The amazing adventures of Letitia Carberry
I sat waiting for the floor to separate and drop me into sixty feet
of water and mud and crawly things with the family burial lot full,
provided my body was ever found, unless they moved Cousin James beside
his first wife, where he ought to be anyhow. And then I realized that
we were moving.
We did not float. We got to shore by a distinct species of leaps; once
or twice I am quite sure we left the surface of the lake. If that stuff
had ever been put on the dog, the fleas would have killed themselves
jumping. And all the time there was a combination of odors that as Tish
said afterward reminded one individually of burnt brandy sauce and an
operating room, and collectively of something that has died in the
alley. And whenever we stopped Mr. Mansfield would do something that he
called “spinner again.”
When we got near enough to shore we could see that the big white Lovell
house was lighted up, late as it was, and there were people on the boat
dock with lanterns. Mr. Mansfield saw it too, and changed the course of
the launch, so we stopped at a smaller landing, half a mile or so down
the beach, and tied up there.
“You are perfectly safe here,” he said, “and I’ll be back in ten
minutes. The only way Major Lovell could recognize this boat in the
dark would be by the sound of the engine, and if he heard this racket
he’ll take us for a battle in a moving picture show. Just sit tight and
keep warm.”
He threw the shawl to us and dived into the darkness. Somebody
was shouting at the Lovell dock, but we sat in safe obscurity and
listened to the wash of the water against the piles. The absurdity of
the situation began to dawn on me, and the sight of Tish and Aggie,
luminous in the starlight--it had stopped raining--trying to get into
their wet shoes, made me fairly hysterical. To add to it all, the
patter of Mr. Mansfield’s bare feet on the boards of the dock waked our
sleeping dog, and with a series of staccato barks he was at our unlucky
young man’s heels. He seemed to have a fondness for feet.
“If you could see yourself, Lizzie, I might understand your mirth,”
Tish said scathingly. “But I fail to see anything funny.”
“Then for goodness sake, Tish,” I cried, “stop dangling that shoe on
your toe and see what is the matter with your figure. It has slipped up
under your chin.”
“Good heaventh!” said Aggie. “They are coming down the beach after uth!”
It was true. The lanterns had left the Lovell dock and were bobbing
wildly along the waterfront in our direction, guided by the barking
of the dog. Of all the hours of that awful night, that was the most
terrible. We sat there shivering and helpless and watched Nemesis
chasing and bobbing down on us. About half way to us the first lantern
stopped and fired a gun, and back along the beach new lanterns kept
adding themselves to the line that stretched out like the tail of a
comet.
Tish thought she was very cool, but both Aggie and I distinctly heard
her say that the stars had stopped raining. And once she said that she
had always been a respected member of the community, and that nobody in
his sober senses would believe her if she told the true story. And when
the first lantern was so close that we could see a vague outline of
the man behind it, desperation gave me a courage that has appalled me
since.
I went over to the engine and tried to “spinner.”
What is more to the point, I did it. The wheels began to revolve with
a sickening speed: the whole frame of the boat jarred and quivered. I
sank back on my knees and closed my eyes.
“We’re not moving,” Tish said with awful calmness.
And at that a white figure hurled itself from the darkness at the end
of the landing and flew down the dock to us. It had a can in one hand
and a lantern in the other. It hesitated a second to throw off the
rope, which was why we hadn’t moved, of course, and, as the engine was
going full, he had only time to catch one of the awning supports as it
flew past. It went as if it had been shot out of a gun, and when Aggie
and Tish and I had assorted ourselves from a heap on the floor, we
were well out from shore.
It was lucky that Aggie took one of her awful sneezing spells just
then, as she always does when she is excited, for by the time she was
breathing easily again the shore was well behind and Mr. Mansfield had
put on the shawl again.
CHAPTER V
THE CAVE-MAN AND HIS WOMAN
It is a little difficult, looking back, to explain our state of mind
that night. It was only our second taste of romance--Aggie’s roofer
being too far back to count. Now, with six months of perspective, I
think we were intoxicated with adventure to the point of abandon. For
when Mr. Mansfield offered to take us home, before starting on his
pursuit of the motor canoe, we refused to go. As Tish said:
“No doubt when you do overtake them, Mr. Mansfield, the young woman
will feel the need of some of her own sex, women of--er--maturity and
experience, to advise her. I consider it our duty to go.”
“Oh, leth go!” said Aggie. “Mr. Carletonth a large man. Do you think
you will have to fight him for your lady?” Aggie’s tone was cheerfully
bloodthirsty, and she clutched the end of the broken oar like a club.
Aggie, the apostle of peace!
“Frankly, I should like to see the end of the affair myself,” I
admitted. “I should like to see the young lady’s face when she finds
you eloping with three maiden ladies, and--I am curious to know how
your cave-man theory works out.”
He was working over the engine, and we were headed down the lake. While
I was speaking he moved to the other side of the launch, and it tilted
villainously. He loomed very large in the darkness, and the strength of
his bare arms and heavy chest, his sinewy legs, made him not unlike his
prototype.
He did not answer me at once. He had found some cigarettes in the boat,
and he lighted one. Only when it was well aglow did he show that he had
heard me.
“The original cave-man was no fool,” he observed, calmly looking ahead.
