The amazing adventures of Letitia CarberryMary Roberts Rinehart, Bobbs-Merrill Company, Braunworth & Co • X ， ! ----- re- - - s a sº- - - ==== *** * * * - - * 2. ** = - - * === - TII, NEW YORK I ſº III; ARY Asº tºº. 1. . . Tillº. Fol N1 --- * > | -- L ----- --- | ; -- The AMAZING ADVENTURES OF LETITIA CARBERRY By MARY ROBERTS RINEHART Author of When A Man marries the circular staircase the Man in Lower ten the WINDow AT THE WHITE CAT, Etc. ILLUSTRATIONS BY HOWARD CHANDLER CHRISTY InDIANAPOLIS The BOBBS-MeRRILL COMPANY PUBLIshers THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF LETITIA CARBERRY - I A G O 3 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF LETITIA CARBERRY CHAPTER I WHAT HAPPENED TO Johnson TRICTLY speaking, this is Tish's story, S but Tish is unable to write it, being laid up, as you probably know from the newspa- pers. But we all three felt that a record of the affair ought to be kept while it was fresh in our minds, although goodness knows we're not likely to forget any of it. A good many people wondered, when the story came out, how Tish had come to be mixed up with it at all, but as Tish herself says, it was very simple. The people at the hospital had become de- moralized, and some firm hand had to take I THE AMAZING ADVENTURES hold. Besides, Tish was a member of the Ladies' Committee, and felt responsible. Tish says the first thing she knew about it was a piercing scream, just outside her room. This was followed by a number of short, sharp cries, feminine, and steps running past her bed- room door. Now, as Tish also remarks with truth, one hears a variety of strange sounds in a hospital at night, and at first she thought it was the woman across the hall, who had had her appendix removed that afternoon, and who had been very unpleasant as a neighbor all evening. But when the noise kept up, and only died away to be followed by somebody crying hysterically down the hall, Tish was roused. She sat up in bed and threw her small traveling clock at Miss Lewis. (Miss Lewis was Tish's nurse, a splendid woman, but a heavy sleeper. She slept on a cot in the room, and until Tish learned that it did not hurt the clock to throw it, she had been obliged to ring for one of the night 2 OF LETITIA CARBERRY nurses to come in and waken her. So now she threw the clock.) Miss Lewis picked the clock from off her chest and sat up, yawning, to look at it. “Twenty minutes after one, Miss Carberry,” she said. “Would you like some buttermilk?” Now Tish was not really ill. She was tak- ing a rest cure last autumn while her apart- ment was being painted and papered, and while she recovered from a twisted knee. She'd bought a second-hand automobile some months before, and learned to run it herself, and the knee was the result of her being thrown out over the steering wheel and ten feet beyond the potato wagon she had collided with. Al- though, as Tish says, it is a strange thing that her knee was twisted, when she brought up standing on her head in three inches of muddy water and a family of tadpoles. Both Aggie and I went to see her daily, the three of us being old friends, although not related, and she was always glad to see us, al- 3 * , THE AMAZING ADVENTURES though she grew sarcastic when Aggie cas- ually remarked that except for the meeting of the anti-vivisection society, we might also have been flung over the potato wagon. Well— “Would you like some buttermilk?” asked Miss Lewis again, beginning to draw on her kimono. Tish says that provoked her and she reached for the clock again, but of course Miss Lewis had it in her hand. “No,” she snapped. “Go out in the hall and see what has happened.” Miss Lewis yawned again and groped around in the half light for her slippers. It was more than Tish could stand. She hopped out of bed in her bare feet and limped to the door. The hall was almost dark and across it the woman with the appendix—or without—was groaning. But half way along, where the night nurse has her desk and keeps her papers and where the annunciator for the patients’ bells is fastened to the wall, Tish saw a group 4. OF LETITIA CARBERRY of five or six nurses, gathered about somebody in a chair. One of them came running past with a glass of something, and the crowd opened to admit the girl and the glass and closed again. Miss Lewis came and looked over Tish's shoulder. “Gee!” she said, and ran down the hall with her slippers flapping and her braid switching from side to side. Just then the woman across gave another groan, and it being dark and the scream still echoing in her ears, Tish reached inside the door for her cane and hobbled out in her nightgown. The girl in the chair, she said, was as white as milk, and her lips were blue. She was half- lying, with her head against the back of the chair, and a violent shudder now and then was the only sign of life about her. One of the other nurses was stroking her hands and talk- ing to her in a soothing tone. “Now listen, Miss Blake,” she said. “It couldn't be. We all have these queer feelings 5 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES here. It's the nervous strain and loss of sleep. I'll never forget the first time I had to do it.” “Nor I,” said another girl, “I went with you. Do you remember? It was that dwarf that died in J. We'd forgotten something, and you had to go and leave me alone.” “Hush!” another nurse broke in, and Miss Blake began to shudder again. “If we had some hot coffee for her—will you drink some coffee if we make it, Miss Blake?” The girl in the chair shook her head and Miss Lewis dragged one of the nurses from the group and whispered to her. Tish heard part of the answer. “Went up with Linda Smith and as usual Linda forgot something—she's been over- working; went to raise the window for fresh air—she says she heard a sound, but didn't notice it—when she turned around”—then more whispering that Tish couldn't catch. “No!” Miss Lewis said, and looked queer herself. “Then, if it's true, it is still—?” 6 - -j-. rººm ├─────────────*** --~~~~******------- ---- |-• ·*---- * what's more—” She stopped and glanced at Tommy. “I’d like to speak to you a moment in the hall, Doctor.” “What sort of shilly-shallying is that?” de- manded Tish. “Can't you speak to him here?” “I can not,” said Miss Lewis, glaring back at Tish, her thumbs inside her apron belt. “It isn't considered shilly-shallying in this hospital for a nurse to make a report to a doctor, and if you'll read the rules on that door—” “I’ll speak to you in the hall,” said Tommy. “Miss Lewis is right, Aunt Tish. If it's in line with what we've been discussing, I'll tell you.” IO3 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES But Tish isn't a woman to take chances. Afterward, she justified her looking through the keyhole on the plea that she was making a scientific theory to fit the case, and if it were not for keyholes many a murderer would have gone unhung to his grave. At the time, how- ever, I was rather horrified. She had plenty of time to tell me what she saw, as it happened, for Tommy did not come back until late in the afternoon, after the guinea-pig incident. Tish says that when she'd got them in focus, as you may say, Miss Lewis was pulling some- thing out of her sleeve. It was a knife, Tish says, with a short, thin blade that looked as sharp as a razor. “One of the knives from the operating room, Doctor,” Miss Lewis said. “I thought I'd bet- ter not let the old ladies see it.” I daresay that was when I saw Tish's back stiffen. “Great Scott!” said Tommy. IO4 OF LETITIA CARBERRY “I found it on the floor under her bed,” Miss Lewis went on. “She didn't see me pick it up. Tommy was staring at the blade. “It's been used,” he said. “Look at this!” “Exactly,” said Miss Lewis. “It's from the operating room, Doctor, and they don't put away their knives in that condition.” “What do you mean by that?” Tommy de- manded sharply. But Miss Lewis only looked at him. “I don't mean anything against Ruth Blake, if that's what you are indignant about,” she said. “But I'm glad I found that knife. There's enough talk, Doctor.” They moved down the hall then, so that was all Tish heard. But she added, “Knife, blood- stained,” to her sheet of paper. Aggie being half drowsy and altogether sulky, we took a little time to go over the notes Tish had made, and they pointed as many dif- ferent ways as a porcupine—Johnson, with his IOS THE AMAZING ADVENTURES raps and his talk about coming back, taken from the mortuary and hung by his neck with a roller towel marked S. P. T.; the coincidence of Johnson's wife murdered a few years before and hung up the same way; Miss Blake wan- dering around at night with a brass candlestick and a blood-stained knife from the operating room, and Tommy Andrews falling or being pushed through a skylight and coming out of the excitement with a bite instead of a fracture! And then there were smaller things, though strange enough—the twisted pipe-molding and the footprints on the wall up-stairs in the room where Johnson's body was found; the loosened molding in Aggie's room and her story about the foot; the fact that Johnson was left to die in the care of a convalescent typhoid and the ward left alone for fifty-five minutes; Linda Smith and her speech to Miss Blake, not to mention the darkish bundle. It was Tish who advanced the gigantic ape theory. She'd been reading The Murders in IO6 OF LETITIA CARBERRY the Rue Morgue, and some of the clues seemed to fit, especially Tommy's shoulder. The loos- ened molding helped out the theory, and as Tish said, also the stringing up of Johnson's body, which, if you left out the supernatural, had apparently been done by something tre- mendously strong, but without intelligence. Well, the more we thought of it the more certain we felt. The footprint part of it, too, we considered corroborative evidence, until we got the encyclopedia and learned that the great apes have the equivalent of four hands, and not a foot at all. But Tish was undaunted. “Mark my words, Lizzie,” she said, “they've lost a chimpanzee or a gorilla from the Zoological Garden—not that they'll acknowledge it. You remember when the lion got loose and ate a colored woman out the Ralston road, and how the papers denied everything until they found the beast dead of indigestion in a cellar? But that is what has happened.” Io.7 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES Well, I thought it likely enough myself, and Tish called up Charlie Sands, who is on a newspaper and is another of Tish's nephews. “Lizzie and I,” said Tish over the 'phone, “have reason to believe that there is a great ape—a-p-e—ape! Monkey, monkey—yes. A large monkey loose, and we want you to trace it.” There was a long pause. Tish said after- ward that Charlie claimed to have fainted at the other end of the wire, and to have had to be restored with whisky and soda. However, which is more to the point, he promised to find out for us what he could, and Tish hung up the receiver. “He'll do it, too, Lizzie,” she said, “although he spoke to me gently, as if he thought my reason had entirely gone. But, as he said, it won't hurt to scare up the Zoo people anyhow. They're very casual about their animals.” Now, two things were discovered that after- noon, neither of them to be explained by any- Io& OF LETITIA CARBERRY thing we knew. The first one was that Tommy Andrews and Mr. Harrison, the su- perintendent, making a careful examination of the roof, found a spattering of dried blood leading from the broken skylight to the ridge pole, where it ceased abruptly. The second one was made by Aggie and myself. About three o'clock that afternoon Aggie got into her clothes and insisted on coming into Tish's room, which was inconvenient, Tish expecting the message from Charlie Sands at any moment. Aggie was nervous, but her head was clearer. She'd been thinking things over, and she knew now that what had hap- pened the night before had been a message from the roofer. “Then the least said about it the better!” Tish snapped. “If he hasn't any better sense than to materialize his foot, and you a woman of your years and respectability, he'd better go back where he came from.” “For heaven's sake, Tish,” Aggie pleaded, Io9 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES looking over her shoulder. “He may be listen- ing to us now !” “I don't care if he is,” said Tish recklessly. “If he'd materialize a will, now, leaving you that house in Groveton | But a foot!” “I’m not so sure it was a foot,” Aggie said restlessly. “I’ve been thinking, Tish—he was a large man, you know. It may have been a hand.” Now at that moment the telephone bell rang, and Tish signaled to me to take Aggie out at once. I got up and took her by the arm. “I’ll walk up and down the corridor with you, Aggie,” I said. “You need exercise.” “I don't care to walk,” she objected, trying to sit down. “See who is at the telephone, Tish. I expect my laundress is through wash- ing and wants her money.” “I’d like you to see the hospital,” I said des- perately as the 'phone rang again. “The-the guinea-pigs, Aggie.” Miss Lewis had told me about them. I IO OF LETITIA CARBERRY Now, Aggie loves a guinea-pig. It's a queer taste, but she says they neither bark like dogs nor scratch like cats, and they have a nice way of wiggling their noses. “Guinea-pigs!” she said in an ecstacy. “Where?” “In the laboratory,” said I, and led her out of the room. She put on all her wraps and Miss Lewis took us to the laboratory, which is a small brick building set off by itself in the hospital yard, with Aggie cooing in anticipation and wanting to send out and buy a cabbage for them. Doctor Grim, who was the surgical in- terne, met us as we were crossing the yard, and volunteered to let us in. “You know,” he said, feeling in his pocket for the keys, “they're not attractive as some guinea-pigs and rabbits I have known under happier circumstances. They scratch a good bit—some think it's fleas; some say it's germs.” “Germs?” Aggie asked, puzzled. III THE AMAZING ADVENTURES “Oh, yes,” he said, opening the door and leading the way into a narrow hall. “Some of them have been inoculated with several differ- ent kinds of germs. That's why we keep this place so well locked up, for fear the germs may escape. You know,”—he unlocked the second door and threw it open, “you know, suppose you were walking up the street and met a solid phalanx of say sixteen billion typhoid germs, or measles! It would be horrible, wouldn't it?” He stepped into the room and looked about him. “Come in,” he said. “It’s a little close. We had a tear-up among the resident staff, and no- body has been here to-day. Hello!” He threw open the shutters, and a broad shaft of gray daylight lighted the room. Aggie gave a cry of dismay. The doors of the small cages around the walls were all open, and in the center, a pathetic