The amazing adventures of Letitia Carberry
“Upon my soul!” he muttered, and then aloud: “How in the name of all
that is nautical did you ladies get as far from shore as this, when you
are rowing in different directions?”
Tish refused to answer, and fell to rowing madly with her one oar, so
that we turned around and around in a circle. Aggie had not said a
word since she gave the young man her shawl. She was sitting in the
stern with the jug in her lap and her handkerchief over her mouth.
“This is a wonderful piece of luck,” he said finally. “I must have been
blown up the lake. I hope I didn’t startle you?”
“Not at all,” I said, as coolly as I could. At least he didn’t have a
revolver: there was no place to hide one, or a knife either. “Are you
out for a pleasure trip? Or did you have any definite objective point?”
This scathingly.
“Just land,” he said. “Any old land will do. Near a boat-house, if
possible.”
“We are going to Thunthet Island,” Aggie lisped, encouraged by his good
humor.
This seemed to surprise him, but after a minute he threw back his head
and laughed: it was almost a chuckle. Certainly, if he was a lunatic,
he was a cheerful one.
“To Sunset Island, then!” he exclaimed. “Forward, and God with us!”
The rain was over, and by the starlight we could make out a little
more about our intruder. He seemed large and not bad looking, and he
had a nice voice. (It was a disappointment, when we finally saw him in
the daylight, to find that his hair was red, but it was offset by an
attractive smile and exceedingly good teeth. Next to a nice nose, I
like a man to have good teeth.) But, of course, some of the greatest
rascals have all the physical attributes at the expense of the moral
ones. As to his good humor, every one knows that a man can smile and
smile and be a villain still. He wanted to take the oars, but an oar
is a mighty effective weapon: neither Tish nor I would give ours up.
Finally--
“I suppose you haven’t any gasoline with you?” he inquired, leaning
forward and hugging the shawl under his chin.
“There’th a quart bottle of cleaning fluid--” Aggie began, but Tish
interrupted her.
“Agatha!” she said.
“I suppose you don’t know of a boat-house near where we could steal
some, do you?” he reflected.
“_We!_”
Tish lifted her oar out of the water and leaned on it. There is no
space here to set down what she said, but she did it thoroughly. She
told him what she thought of his going around in his present costume;
she told him that two of us were Methodist Protestants and one an
Episcopalian, and that we would not assist him to steal anybody’s
gasoline, or his wife or his silver spoons: and she ended up by
demanding that he go back where he came from immediately: that we
could not compromise ourselves by landing him anywhere in his existing
undress--only Tish called it negligée.
He listened meekly.
“If that’s the way you feel,” he said finally, “of course I’ll drop
back into the water. Drowning’s an easy death. But if during your
excursion you happen to come across a motor-boat containing a girl, I
wish you would tell her that I did the best I could.”
He stood up and began to take off the shawl. Tish poked at him with her
oar.
“Don’t be a young idiot,” she snapped. “We’re not making you walk the
plank. What about the young lady?”
“It’s rather a story,” he said, drawing the shawl around him again and
sitting down. “But the idea is this: when a fellow starts to elope
with a girl, and then funks it, by getting drowned or running out of
gasoline or anything of that sort, and leaves her sitting in a dead
motor-boat in the middle of the night, she’s--she’s apt to be touchy
about it.”
“Lord have mercy!” said Tish. “You were abducting a young woman!”
“Penitentiary offense,” he confirmed coolly.
“When she didn’t want to be eloped with!” I added. I confess I had a
queer thrill up and down my back.
“Well,” he considered, “hardly that. She only thought she didn’t.
She has been told so many times that she mustn’t like me that now she
thinks she doesn’t. Pure power of suggestion. If she hadn’t pitched a
can of gasoline overboard in a temper, we’d have been miles away by
this time,” he finished, with his first suggestion of gloom.
In the darkness I heard Aggie draw a long breath. Aggie is romantic,
having been engaged a long time ago to a young man in the roofing
business, who fell off a roof.
“How you mutht love her!” she said, and one could imagine her clasping
her hands. “And how alarmed _the_ mutht be for you.”
“She said she hoped I would drown,” he said, more cheerfully, “but
that’s only girl’s talk. When she gets over thinking she doesn’t like
me, she’s going to be crazy about me. When a girl hates a fellow, she’s
next door to loving him.”
“‘Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings,’” Tish snorted with scorn,
and just then the dog began to whine again and tried to crawl up into
Aggie’s lap. The young man in the shawl started to say something about
having a minister waiting at Telusah, and stopped suddenly.
“It isn’t raining now,” he said, “and yet this boat is filling. Does
she leak?”
She did: we knew it then. The water that had been sloshing around in
the bottom was almost to the top of our overshoes, and an instant later
Aggie, with a fine disregard of the proprieties, had her feet up on the
thwarts. We are all vague about the next few minutes, but after a great
deal of screeching and tipping of the boat, our young man, with the
shawl belted around him as a petticoat, was in Tish’s seat, rowing like
mad, and we were all bailing like mad with our rubber shoes.
We headed the boat straight for Sunset Island, which was as near as
any place, but in spite of us it kept on getting fuller. And just when
Aggie had lifted her jug into her lap to lighten her end of the boat,
and the water was well above our shoe tops, and climbing, and Tish was
muttering the alphabet under the impression that she was praying, the
boat stopped suddenly and the young man said:
“Why don’t you women bail? What are you doing? Tickling the ribs of the
boat? We’ll never get to shore at this rate!”