“A man doesn’t carry a woman off unless he’s crazy about her, in the
first place. If he’s got sufficient force of character to dare her
daddy’s stone club--jail, in this case--and enough physical strength to
hold her to him with one arm and fight off pursuit and rivals with the
other, it--well, it doesn’t matter much what the girl thinks of him in
the beginning: she’ll die for him, in the end.”
Aggie positively thrilled in the darkness beside me, and even Tish was
silenced by the vision of this masculine point of view. As for me, just
at that instant I quite agreed with the young savage!
“Ith--ith the very pretty?” Aggie ventured, after swallowing hard.
“I don’t know,” he said indifferently, straining his eyes ahead.
“Oh--yes, I suppose she is. I never thought about it. I haven’t thought
of anybody else--_anything_ else, for the week I’ve known her.”
“The week!” we all repeated faintly.
“When her groom lifts her off her horse, I want to kill him. If that
ass Carleton gets her to Telusah first and marries her, I’ll take her
from him. She’s my woman.”
Tish stood right up in the boat and pointed her finger at him. “You
d-don’t know what you are talking about,” she stuttered. “How--how dare
you speak of taking a married woman from her husband!”
“Figs!” he said disrespectfully. “In the first place, if the engine
holds out, we’ll run them down at least a mile from Telusah, and in
the second place, while I judge you are talking by the book and not by
experience--a few words said over a man and a woman don’t make them
husband and wife. It gives the woman the man’s name, but--the man don’t
necessarily get the woman. Mine--or nobody’s,” he added under his
breath.
Tish collapsed into her chair. I admit I felt queer all over, and
Aggie’s heart had fluttered back to the thin young man with the
curled-up mustache and a dimple in his chin, who had fallen off a roof.
“Mister Wigginth usthed to talk exactly that way!” she said softly.
That is the way we went down toward Telusah: the prehistoric gentleman
in the bow steering and watching the engine, now and then stopping
it dead to listen for the throb of the motor canoe ahead. Aggie
twitteringly in the past, with her bare feet tucked under her for
warmth and the broken oar in her lap. Tish blazing with indignation and
excitement, and I saved by my sense of humor from going into violent
hysteria and embracing the hot-headed, mad, ridiculous and altogether
satisfactory young animal at the wheel. I merely said:
“I wish somebody had wooed me like that thirty years ago. I wouldn’t be
earning my own living, young man.”
“That’s what she wants to do--stay single and work for a livelihood,”
he said with disgust. “I told her it was all fool nonsense; that the
place for her kind of woman was in some man’s home--”
“Cave,” I suggested.
“Bearing his children--”
“Silence!” Tish shouted, and even Aggie was roused out of a dream.
He shut down the engine just then, and we all heard it: a faint
throbbing that one felt in the ears, rather than heard. He leaped up on
the peak of the boat and stared into the darkness ahead.
“Better than I expected,” he said with suppressed excitement. “They’re
not a mile ahead. I wish I had a stick of some sort: I may have to
knock that chump on the head.”
Luckily he did not see Aggie’s oar, and to his everlasting honor be it
said, he went dauntlessly into the battle with his bare hands. “And
bare arms and legs,” Tish ironically suggests that I add.
For battle it was.
We overtook the canoe somewhere about Long Point, and our lantern
showed two people, as we expected. It was Mr. Carleton, who evidently
hadn’t dressed to elope, and who wore the shirt of a bathing suit and a
pair of corduroy trousers, and the Girl. She was in a white party frock
of some sort. She stopped paddling and stared up at us defiantly as we
must have loomed black behind our lantern. She was very pretty, and she
had two triangular red spots in her cheeks. Our gentleman pulled the
shawl around him and stepped on the thwarts, and even at that distance
we could see the angry fear in the girl’s eyes.
“Lillian,” Mr. Mansfield said cheerfully, “I am not going to do that
puppy with you the honor of asking you to choose between us. I give you
your choice--either get into the launch comfortably, or stay where you
are--in which case I shall run you down and pick you out of the water.”
“You coward!” said Mr. Carleton from the stern of the canoe. “You can’t
try your high-handed methods with me. Run us down if you like. It’s
a penitentiary offense to kidnap a girl and marry her.”
“Oh, piffle!” said Mr. Mansfield rudely. “I suppose you didn’t intend
to marry her yourself at Telusah!”
“I intended to return her to her parents in safety, by way of the
trolley,” retorted Carleton stiffly.
The Mansfield man threw back his head and laughed.
“Did you hear that, Lillian?” he called. “That’s love for you! Why, the
idiot didn’t even intend to marry you! He was going to take you home to
your people!” He laughed again in pure delight.
But the girl had plenty of spirit.
“I don’t intend to be married at all,” she flared at him. “Certainly
not to you, Donald Mansfield. Run us down if you like. I would rather
die than marry you.”
“You hear what she says,” said Carleton, from the darkness. “If you
are a gentleman you will take your boat and your ruffianly accomplices
back to where you came from--or to hell, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Ruffian yourself,” Tish said furiously, but I pulled her down. There
was silence, then--
“Lillian,” Mr. Mansfield said very gently, “‘Lady’ Carleton is right.
If it’s as bad as that I’ll take you home. I had a sort of fool idea
that you would know it was inevitable--that you were my woman. If I’ve