heap of little brown-and- white and black-and-white bodies, lay the guinea-pigs. II2 OF LETITIA CARBERRY Doctor Grim picked one up and examined it closely. “I’m damned" he said, and put it down. “Throats cut, every one of them! And where are the rabbits?” Aggie sat down and began to blubber, but Miss Lewis scolded her soundly. “There'll be plenty more where they came from,” she said sharply. “What does concern us is—how would anybody or anything get in here with both doors and all the windows locked, and not a chimney.” Aggie wiped her eyes and got up. “You laughed at me last night, Miss Lewis,” she said with dignity, “but I wish to remind you that to the fourth dimension there are no locks, no bars, no doors or walls.” “When they invent that,” said Miss Lewis, opening the door to let us out, “they'll have to invent something like these X-ray-proof screens, or a woman won't dare to change her clothes.” II3 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES “And what's more,” said Aggie, turning in the doorway, “the hand that slew those inno- cent little creatures is the one I touched last night!” “Hand!” cried Miss Lewis. “It was a foot then.” But Aggie was holding her shoulder over her face and hurrying across the yard. At the far side she threw back a contemptuous sneeze. Tish's commission to Charlie Sands had an unexpected result. She was almost bursting with it when I got back. “Listen,” she said while Aggie got her spray, “doesn't this bear out what I've been saying right along? The Zoo people say positively that none of their animals has escaped. But they took such an interest in his inquiry that Charlie grew suspicious and bribed a keeper. He sent this up by messenger from the office: x * > “‘Dear and revered spinster aunt,’” she read—“the young rascal! “I couldn't tell you II.4 OF LETITIA CARBERRY this over the 'phone, for it's our exclusive property, and will be published to-morrow morning, with photographs of the late de- ceased, etc. Hero, the biggest ape in captivity, pining for his keeper, Wesley Barker, who has been away, committed suicide in his cage last night by hanging himself with a roller towel. He was found dead when the assistant keeper unlocked the cage at six o'clock this morning. Nobody knows how he got the roller towel. Charlie.” “‘P. S.—I’ve got the roller towel, a fine long one and marked S. P. T. Do you think the letters stand for Suicidal Purpose Towel?’” Tish looked at me triumphantly over her reading-glasses. “You see, Lizzie, what a little logical think- ing will do. If it hadn't been for me, you and Aggie would have gone to your graves expect- ing to be able to come back at any time and hang from chandeliers or do any of the ridicu- lous buffoonery that seems to be expected of II5 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES returned spirits. We search for a ghost and we find a gorilla.” She meant ape, of course, but the other was alliterative. “I’m not quite clear about it yet, Tish,” I said, with my head in a whirl. “If his cage was locked, and the keepers say he hadn't been free, and if Miss Blake—” “If If I’” said Tish impatiently. “I haven't had time to figure it all out, of course. But mark my words, Lizzie, the mystery is solved. We shall sleep to-night.” But, as a matter of fact, we never even went to bed. .* CHAPTER XI IF IT HAD NOT BEEN FOR LOVE T is curious to think that if Tish had been I able to finish her story to Tommy An- drews that evening, and to have given him Charlie's letter to read, the thing that occurred that night could scarcely have happened. For with Tommy knowing what he did, he could have put two and two together and have gone about things in a different way. Aggie, of course, is a fatalist, and believes it would have happened anyhow. In the first place, Tish felt so sure that everything was cleared up that she told Aggie the whole story, ending with the suicide at the Zoo. Aggie sat with her mouth open, and didn't speak except to sneeze until Tish was through. Then she surprised us. 117 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES “Maybe you are right, Tish,” she said. “I know I hope so. I don't know much about gorillas, but I guess they're mostly hairy, aren't they?” “Mostly,” said Tish grimly. “I haven't heard of any Mexican hairless ones.” “Well, the hand by my bed—you needn't sneer, Tish; you can call it a foot if you prefer foot—” “Listen to the woman!” cried Tish. “I haven't called it anything.” “The hand—or foot—was not hairy!” said Aggie, and stuck to it. She is that kind. Tish says she has a small mind, but I think there are some large minds that can only hold one idea at a time. Well, we told the whole thing again to Tommy, who had heard about the guinea-pigs from Doctor Grim, and who listened gravely, and Tish was just getting out Charlie's letter to read to him, when Miss Lewis came in. “Drat that woman'' Tish muttered. “She's II8 OF LETITIA CARBERRY never around when she's wanted, and always butting in when she isn't. Well, what is it?” “Miss Blake is better, Doctor,” she said. “She is sitting up, dressed, and—she's leaving her door unlocked. That's a good sign.” “Thanks, very much,” said Tommy, looking conscious. “It's supper hour now,” remarked Miss Lewis. “If, when I come back, you would care to go over to the dormitory—” “I suppose she hasn't asked for me?” “No. But she asked if you were in the house.” “Thanks,” said Tommy again. “When you come back, then. Ah—thanks, very much.” Miss Lewis left and Tish spread out Char- lie's letter. “Dear and revered spinster aunt,” she began. But Tommy was looking at his watch. “How long does she usually take for sup- per?” he asked. “Excuse me for interrupting, Aunt Tish.” II9 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES “About an hour,” said Tish grimly. “She says she's been ordered to chew her food thor- oughly. “Dear and revered—’” “You know,” said Tommy, “she may get tired and go to sleep, or something like that.” “Not while she's eating,” said Tish. “I mean Miss Blake. I—I think I'll just run over for a moment now, if you don't mind.” “Not alone!” Tish got up and reached for her cane, but Tommy pushed her back in her chair. “No, indeed, dear Aunt Tish,” he said. “You must not use that knee. Nor Miss Ag- gie either—” “Aggie has no intention of using my knee,” said Tish crossly. Tommy was sending me messages with his eyes. I'm notoriously weak as to love affairs. “I’ll go,” I volunteered, obeying Tommy's signals, and go I did, leaving Tish clutching her cane with one hand and the letter with the I2O OF LETITIA CARBERRY other! Aggie was, as usual, oblivious and quite calm. It was my suggestion that I play propriety from just outside the door. Tommy went in, and I heard a rustle from the window, as if she had turned to look at him. “I—my aunt is just outside,” he began, hesi- tating. I am not his aunt, as I have said. “Won't you ask her in?” She had a low, sweet voice. “Certainly, if you wish,” he said, and made no move to do it. “You dismissed me to-day,” he accused her. “I didn't need a doctor.” “I need not have come professionally. I am here now only—well, because I couldn't stay away.” She said nothing to that, as far as I could hear. “I came also,” he said, “to ask you not to stay here alone to-night.” “What do you mean?” she asked sharply. I2 I THE AMAZING ADVENTURES “Only that you might do the same thing again to-night—walk in your sleep, you know.” I heard her chair move, as if she had turned abruptly and faced him. “Why do you say that?” she demanded. “You know I was not asleep last night.” “I assure you—” he began, clearly startled. “I—really thought—” “Please!” she said, and there was another silence. Then I realized she was crying softly. “Don’t do that!” pleaded Tommy. “Don't!” “I thought you were killed!” she said, in a smothered tone. “All the rest of the night I sat and wanted to die. I thought I had killed you!” “Where did you sit?” asked Tommy gently. “It doesn't matter, does it?” “Very much—to me.” “I was—here,” she said, after a hesitation. “You were not here,” said Tommy. “Be- tween that and morning, I was here four times. Where were you?” I22 —º .ae … -- ~~ ** OF LETITIA CARBERRY “I was safe,” she said. “Why do you ques- tion me so?” “Because,” he said gently, “I was in the laboratory at two o'clock this morning. Jacobs helped me with a-wound on my shoulder. I had looked everywhere for you and failed to find you. I thought I heard somebody moving across the hall, and we made a casual search. We found nothing, nobody. But during the fifteen minutes that that door was unlocked, somebody entered the building, and cut the throats of eleven guinea-pigs, piling them in the center of the room. And—on the floor un- derneath them I picked up this afternoon a small pink rosette, apparently off the toe of a woman's bedroom slipper.” “Ah!” she said, as if she found it suddenly hard to breathe. And then she burst out un- expectedly. “After all, was it so terrible? They—they were only guinea-pigs!” “Yes,” said Tommy gravely, “they were only guinea-pigs.” I23 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES He came out the next moment and went back along the hall into the hospital, having quite forgotten me. His chin was sunk on his breast, and he walked heavily. He was as bewildered as I had been. We saw him only once again that evening, and then only for a minute. He was preparing to station his guards through the house, much to Tish's dis- gust. “It's idiotic,” she confided to Aggie and me that night as Aggie was getting ready for bed. “Isn't the creature dead? Do they expect it to come back from the spirit world and do a materializing seance for them while they Wait?” “That's all very well, Tish,” said Aggie, turning on all the lights and getting into bed, “but that hand was not hairy.” “Foot, you mean,” said Tish. “If that is a footprint on the wall of that room up-stairs, it was a foot you touched last night.” At nine o'clock that night Tommy had a talk I24 CHAPTER XII THE CARBOLIC CASE AND A BROWN COAT OMMY was very gloomy that night. He went about placing guards, with his mouth set in a grim line and his eyes hard. A few of the nurses knew what was going on, but with the exception of the three of us, none of the patients had been told. To Tish's assurance that the trouble was over, that the death of Hero, the ape, meant the end of the disturbance, Tommy turned a tolerant smile and a deaf ear. I would have given a good bit to have had Tish's conviction, but no theory that was based on Hero at the Zoo could possibly involve Miss Blake. And Tommy and I knew that Miss Blake was in- volved. I had not told Tish the particulars of Tom- 126 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES the bed. He had lost his customary air of good-natured raillery, and looked tired. “I’ve placed them all,” he said. “Counting myself, there are fourteen of us, and I don't think a germ could escape from any of the wards without my knowing it.” “How about the private rooms?” I asked. “There's as apt to be mischief done by pay patients as by charities.” “You’re right, there. Well, every corridor is under secret surveillance. The doors into the nurses' dormitory are being watched on every floor, and we have a man on the roof.” “Humph!” said Aggie, from the bed. “You’d do better to have a barrel of holy water. Things that dissolve under your fin- gers, just as the clock strikes midnight—it was midnight, Tish. The clock in the hall is five minutes fast by my watch.” “Fiddlesticks!” Tish said tartly. “Then the sun's too fast; you'd better have it regulated. No, Tommy, it would have been more to the I28 OF LETITIA CARBERRY point if you'd taken all these precautions last night. You are too late.” “I hope so,” Tommy observed and got off the bed. “I’ll come around now and then and keep you posted.” He started toward the door and stopped, looking at me. “You haven't seen—Miss Blake? She has not come from the dormitory?” “No.” He looked relieved at that and went out, and for an hour we saw nothing of him. A little before midnight Miss Lewis brought in on a tray three glasses of buttermilk and some crackers. “I knew none of you were sleeping,” she said. “This will do you good. I don't mind saying my nerves are all twittering. This house is enough to set you crazy. If you go around a corner unexpectedly, you come across a figure ducking into a doorway. A nurse from L ward just fell across one of the moppers squatting in a corner by the pantry I29 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES and threw a bowl of chicken broth at him, thinking it was Johnson himself.” “They might as well calm themselves,” Tish observed, sipping her buttermilk. “Nothing will happen.” “Then why don't you take off your clothes and go to bed?” Aggie asked, but Tish scorn- fully refused to answer. “I’m not expecting anything myself,” ob- served Miss Lewis, straightening her cap at the mirror. “These things have a way of petering out—and yet, on the other hand, things in a hospital usually go in threes. If we have one burned case, we'll get two more. Shot cases will come in threes every time, and as for suicides! Well, I’ve seen three carbolic acids every time I've seen one. And that reminds me,” she said, turning from the mirror and with a dive thrusting a foot- rest under Tish's leg, “a carbolic case has just piped out in one of the wards. There are things I’d rather do than go up and lay it out.” 130 OF LETITIA CARBERRY And at that instant the hall nurse appeared in the doorway and spoke to her. “Miss Lewis,” she said, “you are to go to the mortuary with that case. Miss Grimes is having an attack of hysteria.” Miss Lewis turned and surveyed us through her spectacles. “Can you beat that?” she de- manded. “Wouldn't a self-respecting mon- grel pup rebel at a life like this?” She jerked her head—and her cap fell over her ear with the facility of long practice. “All right,” she said to the nurse, “I’m coming, but—” she turned in the doorway and waved her hand to us. “If I am found strung up with an S. P. T.,” she said, “I’ll not hang alone, believe me.” An S. P. T.' We all three stared at each other, and Tish tried to call her back. But she had gone. Could it be, we wondered, that Miss Lewis knew the meaning of the three let- ters? And if she did—l At five minutes of midnight Tommy stopped in to see us. 131 OF LETITIA CARBERRY “Singing!” said Tommy. “Half singing, half chanting. I—I'm go- ing back, Doctor. Nothing ain't ever scared me yet. But—it's singing ‘Nearer, my God, to Thee’—not the words. Just the tune.” “Did anybody else hear it?” “They heard something in the mortuary. They said it didn't sound exactly like singing. But I heard it as plain as I hear you, sir. It- it's horrible.” “Are the nurses still there?” “No, sir. Miss Lewis was sent to take Miss Grimes' place, but she insisted on