The amazing adventures of Letitia Carberry
been a bit raw about it, it’s because the thing seemed so clear to me.
Give me your hand.”
“I shall not get into the launch,” the girl said haughtily.
“Your hand.”
“Confound you, Mansfield, can’t you see she hates you?” This was
Carleton, of course.
“The girlth a fool,” Aggie muttered angrily, behind me. In the instant
that I turned my head, something happened--I don’t know just what. For
the girl was alone in the canoe, we were alone in the launch, and just
below me the water was boiling into white spray. Now and then an arm
shot into the air, or a leg, and occasionally, not often, both heads
were above water at the same time. And it was then that Aggie, the
president of the Civic Club and corresponding secretary of the Working
Girls’ Home, with her draggled skirts pinned up above her bare feet,
stood up suddenly and banged Mr. Carleton on the head with what was
left of her oar!
But if that was amazing, the most surprising thing followed. The Girl
stood up in the canoe and--
“Oh, you’ve killed him!” she screeched. “Oh, Don! Don!” _Donald being
the Mansfield man!_
Then, of course, the canoe turned over, and the rest of what she was
saying ended in a gurgle.
CHAPTER VI
“I WILL GO WITH YOU”
We got them all into the launch finally, for there was only five feet of
water, which explained much that we had not understood about the fight,
and they were as disconsolate looking a lot of lovers as I ever wish
to see. Mr. Carleton sat in the stern and held his head, which Aggie’s
oar had almost broken, and the girl dripped and shivered in a corner by
herself and stared at the Mansfield man, who was coaxing Tish for one
of her petticoats so he could give the girl his shawl.
Aggie was for trying to explain to the girl how we came to be there
at all, and without our shoes at that. But it was such a long story,
beginning with the dog that had fleas (“mange,” says Aggie) and
extending through robbery to attempted murder (“I only meant to stun
him,” says Aggie), that I advised her not to begin it.
The launch would not start after all, and it developed that the
propeller shaft was choked with weeds. This meant that the Mansfield
man must crawl overboard, get on his back under the launch (which
is much more unpleasant, I should think, than getting under an
automobile), and clear off the shaft. And while he was holding his
breath under the boat, and while Tish had turned her back on everybody
and with the aid of the lantern was trying to take a splinter out of
the sole of her foot, the Carleton man got up dizzily and went over to
the girl.
“Surely, Lillian,” he said, steadying himself by the awning frame,
“you--you don’t intend to let that--”
“Please go away,” she said. “I don’t want to talk. How funny you look
with that bandage around your head.” And then, to me (she had accepted
the presence of three bare-footed maiden ladies in the launch without
comment): “Oh, do you think he might be caught in the weeds and--and
_drown_?”
But he did not drown. He came magnificently over the edge of the boat
in a few minutes, with a string of green water-weeds clinging to his
head. Aggie, who, as you have seen, is romantic, muttered something
about “grape leaves in his hair,” which she said afterward was Ibsen,
although the only use I have ever known for grape leaves was to wrap
pats of butter in, in the country.
He turned the launch around and we started for home. I do not recall
that any one spoke on the way back, except Tish, who asked me if I had
any castor oil at the house: she wanted it to soften her shoes if they
dried stiff. The Girl sat by herself and watched the big fellow in
the shawl-toga. And once or twice, when he glanced up and saw her, he
smiled over at her, but he did not go near her or speak to her.
It was pale dawn when we stopped at the dock of the Watermelon Camp.
We, who had been sodden shadows in the night, were now damp and
shivering outlines. Mr. Mansfield, having given the girl the shawl,
drew around him still closer the awning curtain with which he had
draped himself, and Aggie, still clutching the oar, held up one hand in
the gray light to hide the deficiencies of her mouth. No one stirred in
the camp.
Mr. Carleton got up stiffly and glanced around at all of us. Then
he stalked over to the man at the wheel, who was staring ahead and
whistling under his breath.
“Will you give me your word to take her home?” he said.
“Ask her if she _wants_ to go home.” He threw this over his shoulder,
between whistles, as it were. Then the girl, looking very pretty, but
slim and slinky in her wet things, went over to the Mansfield man and
put her hand on his shoulder.
“I--I think I will go with you, Don!” she said. And that practically
ends the story.
We left Mr. Carleton on the dock, staring after us through the mist,
and we all went back to the cottage and put the girl to bed. We gave
Mr. Mansfield a pillow by the sitting-room wood fire, and _Tish’s
green kimono_ to sleep in. And after that we all three took a mustard
foot-bath and some camphor sprinkled on sugar and went to bed.
Aggie wakened me at nine o’clock the next morning by hunting in my
bureau for her second best teeth, and it was then that we found our
lovers had gone. In the girl’s room there was a letter of thanks. She
said she did not wish to disturb us after that awful night, but that
she could not sleep, and that she and Mr. Mansfield were going down to
Telusah to be married.
Tish read the letter aloud and stared at us, while Paulina whined for
her breakfast.
“Upon my soul,” Tish gasped, when she could speak. “Instead of clapping
him into jail, she’s going to marry him!”
“Do you thuppoth he went to Telutha in that kimono?” Aggie said in a
husky whisper. She had taken a terrible cold.
But Mr. Mansfield did not go to Telusah in Tish’s kimono.
After all, the beginning of this story is also the end. For now you
can understand why Tish dropped the bowl when the young man brought
her kimono back from the Watermelon Camp and asked for Mr. Carleton’s
trousers!
I have told the story in defense of Tish and the rest of us. I wish to
brand as false the story told by the man from the hotel who happened to
be fishing for muskalunge early that morning. He said, you remember,
that he saw Miss Carberry _in her green kimono_ leave our cottage just
after dawn and go stealthily along the beach through the mist to the
Watermelon Camp. When she got there, he said, to his horror he saw her
strip off the green kimono and hang it to a tree. Just then the mist
shut down and he saw nothing more.
In his anxiety for Miss Carberry’s sanity he was on the point of
landing to investigate, when he hooked the largest ’lunge of the season
(registered weight at the hatcheries, thirty-seven pounds four ounces),
and when he looked again at the shore all he saw was a red-haired man
hurrying along the beach in a pair of corduroy trousers and a bathing
shirt!
Tish closed the incident with one comment.
“Young millionaire!” she snapped when she saw the newspapers. “Young
scamp, _I_ say, stealing poor Mr. Carleton’s sweetheart and then his
trousers. As for my green kimono, after all we did for him, he might at
least have had the grace to roll it up and stick it under a barrel. I
shall burn it.”
But she did not. Aggie saw it only the other day, put away in
a lavender silk sachet, with a bundle of newspaper clippings, a
half-eaten bath sponge, and a particular kind of bass hook, which we
had found on the sitting-room floor.
THE END
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.