Aggie began to sniffle, and the man in the shawl stood up and peered
over the water.
“Lillian!” he shouted. “Wave the lantern! Coo--ee!”
We all heard it. From far down the lake came a distant “coo--ee” that
was not an echo. The shawl man muttered something and lurched where he
stood: the boat tipped, of course, and more water came over the edge.
Aggie began fervently, “For what we are about to receive, O Lord, make
us duly thankful,” when the boat bumped without warning into something.
It was just in time. As I, the last, was hauled into the motor-launch,
the _Witch Hazel_ slid greasily under the surface, to rise no more.
(The loss of the _Witch Hazel_ was deplorable, and later on we sent
Carpenter, anonymously, money to buy a new boat. He has one, which he
calls the _Urticaria_, but the ghost of the _Witch Hazel_ still walks,
a sort of Pond’s Extract in his memory.)
CHAPTER IV
CLEANING FLUID TO THE RESCUE
It was some time before we could realize that eternity had ceased
staring us in the face and had taken a back seat, so to speak. The
first thing Tish said was that, man or no man, her shoes were going to
come off, and while Aggie was wringing alternately her hands and her
petticoats, I happened to notice the Shawl Man. He was standing holding
his garment around him and staring over the dark water ahead.
“You needn’t feel so badly,” I said to him. “We’re only glad Aggie had
the shawl, and now, if you can run the launch, why don’t you hunt up
your own, with the young lady in it?”
“_This_ is the boat!” he said heavily, and, sitting down, he dropped
his chin in his hands.
Well, there was no girl. Dark as it was, we could all see that. Tish
looked up suspiciously from where she was stuffing her wet shoes with
her stockings to keep them in shape.
“I don’t see any clothes either,” she said tartly. “I suspect your lady
friend tied them into a bundle and swam ashore with them in her teeth!”
“I left her there in that chair!” he affirmed. He looked dazed.
“She--she didn’t want to--to go, you know, and she threw the extra
gasoline can overboard. When we stalled there was nothing to do
but swim ashore, borrow a skiff, and steal some gasoline from the
boat-house on one of the islands. I wasn’t going to sit out there in a
dead motor-boat and let her people stand on the bank in the morning and
pot at me with a target rifle.”
“Thirtainly not!” said Aggie, who had shamelessly allied herself with
him.
“Not only that,” he went on defiantly, “but when a man cares for a girl
the way I care for--her, he either carries her off and marries her or
he dies trying.”
“And quite right, I’m thure.” Thus Aggie. She was still clutching her
jug; the dog, the first to be saved, had sniffed the cork, got a whiff
of the ether, and retired with a moan to the corner.
“If she tried to swim to shore,” began the Shawl Man, and groaned. But
Aggie had forgotten her lisp in her rôle of comforter.
“Nonthenth!” she said. “Probably Mithther Carleton came along with hith
motor canoe and took her home. He’th alwayth mooning around the lake
late at night.”
The Shawl Man jumped to his feet and the boat rocked.
“Denby Carleton!” he said. “Hell!”
Then he went to pieces. As Tish wrote to her niece, Martha Ann Lee,
afterward, “his composure went to pieces on the rocks of adversity,
and sank in a sea of woe.” He raged up and down the launch, muttering
strange and awful things, and every now and then he stooped over the
engine in the middle of the boat and gritted his teeth and turned
something. And the engine would draw a quick breath and turn over
on its other side and settle down to sleep again. And then, when he
finally gave up, he declared he was going to swim after the canoe and
kill Carleton for stealing the girl and throwing his clothes overboard.
(Yes, we found a soft hat floating, and the rest were gone.)
He stood up on the front peak of the launch and began to untie the
shawl, but Tish pulled him back and told him if the girl wanted Mr.
Carleton instead of him he was well rid of her. And she asked him his
name. This brought him around a little. He said, “Mansfield, Donald
Mansfield,” and stalked back and sat down in the stern squarely on the
dog.
“Keep away from that dog!” Aggie exclaimed. “He hath mange.”
“Fleas!” Tish snapped.
“Mange!” said Aggie.
“Upon my word, Aggie Pilkington,” Tish sniffed, “if the creature has
mange, why on earth are you still hugging that jar of gasoline?”
Then, of course, the Shawl Man, who shall be Mansfield now, gave a
whoop and seized the jug.
“Ith cleaning fluid,” Aggie protested. “Thereth ether and alcohol--”
“Never mind what’s in it,” he said excitedly. “I know this engine.
It’ll run on the gas out of a bottle of Apollinaris.” And while he
poured the stuff into the tank he explained his plan. If the engine ran
on the mixture, and didn’t get something that he called a “bun on,”
we could get back to Sunset Island, which I gathered belonged to the
girl’s father, get into somebody’s boat-house (preferably the father’s)
and obtain some gasoline. Also, he would try to find some clothes. It
shows how thoroughly demoralized we were that not one of us objected
to his stealing anything he needed, and that Tish asked him to bring
her a blanket if he happened on one!
The engine would not start at once. And after he had explained that
he had only one hand to crank with, having to hold on the shawl with
the other, we turned our backs, and almost immediately there was an
explosion. The boat jumped out of the water and dropped back with a
thud. I could not scream. Then there came a series of reports, and