having her night supper first. Mr. Briggs is in the mor- tuary with the you know, until she comes.” “I’ll go up with you to the roof,” said Tom- my, and went at once. Aggie had been getting white around the lips during the whole scene, and when Hicks said “Nearer, my God, to Thee,” she almost keeled over against her pillows. The mo- ment Tommy had gone, she burst into tears, I33 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES declaring that something awful was going to happen, that being the tune they had sung at the roofer's funeral. Tish, however, was stonily calm, although I could see she was shaken. She had got out her Irish lace, and sat making picots as if her life depended on it. “I don't for the life of me see what you are bleating about,” she snapped. “If you argue from hearing that tune that he's coming back to-night, there will be more ghosts walking that this hospital can hold. It's been sung at a good many funerals. And another thing, if he was as good as you think he was, he's sit- ting around with a harp, learning celestial mel- odies, not coming back to string up innocent corpses with roller towels, and break sky- lights. It's only the bad ones that aren't satis- fied where they are and come back.” It is hard to say just why that line of rea- soning made Aggie dry her tears, but it did, and she sat up and finished her buttermilk. I34 - ** 1. OF LETITIA CARBERRY It was when I was reaching her the crackers that I heard a creak, and knew that somebody had stealthily opened the door into the nurses' dormitory. Tish heard it, too, and put down her crocheting. All our lights were on, while the hall was dark. This time we saw no candlelight, but we each felt who it was. I stepped to the door and looked out. Miss Blake, fully dressed, was on the nar- row staircase to the floor above, and at the top somebody with an electric flash was bar- ring the way. “Sorry, Miss,” said Jacobs, the night watch- man. “We have orders not to let anybody pass here to-night.” “But I must 1” she pleaded. “I can’t endure the suspense another moment, Jacobs! Where is Doctor Andrews?” “On the roof, Miss Blake.” “Oh, no, not on the roof!” she cried. “Let me pass, I must pass.” I35 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES “Sorry,” he said, not moving. “My or- ders—” Suddenly, from somewhere overhead came a woman's scream, a shrill note of horror that left my ears aching, my heart beating madly. It rose and fell and then rose again, and the silence that followed was the silence of paraly- sis. Immediately after, there was the sound of scurrying feet. Tish and I never knew after- ward how we got up the stairs, or were almost the first on the scene. The hall was dark, as on the floor below, but from the mortuary a bright light streamed down the short, wide flight of steps that served as its approach. On one side of the receiving table Tommy was standing. On the other, Miss Lewis stood, as if frozen, with one hand turning down the covering sheet. But the body on the table was not wrapped in a shroud. It was the figure of a tall man fully dressed, and with the head 136 OF LETITIA CARBERRY and shoulders tightly wrapped in what looked like a brown coat. Tish gripped my arm, shaking so she could scarcely speak. “Johnson!” she said. “Oh, my God, Lizzie, it's Johnson!” But it was not. When they had untied the sleeves, tightly knotted about the neck, Tommy himself gave a cry of horror. It was Briggs, the orderly, dead about ten minutes, and with his ribs crushed in like a broken barrel. The “carbolic case” was lying in placid peace under the table, its bandaged hands folded, its jaw relaxed, its half-shut eyes looking calmly up at the horror overhead. Tish and I put Miss Lewis to bed that night and Tish sat with her until morning. It was dawn when Tommy came in. They had found nothing—except one curious fact: The brown coat that had covered poor Briggs' head had belonged to Johnson. The pockets were full of his private papers. CHAPTER XIII JAcobs' ELEvator S I have said, Tommy came in about A. Miss Lewis had dropped into an uneasy sleep, and Tish was dozing in the chair beside her, Aggie was stretched out on the couch, with a cubeb cigarette burning in a saucer beside her, and was resurrecting her mother's sister again when he came in. He beckoned me out into the hall after he had told us about the coat. “Miss Blake is ill again,” he said. “The second shock, after the first, you know.” “Not seriously, Tommy?” I asked, putting my hand on his arm. “I don't know,” he said miserably. “People don't go from one fainting attack into another without—I guess you've seen how it is, Miss 138 LETITIA CARBERRY Lizzie. I–it would kill me if any harm came to her!” “No harm is coming to her,” I reassured him. “If the strain has had this effect on Miss Lewis, who has about the same nervous sys- tem as a cow, of course it would go hard with a finely organized girl like Miss Blake. And —don't be foolish, Tommy. No finding of surgical knives in that girl's room, or of ro- settes where they don't happen to belong, is going to make her guilty of anything wrong. If she's in trouble, it's not of her own making.” He fairly put his arm around me and hugged me, to the horror of a passing nurse. “Blessed are the spinsters!” he cried, “for they are the salt of the earth! Do you really think that?” “I do,” I said firmly. “And shame on you, Tommy Andrews, for having thought any- thing else. I shall stay with her for an hour or two.” 139 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES “If you will,” he said gratefully, and we started toward the dormitory. On the way over, Tommy told me more clearly what had happened. The body of the “carbolic case” had been taken to the mortuary by Jacobs and Briggs, Marshall, the other night orderly, having refused to go. On the way up, Jacobs, who was running the elevator, complained that it was out of order. It was an old-fashioned lift, moving always very slowly, and built on the familiar cable and wheel principle. Twice during the ascent the cage stopped entirely. Near the top floor the cage began to vibrate wildly and Briggs had been obliged to steady the wheeled table containing the corpse. Jacobs, who had told Tommy the story, said that both he and Briggs were alarmed, fearing that one of the cables had broken; while he worked with the lever in the cage, Briggs looked up apprehensively through the metal grill in the center of the cage. The car was I40 OF LETITIA CARBERRY still shaking from side to side, and refused to obey the lever. Jacobs turned to Briggs and threw up his hands. “It's stuck!” he said. “Either it's going to drop, when it gets ready, or—” He said Briggs wasn't listening, but was standing looking up at the grill with his face blue-white. Jacobs looked up, too, but he was a second too late. He had a sense of some- thing white moving just out of his range of vision, and then the car ceased vibrating. Briggs was still staring up and the car was moving again as if nothing had happened to it. At the mortuary floor he had touched Briggs on the arm, and he shivered and helped him wheel the table out of the cage. Then Briggs asked him to lower the cage until he could see the top, but there was nothing there. After that they took the body to the mortuary. “What did Briggs think he saw?” I asked nervously, holding to Tommy's arm. The hall was dark. I4I THE AMAZING ADVENTURES “It's rather fantastic,” Tommy said, “but— he declared there was a bare foot planted di- rectly on the grill of the cage.” “A foot!” I gasped. “A foot,” said Tommy soberly. “And I'm going to tell you what I wouldn't care to tell Aunt Tish or Miss Aggie, I’ve been on top of the cage myself, just now, with a candle. There are innumerable footprints in the dust, distinct marks of a naked foot. But it is al- ways the right foot!” I shivered. “Tommy!” I quavered. “The mark on the wall where Johnson was found was the print of a naked right foot.” “I know,” he replied, and fell to thinking. “Well,” he said, after a moment, “I’d better go on. Jacobs moved the cage down, but there was nothing on it, or in the shaft over their heads. It ends just above that floor, and as the doors to the shaft were all locked, if any- thing had been above the cage, it could hardly have got away. Briggs himself said that he I42 OF LETITIA CARBERRY thought it was an optical illusion, and was ap- parently not nervous when Jacobs went down to get Miss Lewis. He was gone some time, Miss Lewis, as I have said, having insisted on being fortified with food before she went up.” Finally, as we knew, he had got Miss Lewis and they went back to the mortuary. Briggs was sitting there quietly, with his pipe lighted and a newspaper on his knee. But he was neither reading nor smoking and Jacobs said he was staring overhead, with a queer expres- sion on his face, as if he were listening to something. He started to say something to Jacobs, but Jacobs signaled him to be cautious and pointed to Miss Lewis. Briggs had nodded and re- sumed his pipe. Everything was quiet and peaceful, Jacobs insisted. Tommy and Hicks had appeared sometime before and had gone up the stairs to the roof. The man who had been sent to guard that corridor, one of the laundry men, was dozing in a chair half way I43 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES down. Jacobs, not being needed in the mor- tuary, went down to him and roused him by shaking. He and the laundry man were talk- ing when Miss Lewis came down to the empty ward across from them, and turning on the lights, went in search of something she needed. Jacobs was positive there had not been a sound from the mortuary, except that a gust of air from its open windows had swept along the hall, and the glass-topped doors slammed shut. There had been no outcry, no struggle. When Miss Lewis went back briskly, and opened the doors, she found Briggs apparently gone, and the sheeted figure on the table as before. It was only when she turned down the sheet that she discovered the truth—the body of the murdered orderly on the table and the corpse not to be seen. It was then she screamed. “We have sent for the police,” Tommy fin- ished. “We didn't want any publicity, but now it has to come. It's beyond us. The I44 OF LETITIA CARBERRY strange thing is,” he said, “at the time it hap- pened, every corridor, every ward, every pos- sible means of access to the mortuary was guarded.” “Yes, and with the one nearest it sound asleep!” I commented scornfully. “And goodness knows how many of the others!” “Jacobs was in the upper hall,” he con- tended, “and whoever was asleep beforehand, none of them was asleep after Miss Lewis shrieked, Miss Lizzie. There are only two means of access to the mortuary, one is the fire-escape and the other the steps. Jacobs was just beyond the steps all the time, and Hicks and I were on the roof near the fire- escape. Nobody left by those two exits. That's positive.” “There is another door in the mortuary,” I Said. “What is that?” “Mortuary linen closet,” said Tommy. “Al- ways kept locked, and still locked.” “You haven't examined it?” I45 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES “The linen room woman carries the key, and she is away over night.” “Nobody was missing in the house?” “We made a tally immediately, with the guards all watching every door and window. Two internes and I made the count ourselves, not a soul was missing.” “He was—strangled?” “No. That's one of the queerest things about it. He had been squeeged—his chest is caved in, and I think the autopsy will show that a point of one of the ribs entered the heart. Death was almost instantaneous.” “And the brown coat?” I asked. “How did it get there?” “God knows,” said Tommy, and rapped at Miss Blake's door. CHAPTER XIV BAG AND BAGGAGE ISH stared at me the next morning T when I told her the story Tommy had told me, and laid the key of the mortuary linen closet on her breakfast tray. “The Blake girl is still out of her head,” I finished up, “and I found the key, as I tell you, on her dresser, labeled as you see it. I don't want you to show it to Tommy, Tish.” “Tommy!” said Tish scornfully, and pushed away her breakfast untasted. “I tell you, Liz- zie, if I had had charge of things last night, that poor wretch would have carried in this tray this morning, with the tea slopped over everything as usual. Tommy is a nice boy, but he's stupid.” “But I don't understand,” said Aggie from the bed. “If you think, Tish Carberry, that I47 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES finding the key to a linen closet is going to prove anything against that pretty little nurse, I'll tell Tommy about it myself.” “Exactly,” said Tish, coldly. “And if you do, I wash my hands of the whole affair. As far as I'm concerned in that case, she can go under suspicion the rest of her life.” “Suspicion of what?” Aggie demanded tartly. “She didn't kill Briggs, I suppose. Even if she could have broken his ribs, as Tish says, and she's a perfectly respectable girl—you can see that in her face—she was right on the stairs here when it happened, wasn't she?” Tish got up and put the key of the linen closet in the lower bureau drawer. “Don’t be any more of a fool than you can help, Aggie,” she said, and shut the drawer. “I don't think Miss Blake killed Briggs, or got up on the wall and made a footprint a foot and a half long near the ceiling, or hung Johnson by the neck to a chandelier. And if my nephew chooses to be so head over ears 148 OF LETITIA CARBERRY in love with the young woman that he's no more capable of logical thought than a guinea- pig, I shall look into the thing myself.” “Guinea-pig,” said Aggie. “Now then, that's another thing, Tish. The rabbits—” “Lizzie,” Tish said, snubbing her com- pletely. “Will you see if Miss Durand is off duty yet? I want to talk to her. Lewis won't be back from breakfast for an hour. She can't Fletcherize and tell that story at the same time.” The hall nurse promised me to find Miss Du- rand and send her to Tish's room, and started at once in the search for her. She turned to say, over her shoulder and with bated breath, that detectives were in the building now, that Tommy was with them, and that there was a story that they'd found some curious prints on the wall in the room where Johnson's body had hung. “A foot, and just beside it a woman's hand,” she said. “I hear they are going to I49 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES take impressions of all the hands in the hos- pital to-day!” I carried this to Tish, and she affected indif- ference. But she was visibly uneasy and at different times I caught her staring fixedly at her palm. At eight o'clock Miss Durand came in look- ing tired and white, Tish asked her to sit down and offered her a little port wine, but she refused. “No, thanks,” she said. “I’m off to bed soon, and