortal soul.”
Agatha sloshed a half-dozen steps up the dock. Then she turned on us
both in the darkness.
“If _you_ had thwallowed two gallonth of dirty water, tho that you can
feel it thaking in you when you walk, and had lotht your thell back
comb and your betht upper teeth, you wouldn’t care, Tith Carberry,
whether you had an immortal thoul or not.”
Then she thtalked--stalked, I mean, up to the house. Tish was furious,
but luckily, I have a sense of humor. With Aggie’s soul hanging fire,
so to speak, I sat down on the dock in the rain and laughed. That was
the beginning of my deterioration; from that instant, when I braved
rheumatism and Tish’s displeasure, to that later moment just at dawn,
when we came back to the dock again, draggled, dirty and guilty, I was
forty-nine years young, reckless, disdainful of consequences, unmindful
of wet feet and the proprieties, forgetful even of law and order. That
awful, glorious night, when young Love--but that’s the story.
CHAPTER III
A WET YOUNG MAN
Well, Tish and I got the boat loose, and Tish dropped the scissors into
the water. Then when we got in, Tish insisted on rowing with her face
to the bow of the boat. She said she couldn’t see where she was going
if she didn’t, which, of course, was true enough. We dragged the dog in
by his tail and then sat and waited for Aggie. When she did come she
was sulky, and almost the only words she said that entire night were
“Kill him!” And that was under stress of great excitement, at three
o’clock in the morning.
The night was very black, but a light on the boat-landing at Sunset
Island gave us our direction. Tish and I rowed, I behind her, and as
she had an unexpected habit of scooping the top off a wave with her
oar and throwing it over my face and chest, finally, in desperation I
turned my back to her. It was really easier rowing that way, although
we did not keep very good time. But, as I explained when Tish objected,
it was really safer, for by rowing back to back we could see in both
directions at once.
When we were about a mile from shore, Aggie spoke for the first time.
“The boat’th leaking!” she said.
“Gracious!” I exclaimed, and felt my petticoats. They were sopping.
“Nonsense!” Tish sneered. “It’s the water Lizzie’s been ladling in with
her oars.” Then she caught a wave with her oar, and poured it down my
back. At that minute the dog moved uneasily in the bottom of the boat
and crawled up on the seat in the bow, where he sat and wailed.
We should have gone back. I said so then, but Tish is like all the
Carberrys--immovably obstinate. When I tried to row back to the
landing, _she_ was rowing for Sunset Island, and all we did was to
make as much splash as a paddle-wheel steamer, and not move an inch in
either direction. And just then Tish broke an oar.
“There!” she snapped, turning on me, of course. “Just look what your
pig-headedness--”
She never finished. She was staring, petrified, at the rim of the
boat, which was just visible. There were two white splotches on it
that looked like hands. The more I looked, the more I knew they _were_
hands! And then the boat tilted to that side until we all screamed,
and a head and shoulders appeared, fell back out of sight, upreared
themselves with a mighty heave, and--dropped into the boat.
It was a man--a young man. Even in the darkness he gleamed white from
head to foot. We shut our eyes and screamed. When we stopped he had
sat down on the dog, discovered him, slid him with a splash into the
bottom of the boat and had settled himself comfortably in the bow.
“I’m sorry I frightened you,” he was saying, “but--I’d been swimming
for a good while, and your boat was an oasis in the dusty desert.”
“Get back into the water instantly!” Tish commanded, turning her
profile to him. “Have you no shame?”
“Oh, as to _that_,” he said aggrieved, “I--I have something on, you
know. Of course, they are wet, and they stick to me, but--”
“Give him thith,” Aggie broke in, and unwound herself from her shawl. I
passed it to Letitia over my shoulder, and Letitia averted her face and
held it out to him.
“Thanks, awfully,” he said. “After all that exercise, the night air is
cold on a fellow’s back.”
At that Letitia turned on him in a rage.
“_Will_ you open that shawl out and cover yourself?” she asked
furiously. “_Cover_ yourself. Your _back_! Look at your _legs_!”
“As long as you sit quiet and behave yourself, you may stay in the
boat,” I added with as much composure as I could get over my trembling
lips. “Otherwise, I warn you, we have a dog.”
At that I think he prodded the dog with his foot, for he set up a
nauseated whine--the dog, of course--and the young gentleman laughed.
“Your dog is quite safe, madam,” he said. “I wouldn’t bite him for
anything.” Then he leaned forward in the darkness and stared at Tish
and myself.