if I can only sleep—I didn't sleep much yesterday.” “Too noisy, I daresay,” said Tish. “Poor Briggs complained of the same thing in this very room yesterday.” “Oh, it wasn't the noise. I—I got to think- ing.” She tried to smile. “There have been so many strange things happening!” “I should think so,” said Aggie. “That poor Miss Blake! Do you think—” Tish fixed her with a cold eye, and Aggie's I50 OF LETITIA CARBERRY voice trailed off to nothing. She looked frightened. “Miss Durand,” said Tish, suddenly hitch- ing her chair forward, “I should like you to tell me why you left Johnson to die alone and why you absented yourself from your ward for fifty minutes.” Miss Durand turned even paler, and got up. “I didn't understand that you—” “Sit down,” said Tish. “I guess you know I'm chairman of the Ladies' Committee here, and you'd better tell me than tell the police. I don't start with the belief that half the hos- pital's guilty and the other half accessories to the crime, and that's what the police will do, according to my experience.” “You may ask Bates—” she began. “So I may,” said Tish cheerfully. “And if you are around he'll say you were away a scant ten minutes and if he's alone, he'll swear to an hour or more.” “It was less than an hour, I'd swear to that I51 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES anywhere,” said Miss Durand. “It couldn't have taken so long!” “What couldn't have taken so long?” Tish demanded. Miss Durand looked around at the three of us and seemed to be thinking. “What do you mean by saying I'd better tell you than tell the police?” she asked. “Just this,” Tish said briskly getting out her sheet of note-paper. “I flatter myself I can see as far through a stone wall as most people, especially if there's a crack to look through. I've been looking at this particular stone wall off and on since four o'clock this morning, and—well, I think I begin to see daylight.” “Humph!” said Aggie. “Then the least I can say, Tish—” “Now, Miss Durand,” Tish began, biting a point on her pencil. “We'll get at this sys- tematically. Did Briggs have any enemies in K Ward?” I52 OF LETITIA CARBERRY “He wasn't popular. I guess old Johnson hated him about the most.” “Ah!” said Tish, and put that down. “Did you know Johnson was dying when you left the ward?” “He’d been dying for twenty-four hours and had been unconscious for six,” she de- fended herself. “Nobody can tell when that sort will make a clean get-away.” “Good gracious!” Aggie ejaculated, and even Tish looked shocked. Miss Durand was clearly not in Miss Blake's class: seen in the morning light, her face looked hard as well as tired. “I see,” said Tish, and put down “clean get- away.” “Now, Miss Durand, why had Linda Smith been crying when she came to you at midnight that night?” “She said she had had some words with the head nurse. She had missed a lecture that evening.” “Why did she miss the lecture?” I53 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES “I don't know.” “Don’t know or won't tell?” asked Tish, over her note-paper. “Don’t know,” snapped Miss Durand, and for all I didn't like her, I thought she was tell- ing the truth. “Now, Miss Durand,” Tish observed, sit- ting back and fixing her lame leg on its has- sock, “I’d be glad to hear why Miss Linda Smith took you away from your wards that night, and where you went.” “She had forgotten to attend to something, and she came back to fix it.” “What?” Miss Durand stared at Tish and Tish leaned back, with her pencil stuck through the knob of her hair, and stared at Miss Durand. As I have said somewhere else, Tish is a master- ful woman, and Miss Durand felt it. “She had forgotten to turn in Johnson's clothes,” she said. “That is always done after a death: the clothes are held in the office for I54 OF LETITIA CARBERRY the friends to get. We went to the basement clothes room.” “But Johnson was not dead!” “The chances were he would die that night. The clothes should have been ready in case relatives had wished to remove the body at once.” “The trip to the clothes room would take about ten minutes, I daresay,” Tish said dryly. “Why didn't she go alone?” “I—I hardly know. She was nervous and upset. You see, her three years is almost up, and she and the superintendent are on bad terms. She has always said that he would make use of any small mistake she made, to keep her from getting her diploma.” “When would she get it, everything going well ?” “Next week.” “Very good,” said Tish, and put something down. “Now then, what happened in the clothes room?” I55 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES “I didn't go in.” “Where were you?” “The morning milk cans were being deliv- ered. I went to the other end of the basement, past the engine room, and got a glass of milk. I was thirsty.” “I see. And that took forty minutes?” “No,” said Miss Durand. “When I got back to the clothes room, I couldn't find Miss Smith. The cellar man, sitting on the stairs, said she had not gone up. I was worried, and we both searched for her. We couldn't find her.” “But you did find her. You went back to K ward together.” “I didn't find her,” said Miss Durand. “When I came back to the stairs, she was sit- ting there, with a bundle in her lap. She was white. The cellar man asked her if she felt sick.” “How did she explain her absence?” “She didn't,” said Miss Durand with her 156 OF LETITIA CARBERRY curious smile. “She's a very queer woman, Miss Smith is.” “Humph!” Tish said, and put down a line or two. “Well, I reckon the next thing to do is to see Miss Smith. She looks pleasant enough, but you can't tell by looking at a toad how far it can hop.” Miss Durand got up and prepared to go. She still wore her curious smile. “I think it has hopped a good ways, Miss Carberry,” she said. “Linda Smith has gone, bag and baggage, nobody knows where!” LETITIA CARBERRY terday,” she said, with her thumbs tucked inside her belt and her spectacles flashing. “It's got cured pretty quick, I think.” “I don't employ you to think,” said Tish, hopping past her and opening the lower bu- reau drawer. “You needn't employ me at all.” “That's a fact,” Tish said. “It hadn't oc- curred to me. You go in and take care of Miss Pilkington to-day, Miss Lewis. There's nothing pleases her like being taken care of.” “There's nothing the matter with Miss Pil- kington, either,” snapped Miss Lewis, but Tish was getting down on her knees by the drawer, groaning as she did it, and she only threw an absent reply over her shoulder. “Oh, well,” she said, “you know what I mean. I didn't mean to offend you. You're a good nurse, but I've got something else on hand. Give Miss Pilkington a bath and put talcum on; she'll take to it like a baby.” Miss Lewis opened her mouth to refuse, I59 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES thought better of it, and went to Aggie's room. Tish drew a long sigh. “Thank heaven!” she said. “They'll keep each other busy for the rest of the day.” Which they did. Aggie emerged from her room when Tish and I, breathless and dirty, got back late that morning. She was pow- dered and manicured, curled and French- puffed, and she knew the history of every private case on the floor; name, age, family scandal and operation. She was primed to talk, but by that time Tish and I had no time to stop. Things were approaching a climax. Well, Miss Lewis and Aggie off our hands, Tish emptied the lower drawer and spread its contents on the floor in front of her. First of all, she laid out the two roller towels, with the S. P. T. showing. Then followed the brown tweed coat, secured by a dollar to Ja- cobs, the small surgeon's knife, the dented brass candlestick, the bandage Linda Smith had picked up in the upper hall, the linen I6o OF LETITIA CARBERRY room key, and Charlie Sands' letter about Hero at the Zoo. Then with the sheet of note- paper in her hand, she began to play a sort of checkers with the different things. The two S. P. T. towels she put together and using this combination as a king, she proceeded to jump the other articles, one by one, moving them around aimlessly in the intervals and consulting her notes. At the end of the game, as well as I could make out, the king had it. At least, the two towels seemed to have Charlie Sands' letter checkmated in a corner, and the other articles lay in a humiliated heap on Tish's lap. “Well,” I said, “I see the towels win, although I think you cheated once.” Tish stuffed the notes into the bosom of her dress and tumbled the other things back in the drawer. Then she got up, making hor- rible faces as she straightened her knee. “I’m sorry it's raining, Lizzie,” she said. “We'll have to go out.” I61 OF LETITIA CARBERRY that underneath, I’m not going to be a party to it.” “Very well!” said Tish, and getting a pair of scissors, she was about to cut off eight inches of her best French gown, when I weak- ened and got the safety pins. It was plain, Tish was in no mood to stop at trifles. I made her as respectable as possible, at least on the surface, and by that time, seeing she was de- termined to go, I got ready and went with her. Now, a patient can't leave a hospital with- out a card being sent down, signed by the in- terne and countersigned by the superintendent, and brought back by the elevator boy for the signatures of his family, his friends and the police bureau, or something almost as compli- cated. But not knowing anything of this, Tish and I went down in the elevator, past the door-man and out the front door, called a taxicab and drove away with perfect ease and calmness. We went to the Zoo. That is generally I63 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES known now, although that Tish went in her nightgown is here for the first time set forth. But what we did at the Zoo I do not know ex- actly. I might as well have been back with Aggie, being bathed and talcumed. Tish let me pay the taxicab, pointed to a chair in the ante-room, and spent twenty minutes in the private office of the superintendent. I was rather bitter about it. In the first place, I don't like Zoos, and in the second place, after I had been there ten minutes, a man in uniform came in and examined all the corners of the room and turned over every chair. When he came to the one I was in, he said, “Excuse me, ma'am, but you haven't no- ticed a small green snake with red and yellow markings anywhere around here, have you?” I was frozen in my chair. “No,” I replied as calmly as I possibly could, “unless I absent-mindedly put him in my hand- bag!” - “Oh, I didn't mean that, lady,” he hastened I64 OF LETITIA CARBERRY to explain, “I meant—he may be curled on the rungs of your chair.” I got up at that almost instantaneously and he turned the chair over. “Not here,” he said, disappointed. “Little devil, this is the third time this week!” “Is he—is he poisonous?” I asked. “Well,” he said thoughtfully, “personally, I shouldn't care to sit down on him in the dark.” He went out and closed the door, and when Tish came back, she declares I was standing in the middle of the room with my skirts held up, and turning slowly around in a circle. There was a glitter in Tish's eye that I had never seen there before, as we drove back to the hospital. I attempted to explain a little of how I felt at being left in a place like that, where at any moment something might break loose for the third time that week, and why I was turning around, but she told me tartly not to bother her. 165 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES We returned to the hospital in silence, and I paid for the taxicab. It was not until we were back in Tish's room, and had put her into her chair and got a hot-water bottle under her knee, which had gone on a strike about that time and refused to bend at all, that I spoke. “Well?” I asked. “Well—what?” “Have they lost anything? Any animals?” “No,” said Tish calmly. “I knew that be- fore I went there. Aggie, what day was it the two medical internes left?” “This is Friday,” I said. “It was Tuesday evening, Tish.” “I thought so,” she observed. “Now reach me my notes, Lizzie, and go call Bates.” CHAPTER XVI TOMMY TELLS WHY ATES came unwillingly. His shrewd B face was pale and twitching, and he in- sisted on knowing why he was wanted. “I can not tell you, because I do not know, Mr. Bates,” I said. “Miss Carberry wants to speak to you. That is all.” “I haven't time,” he said. “I’m helping out in the wards to-day. One of the day orderlies has to take Mr. Briggs' place to-night, and he has gone to bed to get some sleep.” But I got him to go finally, and we went together along the hall, his carpet-slippers flap- ping loosely as he walked, his shirt open at the throat and showing his lean brown neck. I thought to myself uneasily that the man looked like, at least, a potential criminal him- 167 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES -*. self. But just as we reached Tish's door Tommy came out. I sent Bates in, for Tommy had put his hand on my arm. - “What has she been up to?” he asked, as the door closed. “She's sitting in there in a kimono, with her foot on a stool, and she's got her bonnet on.” “We’ve been out,” I said tartly. “Or she's been out. I only went along. We went to the Zoo, Tommy, and she left me to sit on snakes with green and red markings—” “What!” “Well, it only happened that I didn't. And she's got hold of something: I never saw her in such a state.” “The Zoo!” cried Tommy and whistled. Then he smiled. “I see,” he said; “The Mur- ders in the Rue Morgue, eh? Well, what happened?” “I haven't any idea. She's got some sort of a scent, and she's got her nose to the ground I68 OF LETITIA CARBERRY and running like mad. If she's interfered with to-day, she'll bite.” “I see,” said Tommy again thoughtfully. “Well, good luck to her.” “How is Miss Blake?” He lowered his voice. “She's conscious, but don't tell Aunt Tish, please. She wants to ask her some questions, and I don't want her disturbed. She's very weak.” He looked down at a little case he had in his hand, and then at me. “I’m going to give her a hypo- dermic,” he said, “and the nurse is doing some- thing else. Would you mind coming over with me?” Well, of course, I'd wanted to hear what Tish asked Bates, but as I've admitted before, I'm a good bit of a fool where there's a love affair on hand, and I'm fond of Tommy. “All right,” I said, and we went. I thought I heard Tish's voice raised angrily as we left the door, but the next moment there was only the quiet hum of Bates speaking. 169 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES The little nurse was lying in bed with her eyes closed. She looked white, but her lips had more color than the day before. She opened her eyes as we came in, and put out her hand to me. “You're very good,” she said. “You see I am better.” Tommy beamed. “And just in time!” said I. “One more fainting fit, and Doctor Tommy Andrews would have been tied up in a strait-jacket.” She colored a little and looked at him. “I’ve been telling her,” said Tommy, catch- ing my eye, “about Miss Lewis and the mouse last night. A girl with a set of lungs like that is lost in a hospital. She ought to be in a garage blowing up auto tires.” “And—everything was quiet last night?” “Not a sound—except the aforesaid yell. Never knew the house quieter.” He reached over and caught her wrist. “Nerves as tight as a string!” he said. “You’re going to have a hypodermic and relax a bit.” 17o OF LETITIA CARBERRY “Since you will be my medical adviser—” she said, half shyly, and held out her right arin. Tommy fixed the hypodermic and came over to the bed. “Ready!” he said, but in- stead of the right arm, he leaned across and drew up the short white sleeve of the left. She made a quick movement, but was too late. “Good heavens !” Tommy said, and we both stared. The arm was covered with bruises from elbow to shoulder! Tommy walked back with me to Tish's room, but at first he said nothing, and neither did I. The girl had offered no explanation, and he had asked none. The poor little arm had been too pathetic. Just before we reached Tish's door, how- ever, he stopped. “The sheer brutality of it!” he said. “She's only a bit of a girl, and she's been through something horrible. But I'm not going to ask 171 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES her about it, and I won't have her questioned by anybody else. If I'm satisfied, it's nobody else's affair.” “Listen to the egoist!” said I. “And why is it your affair only.” “Because I'm going to marry her, if she'll have me,” he said hotly. “And after I have her, and can protect her, I'm going to kill who- ever put those finger-prints on her arm.” “Finger-prints!” I cried. “Yes, finger-prints,” he said, and opened the door. Bates had gone, and Aggie and Tish were together. Tish still wore her bonnet, and she had a crimson spot on each cheek. “Tommy,” she said, the moment we en- tered. “I’ve sent for the linen woman, and I want you to stay by. As soon as I’ve seen her, we're going to the Blake girl's room.” “Oh, no; you're not,” said Tommy calmly. “You’ll go there over my dead body.” “That wouldn't be much of an obstacle!” 172 OF LETITIA CARBERRY “She's very ill. I won't have her disturbed,” said Tommy, and set his jaw. They both have the Carberry jaw. Tish made an impa- tient movement. “Oh, well, I can manage without her. Is the top of the elevator flat?” she added. “The center is, I believe,” Tommy was doubtful. “What on earth—” “Never mind!” said Tish grandly, and the linen woman knocked. “Mrs. Jenkins?” asked Tish. “Yes'm,” said Mrs. Jenkins. She was a tall woman, in black, with a white apron and a thimble as badges of office. “I wanted to ask you for the key to the mortuary linen closet, Mrs. Jenkins,” said Tish. Mrs. Jenkins fidgeted, and glanced at Tommy. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I–haven't got it just now.” “Indeed!" Tish raised her eyebrows. I73 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES “Aren't you responsible for that closet? I have a particular reason for asking.” Mrs. Jenkins turned to Tommy. “Since you're here, Doctor Andrews,” she said, “I suppose it's all right, but we don't give the keys to any of the closets to patients usually.” “Since you haven't got it, that needn't dis- turb you,” Tish said sharply. “If you wish a reason, however, I'm a member of the Ladies' Committee of this hospital, and as I am un- dertaking a special inquiry into things that have happened here lately, I want that key.” Mrs. Jenkins looked dazed. She had never seen a female detective, I daresay, and to see one sitting before her in a kimono over a nightgown, with a black bonnet with jet bu- gles over one ear, and her foot out on a stool, clearly bewildered her. “I’m sorry,” she said respectfully, when she'd recovered, “but the key that usually hangs in the mortuary is lost, and I gave Miss Linda Smith the other one.” I74 CHAPTER XVII ON THE ROOF AND ELSEWHERE W M 7E came back in an hour to find Tish waiting with her bonnet still on, and in a more agreeable frame of mind. She asked Tommy and me to go around the hospital with her, but refused to take Aggie, who retired sulking to her room. Tish rolled up the S. P. T. towels and led the way herself, a strange gleam in her eye. Considering what she had in mind, it was a courageous thing she was doing, but I don't mind admitting now that there were moments that day when I thought she had lost her reason. She led the way to the mortuary first, with her bundle under her arm, and Tommy and I trailing at her heels, like two bewildered lambs after a wild-eyed sheep. Seen in day- light, there was nothing horrible about the 176 LETITIA CARBERRY mortuary. There were no bodies there, and the daylight came in in churchly fashion through the two large stained glass windows in the end. Indeed, the room looked like a small chapel, being finished in dark wood, with pale walls, chairs in a row around the edge of the floor, and only the row of tables in the center instead of pews, to spoil its ecclesiastical appearance. At the far end, to the left, and near the windows, was the door to the linen closet. Tish gave the room only a casual glance, and stalked across to the linen closet. She hesi- tated a moment and grasped her stick closely. Then she inserted the key she had carried up with her, and slowly turned it. The door flew open immediately and I took a hasty step back. But it had been pushed only by the draft of air from a small win- dow at the side, which was open, and except for piles of neatly folded linen, the closet was empty. Tish looked slightly disappointed, but . OF LETITIA CARBERRY breathing spot. There were benches around and a flower pot or two, and directly in the center was a four-foot iron fence, enclosing a skylight. Two men at work there showed where Tommy had gone through, and when I glanced at him he was staring at it with a rueful smile. “When you remember,” he said, “that I weigh a hundred and seventy pounds, and that I went over that fence head first, it makes you wonder what grudge old Johnson had against me. I was decent enough to him, if Briggs wasn't.” “Do you mean that—that Briggs was cruel to him?” I asked Tommy. “With a refined form of cruelty, yes. The sort that lets an old man go without sugar in his tea, and won't hear him begging for ice- water.” “Then I'm glad he's dead,” I snapped, “and if I’d been Johnson, I'd have—” Tish had wandered across the roof, and was I79 OF LETITIA CARBERRY disappointed. But she didn't stop her half hop, half run, over the roof. At the end of fifteen minutes she was back at the top of the fire-escape, ready to descend. But going down was different from going up, and I guess we were both relieved when Tommy said there was a staircase. When we got to the bottom, I was clear out of breath, and even Tommy was panting. But Tish hadn't turned a hair. Some sort of in- ward excitement was stimulating like a fever, and knowing Tish, I felt she would cave in like a pricked balloon when it was over. The next thing she demanded was to be put on the top of the elevator cage. But Tommy absolutely balked at that and Tish seemed to realize herself that it wouldn't do. “I’ll go for you,” Tommy said. “I’m will- ing to sacrifice myself for you any time, Aunt Tish, but you can see for yourself that a self- respecting woman in her prime can't ride on top of an elevator without causing comment. I8I OF LETITIA CARBERRY Riding majestically on top of it, one hand in a dignified manner holding to the cable, the other clutching her stick, and with her head thrown back and staring up, was Tish! She went past us without seeing us, and a moment later we heard her say calmly: “Stop now, Frank. Stop!” Almost immediately on that she said, “Go down! Go down, I tell you! Go down!” The cage went down past us, with Tish still holding on, still looking up. But on her face there was the most terrible expression of min- gled fright and satisfaction I ever saw. The next moment there began, from above, a shower of sticks, pieces of plaster, and finally, a small creature that looked like, and proved to be, a dead rabbit. Aggie began to scream and to tear at the elevator doors, but luckily they held. Well, as the newspapers have told, the idiot of an elevator man kept on to the first floor in his excitement, and it's a great wonder Tish 183 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES was not brained. But nothing hit her, and she got to the lower floor in safety. If she had waited until the cage was lowered suffi- ciently, she would not have been hurt, but just as the top was still four feet from the floor, the rabbit landed, and Tish jumped and broke her arm. CHAPTER XVIII COMMON SENSE ELL, that's all there was to it. As W V I said at the beginning, this is really Tish's story. She told us the whole thing that night sitting up in bed, with the Chief of Police and the hospital superintendent on one side of the bed, and Miss Lewis and I on the other. Aggie lay on the couch with a cubeb cigarette burning beside her, and stared at Tish with admiration mixed with awe. “In the first place,” said Tish, to the Chief of Police, “here are the two towels that figure in the case. One of them is the one that hung Mr. Johnson's body three nights ago to the chandelier, the other is the one with which the ape, Hero, is supposed to have committed sui- cide at the Zoo the following night. As you 185 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES see, the two towels are alike. Do you know what S. P. T. stands for?” she asked. “I can't say I do,” said the Chief of Police, and picked up one of the towels. “Humph!” said Tish. “Well, it means ‘Sick Patient Towel,” and they are used in hos- pitals for tying up delirious patients. The trouble was, there wasn't a delirious patient in the hospital strong enough to walk, let alone tie up a body to a chandelier. “But before I learned from Bates what S. P. T. meant, I’d been to the Zoo. That was yesterday morning. Maybe you believe that a lonely monkey will commit suicide; maybe he will, I don't know. But when he hangs himself with a roller towel from the Dunkirk hospital, I want to know how he got that towel.” “Oho!” said the Chief of Police, “so the little rascal got loose, did he?” “He did not,” said Tish tartly. “They said he was lonely for his keeper. Very well, said 186 OF LETITIA CARBERRY I, where is his keeper? Where is this man he was so fond of that he couldn't live with- out him? The answer, gentlemen, was that this keeper was a patient in the Dunkirk hos- pital, as the result of being crushed almost to death by the beast that was supposed to be pining for him! The keeper's name was Wes- ley Barker!” “Barker!” said Tommy. “Why, that was the big Englishman—! Go on, Aunt Tish.” “I came back to the hospital with a strong desire to talk to Wesley Barker, but Wesley Barker was not in the hospital. He had been dismissed three days ago. Bates recalled tak- ing his dismissal card to the elevator man, about seven o'clock Tuesday evening. That put Barker out of the case, apparently, but I sent for Jacobs and asked him how easily a man could get into the building at night. He said it was impossible. The doors are always locked, the basement entrances and fire-escapes lead from the courtyard, and the courtyard is 187 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES locked and in charge of a gate man. That seemed to cut out Wesley Barker, as I say. If he was out, he could hardly get back without using dynamite. “I got out my notes again, and went over them. I couldn't see how Miss Blake and Miss Linda Smith were mixed up in it. They were the day nurses in Kward, Miss Smith in charge and Miss Blake assisting. I had several notes on them: Tuesday at midnight Miss Smith coaxed the night nurse to go to the base- ment with her, where the patients' clothes are kept in lockers: she was missing for a time, and when Bates saw her later she carried a “darkish bundle,' possibly clothing. Why?” The Chief of Police looked wise; he had a way of wriggling his nose like a rabbit. “The next morning, Miss Blake being ill, we heard Miss Smith crying in her room and blaming herself for the girl's condition,” Tish went on. “Again, why? “On Wednesday night Miss Blake, still I88 OF LETITIA CARBERRY weak and ill, made a complete search of the third floor. Not another nurse in the house would have gone there, or to the mortuary and later to the roof, as she did. Some strong purpose sent the girl, of course—but what? “That night, following Miss Blake to the roof, my nephew was thrown through a sky- light. Later he confessed to a bite on the shoulder. The same night, apparently in a spirit of wanton mischief, the guinea-pigs in the laboratory were killed and three rabbits were taken away. Miss Blake had been there. My nephew confessed later to finding a rosette from her slipper there. Again—why?” Tish stopped and looked at the Chief of Police, who sat stroking his chin. “How would you have gone about the case, Mr. Chief of Police?” Tish demanded. “Probably much as you did,” he said, look- ing at her with a patronizing smile. “It’s a simple matter when we know the answer, to say that two and two make four, but you are 189 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES giving me the four, and asking me whether you reached that conclusion by adding three and one, or two and two, or four and nothing. Given a certain number of clues, the logical mind often achieves remarkable results, but it is usually the trained mind. That you suc- ceeded so well, my dear lady, I consider re- markable. Remarkable!” >> “Given the same clues,” Tish persisted, “you'd have reached the same result?” “Undoubtedly.” “Well,” said Tish, mildly. “It's strange that I couldn't. There were a few gaps my mind wouldn't jump. And I noticed your men here seemed to feel the same way. It seemed like some distance from a roller towel in the Zoo to Johnson's brown tweed coat.” The Chief of Police looked uneasy. “By exactly what mental process did you connect the two?” he asked, wriggling his 110Se. “I didn't,” said Tish calmly. “While you 190 OF LETITIA CARBERRY and your men were measuring finger-prints and reassembling Mr. Johnson from where he'd been scattered to, I did what any person with common sense would have done, I went to Miss Blake and asked her!” CHAPTER XIX NOTE BY DOCTOR THoMAS ANDREws, LATE VIS- ITING PHYSICIAN AT THE DUNKIRK HOS- PITAL, AND Now ON THE ORTHOPAEDIC STAFF of THE SAME INSTITUTION, DATED THREE weeks LATER, FROM BERMUDA ISS LIZZIE'S narrative stops here. My Aunt Letitia, during her con- valescence in the hospital, having been dis- covered poring over books of aerial navigation, and having written to the Wrights, offering to turn over a second-hand automobile of standard make, a thirty-foot motor launch, and an equity in money, for one of their model bi- planes, Miss Lizzie and Miss Aggie hurriedly took her to Mount Clemens for a series of baths. “I shall take up Miss Lizzie's narrative with I92 LETITIA CARBERRY the story told to my Aunt Letitia by Miss Blake, now my wife. Miss Blake was young, only nineteen, and had been in the hospital only six months. Miss Smith was the head day nurse in K ward, with Miss Blake as her as- sistant. Miss Smith had almost completed her three years' course, and was not popular with the officers. She was, however, a good nurse, and unlike Miss Blake, was dependent on her earnings for her support. “On Tuesday evening, trouble between the two medical internes and the hospital superin- tendent, Mr. Harrison, reached a climax. The three men had a wordy argument on the stair- case near Kward, and Linda Smith (who was not over-scrupulous) had shut herself in a small supply room near to listen. The ward was in charge of Miss Blake, who was serving the patients' suppers from a table in the center of the long room. Behind a screen, in the second bed from the far end of the ward lay Amos Johnson, peacefully dying. Beyond I93 - THE AMAZING ADVENTURES him, in the end bed, lay a delirious patient named Wesley Barker, an Englishman, who had been sent in from the Zoological Garden, badly injured by the great ape, Hero, since dead. “Barker was tied down. Two long tewels, one over his arms and one over his legs, were knotted beyond his reach under the edge of the bed. His fractured ribs had healed, but he was still delirious. His delirium in the last day or two had taken on an acuter form, and was mania. Articulate speech had changed to noisy ape-like chatterings. He made strange facial grimaces, and being tied, had more than once tried to bite his nurses. “Miss Blake filled a feeding cup with broth, and having attended to the other patients, went behind Johnson's screen to feed the maniac in the last bed. To her horror, the bed was empty! “Nervous, but not excessively alarmed, Miss Blake called Linda Smith, and they I94 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES dow,” she said, “but I don't see it. What are you looking at?' “The gate man pointed to the Center Street bridge, which crosses the river near the hos- pital. “There's a woman out there in white,’ he said, ‘and she looks as if she might be thinking—there, look at that!’ “The bridge was practically deserted. She and the gate man saw the figure move back a step or two, run forward and dive over the rail. The gate man unlocked the gate and ran out, but the toll house is at the east end of the bridge, and by the time he had raised the alarm there was nothing to be seen. Linda Smith went back to Miss Blake, and had hys- teria in the K ward linen room. “Discovery meant disgrace to her, so she made up her mind not to be discovered. Barker had had no family and no friends. No one had visited him except the assistant keeper, and he had not shown any particular solici- tude. Linda Smith thought she saw a way 196 OF LETITIA CARBERRY out, and half frightened, half coaxed Miss Blake into helping her. Remember, they both thought Barker was dead, and Linda Smith threatened in case of discovery, to throw her- self off the roof. Miss Blake's part, there- fore, was the acquiescence of a young and terrified girl, in a situation that would have shaken older and stronger nerves. “The two medical internes left at seven o'clock, as a result of the dispute with the su- perintendent. At ten minutes past seven, Linda Smith sent down a dismissal card for one Wesley Barker, with the forged signature of one of the departed internes. At twenty min- utes past, the yellow ticket came back from the office, the ticket which would permit Wesley Barker to pass the door man and leave the hos- pital for good. Linda Smith destroyed it. “At seventy-thirty the night nurse, Miss Durand, was told that one of the heaviest burdens had been taken from her, and went to work cheerfully. But at ten o'clock that 197 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES night Linda Smith, lying awake in bed in her room in the dormitory, saw Wesley Barker climb up the fire-escape outside her window, stopping now and then, monkey fashion, to swing out over the dizzy height by his hands. “The girl was almost frenzied. She got up and dressed and went to the roof. To her horror she found the superintendent, Mr. Harrison, smoking there and she almost fainted when she got back to her room. But the superintendent was not molested. There was no alarm. “At midnight she formed the resolution of getting Barker's clothes from the basement clothes room and putting them on the roof, in the hope that he would put them on and go away. Properly dressed, even if he went back to the Zoo, she could claim that he had been taken away by somebody in a carriage, and might still put through the deception. In any event, his clothes could not be left there. Their discovery meant her disgrace. 198 OF LETITIA CARBERRY “She had forgotten, however, that Barker had been brought in in the ambulance, and had no clothes. Afraid to go to the basement alone, she asked Miss Durand to go to the clothes room with her, giving as an excuse that she had forgotten to send Johnson's clothes to the office, a rule in case of death, and on finding nothing there in Barker's name, she did the only thing she could think of— took Johnson's old brown suit, which, with his worn shoes and not very clean linen, was tied in a bundle with a piece of bandage and marked with the dying spiritualist's name. “Miss Durand had disappeared, carrying the bundle. Miss Smith searched the far corners of the basement, but found nothing. Finally, she and Miss Durand went up-stairs again, to find that Johnson had been dead for some time. Bates, the convalescent, had seen them go and saw them return. He had, how- ever, been detected a day or so before by Miss Durand selling cocaine to a colored man in one 199 OF LETITIA CARBERRY she was in an abnormal frame of mind by this time: ill, sleepless and unable to eat. The food disappeared, but if the morphia had any effect, it was in daylight, when he probably slept, hidden away under the roof or in the linen closet. “The following night she searched the fifth, or mortuary floor, carrying a candle. She had suspected, from the night before, that Barker was hiding in the linen closet, and Linda Smith got the key. The plan had been that Miss Smith should go with her, but she was given a special case that night, and ...[iss Blake, courageously enough, went alone. “Barker was in the closet, and when she opened the door he seized her arm in a mur- derous grip that left it blue and swollen. She tried speaking to him, and releasing his hold, he darted out through the closet window and leaped to the fire-escape. Miss Blake pluckily followed him to the roof, but he had disap- peared. As Miss Lizzie has told, I followed 2OI OF LETITIA CARBERRY that she had found on the roof, and which Miss Lewis subsequently found in Miss Blake's room. “The condition of the two girls by that time was pitiable. Miss Blake, younger and more nervous, had entirely succumbed: Miss Smith, sleepless and unable to eat, was still making a fight to cover the whole thing and to drive Barker away from the building. They could not discover where he hid in the day- time, but at night evidences of his ape-like mischief were everywhere apparent. He swung by his feet from the pipe-molding of the walls, squatted on the foot-board of the bed in private room thirty-six, making hideous grimaces—a story which caused the nurse in charge to mark “delirious' on the record of a perfectly rational woman—leaped at giddy heights about the fire-escape and the roof, and alarmed Miss Aggie into her story of a ghostly foot. The man's strength was almost super- human. 203 OF LETITIA CARBERRY the cage by a roller towel which did not be- long to the Zoo. “The police were put on the case, and had already arrested the assistant keeper, who had been heard to say that either the ape would get him or he would get the ape. “On Wednesday night, Briggs, who had been most unpopular with Barker, met his death in an almost similar manner, his ribs being crushed in. In this case, however, Barker's ingenuity utilized the useless brown coat, the two towels being gone. Previous to that time, he had rocked the elevator in imp- ish mischief, or possibly wrath. It was this incident which caused my Aunt Letitia to sus- pect a space under the roof at the top of the elevator shaft, as a hiding place. “The result of her courageous investigation is well known: mounted on top of the cage, she was taken to the upper position of the shaft, and there found what she had been looking for, an unboarded spot behind the elevator wheel. 2O5 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES She was disappointed, however, in finding the space too dark for inspection, and in hearing or seeing nothing suspicious. “Being a courageous woman and convinced that what she sought was there in the cave- like recess, my Aunt Letitia threw her slipper with all the strength she could summon, and was answered by a growl. “My wife has just read this and confirms most of it. She suggests, however, that I have omitted our theory of how Briggs was murdered without discovery, while Jacobs was in the hall nearby and I myself guarded the only other means of exit, the fire-escape. “Barker probably took refuge in the linen closet, arriving at the mortuary floor ahead of the slow progress of the cage, by scurrying up the cable. He hid in the closet, and by throw- ing the coat over Briggs and squeezing him in his muscular arms, he prevented any outcry. Immediately after, he locked himself in the 2O6 OF LETITIA CARBERRY closet again, where he smoked Briggs' pipe, perhaps in itself the object of the attack. “On the alarm being raised, Hicks and I came in through the window, and Jacobs through the door. This left the fire-escape and the roof unwatched, and he climbed out the window of the linen closet, swinging himself easily to the fire-escape. “The rest of the story we know. Barker was found, exhausted and half starving, and was promptly put in a padded cell, where, a week later, he died, probably from an infec- tion, having cut his left foot badly, possibly with the very knife that killed the laboratory guinea-pigs. The injured foot, which he had crudely bandaged, probably explains why only prints of a right foot were discovered. With the removal of suspense Miss Blake recovered, and is now with me, enjoying the lilies and onion fields of Bermuda. My Aunt Letitia is at Mount Clemens, taking a series of baths and—I am informed by Miss Lizzie-carrying 2O7 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES on what she believes is a clandestine corre- spondence with the Wright brothers. Miss Aggie's hay fever left with the first frost. I am sorry to say that Miss Linda Smith has never been heard from.” THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF LETITIA CARBERRY PART Two CHAPTER I A CIGARETTE CASE, A SHOE, AND A MENU CARD we got back to the lake, and it was twenty minutes before Carpenter heard us and started the ferry across. Tish had lost her glasses in the excitement at the Sherman House, and she did not see that Carpenter had forgotten to put the bar across the end of the boat. Aggie and I screamed, but it was too late: she drove the car down the bank in the moonlight and she did not stop in time. The first we knew I. was three o'clock in the morning when we were sitting waist-deep in Lake Penzance, with Tish still holding the steering wheel and the stars making little twinkles in our laps. 209 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES As Tish said afterward, it was a fit ending to a sensational night, but, what with the wet- ting aggravating Aggie's hay fever, and my having bitten through the side of my tongue when the machine struck the bottom of the lake, it more nearly finished us. The ezgine drowned with a gurgle, and after Carpenter's first yell there wasn't a sound. Then we heard him come to the end of the ferry-boat and look down at us, and the next moment he had dropped the lantern and was doubled up on the dock, laughing like the fool he is. “Are you both there?” said Tish, without turning her head. Aggie sneezed, as she always does after a shock, and a wave moved slowly in and raised the water level with my breastbone. “We are both here,” I said, with a bitterness that was natural under the circumstances. “No thanks to you, Tish Carberry. There's no fool like an old fool.” “What do you mean?” Tish demanded 2IO OF LETITIA CARBERRY fiercely, twisting around in the water with her dust cap over her eye. “Who was it said I ought to buy the dratted thing? Drive it yourself if you think you can do any better.” “Row it,” I corrected. “It's finished for good as a touring car, but by putting an awn- ing over it we might make it into a tolerable gasoline launch.” Aggie was crying. “I told you something would happen,” she sniffled. “You'll kill us all yet, Tish Carberry —and me in my foulard silk that spots with a drop of rain!” But Tish wasn't paying any attention. She picked up the wrench that she had kept by her as a sort of weapon and stood up on the seat. Tish is a large woman. “Abraham Carpenter,” she snapped, with as much dignity as she could with her clothes glued to her, “if you do not stop that noise I will brain you.” Carpenter eased down gradually, and, hold- 2II THE AMAZING ADVENTURES ing his sides, he leaned over the end of the ferry. “What'll I do, Miss Tish?” he asked, begin- ning to jerk again, but with an eye on the wrench. “I can go around to the other dock and get a rowboat, but it'll take time.” “Don’t bother about the other dock,” Tish snapped. “Get that board there on the ferry and put one end of it down to the automobile. Then turn your back.” That's the way we got out. I went up the board first, on my hands and knees, and bar- ring a few splinters I got up very nicely. Aggie came next, and as the board was getting wet she had more trouble. But Tish had the worst, for by that time the board was as slip- pery as a toboggan; twice she got as far as the middle, only to slide back on her stomach, and the last time she refused to try again. She sat down on one of the seats, with the water up to her waist, and said that she was skinned alive, and that she wished there was a tide to 2I2 OF LETITIA CARBERRY come up and drown her and the miserable machine. We got her up finally by throwing her a rope to put under her arms, and once up she collapsed on the ferry-bench. It was then that Aggie missed the money. Carpenter had slid down the board and was preparing to salvage the cushions when Aggie clutched at her stocking and yelled. “It's gone!” she screeched, and then she sat plump down on the floor of the ferry-boat and began to cry. “What's gone?” Tish demanded. “The money,” Aggie said, feeling frantically around the tops of her shoes. “When we went over the edge something broke—I felt it—and the money's gone.” Tish had both her arms in the air and the rope over her shoulder, but she stopped strug- gling and stared at Aggie. “Gone!” she said in an awful voice. “Aggie Pilkington, every dollar of that money was graft money. Only the prospect of stuffing it 2I3 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES between that red-haired man's teeth has kept me alive through this terrible night. Don't tell me you've lost it.” “We can give him a check,” said Aggie feebly. “We can!” Tish snorted, and not another word did she say until Carpenter had taken us across the lake and we stood dripping on the front porch of the cottage, while Aggie got the key from under a flower-pot. Then Tish looked across the moonlit lake to where the cushions of the machine floated in a nest of stars at the end of the ferry-dock. “We aver- aged thirty miles an hour coming home,” she said triumphantly, “and for the first time I feel that I have mastered the machine.” Wet as we were, we remembered to put the lantern in the window as we had promised, and we thought we saw a skiff shoot out in the starlight from the other side of the lake. Tish and I took some hot milk, and Aggie had a raw egg and some more baking soda, and we 2I4 OF LETITIA CARBERRY went to bed. The stars were fading by that time, but after I got into bed I distinctly heard footsteps on the gravel below my window. “Are you sure you said the first house on the left?” Tish called to me. And then we heard . Mr. Ostermaier's voice from the upper window next door, and we knew it was all right. I crawled out and tried to see into the preacher's parlor, but the shade was partly down. I could only make out a sleeve of Mrs. Ostermaier's kimono. I was disappointed after all we had gone through. She-Mrs. Ostermaier—came over the next morning after breakfast, while Aggie's foulard silk was hanging on the clothes-line. She had been down with the other cottagers, looking across to where the red leather of Tish’s ma- chine stuck up above water-level. “Be careful,” Tish said under her breath when she saw her; “she's got something in her hand!” “What a terrible accident, and how lucky 215 OF LETITIA CARBERRY having such a dreadful experience—a young couple came to our cottage and wakened Mr. Ostermaier. I think they threw gravel through the window. They wanted to be mar- ried.” Tish sat up and tried to look scandalized. “I hope your husband didn't do it,” she said. I had to pinch Aggie; she was leaning forward with her eyes bulging. That put Mrs. Ostermaier on the defensive. “Why not?” she demanded. “They had a license, and they were of age. I believe in en- couraging young love; Mr. Ostermaier says it is the most beautiful thing in the world. Cousin Maggie and I were witnesses, and we threw rice after them. It was barley, really, but we didn't discover that until this morning.” Aggie gave a sigh of relief; we had guessed, but it was the first time we had really known. “I told Mr. Ostermaier that it gave me quite a thrill the way he looked at her as Harold pronounced them man and wife. “All the 217 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES world loves a lover,’ and Cousin Maggie has been reading Ella Wheeler Wilcox diligently all morning.” She turned to go and we breathed easier. Now that we knew they were safely married-– Mrs. Ostermaier turned and started back. “I nearly forgot what brought me,” she called. “My Willie found this in the bed of your automobile, Miss Tish.” She held out the cigarette case and Tish took it and dropped it into her work-basket. “It belongs to my nephew, Charlie Sands,” she said, looking Mrs. Ostermaier in the eye. Tish has plenty of courage, but I felt calamity coming. “So I told Mr. Ostermaier,” the creature said, with a smile. “But he insists on remark- ing the coincidence that the initials on the cigarette case are W. L. and that the young man's name on the license was Walter Lewis.” I have always thanked Heaven that at that moment her Willie fell off the dock, and al- 218 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES “It's been puzzlin' me for four days, Miss Lizzie,” he said, fumbling with the string of the bundle. “I sez to Mrs. C., sez I, ‘It ain’t possible,” I sez. “She sez she lost her shoe when the automobile went into the water, and she's a truthful woman; and yet, two days after, the chambermaid at the Sherman House finds it high and dry under a bureau, forty miles away. It's spooky,' I sez.” Aggie was pouring hot water into the teapot, and she kept on pouring till it went all over the place. “Nonsense,” said Tish. “That shoe doesn't belong to Miss Lizzie.” But I looked at Carpenter's face and I knew it was hopeless. “You’ve been a good friend to us, Mr. Car- penter,” I said. “We’ve always felt we've owed you something. Here's a little present, and thank you for the shoe.” He took the money and we looked each other straight in the eye. Then he grinned. 22O OF LETITIA CARBERRY “For twenty dollars, Miss Lizzie,” he said, “I’d be willing to swallow my tongue back- ward. And the shoe ain't the tongue kind.” CHAPTER II A BLUE RUNABOUT AND A BAD BRIDGE OTH Aggie and I had objected when B Tish talked of buying an automobile. But the more you talk against a thing to Tish the more she wants it. It was just the same the time her niece, Maria Lee, went to Europe for the whole summer and offered Tish her motor-boat. Aggie and I protested, but the boat came, and Tish had a lesson or two and sent to town for a yachting cap. Then, one day when we were making elderberry jelly and ran out of sugar, Tish offered to take me to the mainland in the boat. That was the time, you remember, when the stopping lever got jammed, and Tish and I circled around Lake Penzance for seven hours, with people on dif- ferent docks trying to lasso us with ropes as we 222 LETITIA CARBERRY flew past, and Aggie in hysterics on the beach below the cottage. People of Penzance still speak of that day, for we figured out that we had enough gasoline to run one hundred and sixty miles, and after Peter Miller, at Point Lena, had lassoed us and was dragged for a quarter of a mile before he caught hold of a buoy and could let go of the rope, we got desperate. I was at the wheel and Tish was trying to stop the engine, pouring water over it and attempting to stick an iron rod in the wheels. And just as she succeeded, and the rod shot through the awning on the top of the launch like a sky-rocket, I turned the thing toward shore where it looked fairly flat. “I’m going to get to land,” I said with my teeth clenched. “I don't care if it crawls up and dies in a plowed field; I'm going to get my feet on dry land again.” I had not expected it to stop so suddenly, but it did, and Tish and I and the granulated sugar landed some distance ahead of the boat and 223 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES well above high-water mark; in fact, Tish broke her collar-bone, and that entire summer, whenever the doctor had to peel off the ad- hesive plaster, Tish would get ugly and turn On 111C. Well, we should have known about the auto- mobile. I had a queer feeling when I started out that morning. Tish had had the car out the day before by herself for the first time— both Aggie and I had had the good judgment to refuse—and she got home safely, although she had a queer-looking mark on her right cheek, and one of the mud-guards didn't look exactly right. She said she had had a lovely ride, and we helped her push the machine into the wash-house, where we had had Carpenter knock out a side, and then she went to bed and had a cup of tea. Aggie heard something moving that night, and she found Tish sitting up on the side of her bed, holding like death to the back of a chair and turning it around like a wheel. Aggie got her back to bed, but 224 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES hang of going slow. But there's one comfort about going fast: you get around much quicker.” At the foot of the stairs she stopped and called up. “I’m going to take a tablespoonful of black- berry wine,” she said. “I feel chilly in the small of my back.” Aggie and I didn't say anything, but we each took a tablespoonful of blackberry wine also. Tish had written out a list of things to do to start the car, such as “Turn A,” “Push forward B,” and so on. And she had pasted bits of paper marked A and B on the levers and plugs. So I read: “Turn A; push up B; crank, and release C.” It started nicely. “Just one thing,” Tish said over her shoul- der as we passed the Ostermaier cottage, and they waved to us from the porch: “Don’t scream in my ears; don't lean over and clutch me around the neck; and if we run over any- 226 OF LETITIA CARBERRY thing, try to look as if you didn't know we had.” Luckily she had not noticed my traveling bag. After the affair of the launch I was pre- pared for anything, and I had packed up three nightgowns, a balsam pillow, a roll of band- age, a bottle of arnica, a cake of soap, my sewing box and a prayer-book. Aggie had some sandwiches; so we felt we were prepared for everything, from sudden death to losing a button. We got on to the ferry safely enough. Car- penter, who runs the cable drum of the ferry with a gas engine, examined the machine with a great deal of interest on the way over. “It's a pretty hot day, Miss Tish,” he called as we were starting off the boat. “You’ll have to watch her; she'll boil.” Tish looked worried, but she said nothing. “What is there to boil?” Aggie whispered to me. “The gasoline,” I told her; “and if it boils 227 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES it’ll explode. I'm no mechanic, but I know that much.” After a few moments' silence Aggie leaned forward. “Tish,” she said. “Don’t take my mind off this machine!” Tish shouted back. “Isn't that a buggy com- ing?” “It's too far off to see. It's either a buggy or a wagon,” I said. “Tish, where's the gaso- line tank?” But Tish wasn't listening. “Why doesn't that man turn out? Does he want the whole road?” she snapped. There was a silence while we neared the buggy ahead. Then Tish leaned over and began jerking at levers. “I can't stop the thing,” she gasped, “and there isn't room to pass!” There wasn't time to pray. I saw Aggie shut her eyes, and the next moment there was a terrific jar. Aggie and I were flung together in a corner of the seat, a man yelled, and the 228 OF LETITIA CARBERRY next minute we had leaped out of the ditch again and were going smoothly along the road. I glanced behind. The man had halted his horse and was standing up in the buggy, star- ing after us. “I didn't think I could do it,” said Tish com- placently. “Only the grace of God took you into that ditch and out again, Tish Carberry,” I snapped. “And if you are going to do any more circus performances I want to get out.” She could stop the car well enough when there was no crying need to, and now, to our alarm, she stopped every now and then and got out and held her hand over the front of the machine, like testing the owen for cake. Finally she said: “It's boiling!” Aggie got ready to jump. “It'll explode, won't it?” she quavered. “I don't see why it should explode,” Tish replied, wetting her finger to see if it sizzled 229 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES when she touched it. “But it's hot enough, in all conscience. A good rain would cool it.” The sun was blazing down on us, however, and there was no sign of rain. I said I would just as soon be blown up as melted down, and we got in again. The machine would not start. We all took a turn at the handle in front, but it was like winding a clock with a broken spring. That is where the man and the girl and the little Pomeranian dog enter the story. For they came along in a blue runabout car just as Tish threw her book called Automobile Troubles over the fence and said she was going to walk home. The book said: “Beginners having trouble with their engines should look under the headings Ignition, Carburation, Lu- brication, Compression, Circulation and Tim- ing.” As Tish remarked, the only one that was understandable was Circulation, and any- body could tell without a book that the car wasn't circulating to any extent. 230 OF LETITIA CARBERRY Just as Tish threw the book away the young man in the blue runabout stopped and got out. “In trouble?” he asked. “Can I do anything for you?” “It was boiling,” said Tish. “I suppose something has melted inside.” “Oh, I think not.” He looked at the car, pushed something, went round and turned the handle—crank, Tish called it, and it's a good name—and the engine started. “You didn't have your gas on,” said the young man. “And don't worry; you're sure to heat up on a day like this, but nothing will melt.” “Or explode?” asked Aggie. “Or explode.” He looked at the girl and smiled, and when we started off they were still there, watching us. The dog yelped, and the girl smiled and waved her hand. Aggie, who is far-sighted, turned around a second time. “He reminds me of Mr. Wiggins,” she said with a sigh, still 23.I THE AMAZING ADVENTURES looking back. Aggie was engaged years ago to a young man in the roofing business, who fell off a roof. After a minute, “He’s kissing her!” she gasped. After that she nearly broke her neck watching them out of sight. Aggie is ro- mantic. I turned around, but I had on my near glasses. I don't know how we lost the Noblestown Pike. Tish blamed it on having to drive with one eye shut, on account of something getting into the other. Aggie's nose was sunburned and swelling, and I would have given a good bit for something heavy in my lap to anchor me. When I was a girl I rode horseback, and with any kind of a steady horse you can tell when the next jolt is coming; but Tish's ma- chine has a way of coming up and hitting you when you are off guard, so to speak. To go back, after an hour or so we found we were on the wrong road. It kept growing narrower, and when at last it became only a 232 OF LETITIA CARBERRY dusty country lane Tish realized it herself. There was a rickety farmhouse about two hun- dred feet from the road, with a woman bend- ing over a washtub outside the door. I stood up and made a megaphone of my hands. “Which way to the Noblestown Pike?” I yelled, while Tish got out and stuck a wet finger on the hood over the engine. The woman looked up and pointed sullenly in the direction from which we had come. We looked at the road. There wasn't a spot to turn—not another road in sight to back into. It was hotter than ever. The engine hummed like a teakettle on a hot stove, and there were little clouds of blue smoke coming from some- where or other about it. Aggie said she thought the gasoline tank was on fire. “If it is you'll soon know it,” said Tish grimly. “It’s under the seat. I’m going to back up on to this bridge business over the gutter. I think I can make it.” “Do you know how to back up?” I asked; 233 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES and just at that minute the woman left her tub and started to run down the walk. Tish backed. With an awful grinding of wheels she got the right lever finally; the ma- chine gave a jerk that would have decapitated a chicken, and we backed slowly on to the timbers that bridged the gutter and made a road toward the house. When it gave the first crack we shouted—Aggie and I. It might not have been too late, but Tish put on the emer- gency brake by mistake and for a minute we hung on the verge. Then we began to settle. We went down slowly, with Tish above us and rising; and when we stopped, there we were, Aggie and I and the rear of the machine, a good four feet below Tish and the engine, with something grinding like mad and clouds of smoke everywhere. When we crawled out the woman who owned the bridge was standing on the bank looking down at us, and her face was some- thing awful. 234 OF LETITIA CARBERRY “You’ll fix that bridge before you leave!” she said, shutting her mouth hard on the last word. “You’ll fix that automobile before I'm through with you!” said Tish, pointing at the thing, which looked like a horse sitting down in a gutter. “Oh, rats!” the woman said rudely. “That's four of them things that's gone through that bridge this week, and I'm good and sick of it. Ain't there any other bridges in Chester county?” “Not like that,” retorted Tish, eying the ruins. “You don't call that a bridge, do you?” “It was,” said the woman. She came forward and a ferocious-looking dog stepped from behind her. Tish looked at the dog. “It wasn't much of a bridge,” she said, more politely. “If you've got any men on the place I'll give them a dollar apiece to get my machine out of there.” 235 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES “No men around,” said the woman shortly. “Theodore,”—to the dog—“don’t you go around bitin' until I give you the word. Sit down.” The dog sat down. “Before you leave,” she said to Tish, “you'll mend that bridge or I'll know the reason why. Meantime your automobile is trespassin', and the fine is twenty dollars.” Then she sat down on the bank and began to tickle the dog's ears with a blade of grass. “Theodore,” she said, “if them three old maids think they can bluff us, they don't know us, do they?” I had stood about as much as I could, so I walked around in front of her and glared at her. “I wouldn't sit so close to the automobile if I were you,” I remarked emphatically. “Some- thing is likely to explode.” “I feel like it,” she said. “When I get mad I'm good an’ mad. Anyhow, I own this place, 236 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES wrapper was wet through with sweat, and the dog trailed at her heels. Aggie, who is always sentimental, took a step after her. “I say,” she called. “If we come back for you some nice afternoon, will you let us take you for a ride?” But she got no answer. To our amazement, the woman turned around at the top of the path and put her thumb to her nose! We did not see her again for some time, but after Tish had climbed in twice and started the engine, to see if the car couldn't climb out— the only result being that it almost turned over —the woman appeared again. She carried a board that looked like a breadboard nailed to a broom-handle, and on it, in fresh ink, as if she had done it with her finger, were the words: “Trespassing—fifty dollars.” “You said twenty before,” I protested. “That was for those little dinky, one-seated affairs,” she said, jabbing the broom-handle into the dirt beside the road. “Two seats, 238 OF LETITIA CARBERRY forty dollars; two seats and a folded back buggy-top, fifty.” She adjusted the sign care- fully, looked up and down the road, and then went back to the house. - So we sat down on the bank and Tish ex- plained how she happened to do it. I am a Christian woman, and Aggie is so gentle that she has to scratch twice to light a match, but I must say we were bitter. We told Tish we didn't care how she happened to do it, and that some day she would be punished for a temper that made her throw away books that she would be sure to need some time; and that, anyhow, an unmarried woman of fifty has no business with an automobile. “It’s my belief,” Tish retorted, “that she keeps her old bridge for this very purpose. She could make a good living off it, and all the work she'd have to do would be to build it up after every accident.” “Oh, no,” Aggie said bitterly. “We are go- ing to repair it, I believe.” 239 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES The back of my neck began to smart from the sun, and the dust eddied around us. A white hen came down the path, hopped on to the sloping step of the machine, perked its head at us, and then, with a squawk, flew up into Tish's seat behind the wheel. I was thirsty and my neck prickled. Early in the afternoon we had a difference of opinion about who should walk the five miles to telephone for help, and after that we did not speak to each other. Tish talked to the machine and Aggie to the chicken. Every now and then Tish, after staring at the machine for a while, would get up and pick up the soundest of the bridge timbers, put it under the dropped end of the car and push with all her might. “Call this a bridge?”—push—“Why, this is nothing”—push—“but a rotten old fence-rail!” —bang!—the timber broke. Tish stood with her back to us and kicked the pieces; then she turned on us. “As far as I'm concerned,” she snapped, “the thing can sit there till it takes 240 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES “Water, one dollar a tin. For automobiles, five dollars a bucket.” The woman came out and pumped some. The water ran cool and clear into a trough and then spread over the ground in dreadful waste. I could have lapped it up out of the trough; every bit of skin on me and lining membrane in me yelled “Water!” and—I had no money with me! The woman stood and waited, Theo- dore beside her. “That's an outrage,” I fumed. “How dare you put up such a sign! I–I shall report you!” “Who to?” she inquired. “I ain't askin' you to drink it, am I? It's my well, ain't it?” “I’ll send the money to you by mail.” I had lost all my pride. “I’ll come back and pay you.” “Cash in advance,” said the creature; and, pumping enough into a tin basin to have cooled me inside and out, she put it down for the dog to drink! CHAPTER III A DIFFERENCE OF OPINION AND A BARGAIN HAVE always felt that we did the right I thing that night. It was all very well for Charlie Sands, Tish's nephew, when he heard the story, to say: “And they talk about giving women the vote! Why, for sense they would substitute sentiment; they would buy their opinions at the department stores along with their bargains, and a little two-penny love affair could upset the Government!” Tish was raging. “It does not matter whether you approve or not, Charlie,” she said loftily, “as long as our consciences approve.” “Approve!” He nearly fell back out of his chair. “My dear ladies, you should every one have been jailed ! As for conscience, I'd give a thousand dollars to have a conscience that 243 OF LETITIA CARBERRY motor veil. She was walking with her hands in the pockets of her ulster, and she was limp- ing. About a dozen feet behind her, and stop- ping every now and then so as not to overtake her, came the runabout. It was very peculiar. The young man had his jaws set tight, and as he was staring at the girl, and as she was star- ing straight ahead, neither of them saw us on the bank just above their heads. The girl—she was a very pretty girl, al- though streaky just then—had a tight grip on the Pomeranian. She had it tucked under her arm and it was wriggling and yelping to be free. Just after the blue machine had turned the corner the little beast got loose, and with a yelp he dashed to the car and into the empty Seat. The girl stopped. So did the car. She faced about and the young man gazed over her head. Suddenly the girl looked up and saw us, and with a quick glance she spied the lamps of 245 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES Tish's machine around a curve. No one would have guessed from the front end of the thing that the rear had died in a gutter. “Oh!” she said. “Oh, I'm so glad you're here! Are you going back to town?” “We are not going anywhere,” Tish replied shortly, “unless your young man can help us.” “He is not my young man,” the girl retorted, with distinctness; “but if there isn't very much the matter I daresay he can do something.” “I am not an automobile expert,” he said, “but I probably can help a little, as, for in- stance, stuffing a puncture with rags until we get back to the city.” The girl flushed. It was evidently a personal allusion. “We haven't any rags,” said Aggie, “and it isn't a puncture.” - “There are two things we might do,” said the young gentleman as he eyed our ma- chine critically. “I might go to the near- est telephone and have help sent out from town, but as it's almost sunset it's pretty late 246 OF LETITIA CARBERRY for that; or, with a jack and a little help, we might fix it ourselves.” “A jack!” Tish said with scorn. “What kind of a jack—a bootjack or a jackass? I daresay they have them both at that farm- house; I know they have one.” “A jack—a lever,” explained the young man, beginning to work at the lock of the tool- box. “Where are you going—to Noblestown?” “To the lake,” I replied. Tish was fum- bling for the keys to the machine which she kept in a pocket in her petticoat. “We have a summer cottage there.” “I’ll make a bargain with you,” he suggested. “The—the—er—young lady refuses to go back in my car. We—the fact is, we have had a small difference of opinion, and—she insists on walking home. If I get your machine in shape, will you take her to the city?” We would have taken her anywhere short of a planet to get away ourselves, and that was how it began; for the young gentleman took 247 OF LETITIA CARBERRY Mr. Lewis got into the car and put on the power. There was a terrible grinding, but nothing moved. From behind, the three of us shoved, and Aggie said between gasps that if anything gave way her niece was to have her amethyst pin. “Anne!” cried the young gentleman. But Miss Anne was powdering her nose and we all saw her turn it up. “Anne!” called the young man who was not her young man, “you'll have to help here.” “Help yourself,” said Anne coolly, and, moistening her finger, she proceeded to wipe the powder off her eyebrows. Mr. Lewis shut off the engine, got out of the car and put on his coat. The girl did not turn her head, but she was watching through the mirror, for as he picked up his cap she rose lazily, put away her toilet things and started in our direction. “What shall I do?” she asked Tish, ignor- ing him. 249 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES “Push,” said Tish sharply—“unless you are too lame.” “My being lame won't matter, unless you wish me to kick the machine out,” retorted the girl sweetly; and with that, the power being on, she put her brown arms against the car and her shoulder-muscles leaped up under her thin dress, and before I had planted my feet in the ditch the car rose, clung for a minute to the edge, and was over into the road. The girl said nothing. She looked at her hands, stepped out of the ditch, patronizingly helped Aggie out of it, and swung up the path with her head in the air. When I saw her again she had taken the sign off the pump and thrown it in the grass, and was washing her hands uncon- cernedly while the woman stood in the door and yapped at her. If she had a mite of sense she would have gone back to the city in the blue car and let us go home to bed. But when she had come back to the road and the young man suggested 250 CHAPTER IV, THE APPETIZERS AND THE HOTEL BUREAU W M 7 E didn't talk very much. Tish was anxious to show she could drive, for all she had sat us down in a ditch, and after she took a wrong turning and stampeded a herd that was being milked in a barnyard, I could not keep my mind off the road. Once I looked at the girl, and there were tears running down her nose and dropping into her lap. I gave her my smelling salts, which I always carry in Tish's machine, and after a while she reached over and slid her hand into mine. “I shouldn't care if the car went to pieces,” she said. “I’d be happier dead.” “If you are always as unpleasant to that young man as you were this evening, I doubt it,” I snapped. 252 LETITIA CARBERRY “Didn't you ever quarrel with your husband before you were married?” she demanded, looking at me sideways. “I thank Heaven I never had a husband,” I replied, and with that she looked uncomfort- able and drew her hand away. - “Is your—friend married?” she inquired. And it took me a moment to realize that she meant Aggie and that the minx was jealous. Aggie is fifty, and so thin that when she wears a tailor-made suit she has to build out with pneumatics. You remember, at the Woman's Suffrage Convention, how Mrs. Bailey pinned a badge to Aggie, and how there was a slow hissing immediately, and Aggie caved in be- fore our very eyes? Mr. Lewis checked our wild career after a few miles by getting ahead of us, and we got into town about eight. But after we had left the girl at her house—an imposing place, with a man at the door and a limousine at the curb —it was too late to go back home. Aggie and 253 OF LETITIA CARBERRY tude these days—right before anything, honor above all.” Tish waved the hairbrush and then she turned on the maid. “Girl,” she snapped, “why is this brush chained?” “The ladies steal them,” said the girl. Tish stared at the chain. “You are so quick, Letitia,” Aggie protested. “It was the other way round. The girl was angry because he wouldn't sell his vote, even for her.” Tish sat down in a chair, speechless; but just then Mr. Lewis came to the door and said that supper and the Martinis were ready. The Martinis proved to be something to drink, and after Mr. Lewis had raised his hand and sworn there was no whisky in them we drank them. He said they were appetizers, and the other day Tish said she was going to write to the Sherman House for the recipe before she has the minister to dinner next week. Never did I eat so delightful a meal. Tish forgot her sprained shoulder and the splinter 255 OF LETITIA CARBERRY felt better, but we were all wide awake and the heat was terrible. We could look out the window and see there was a breeze, but not a breath came in. We sent for the bell-boy again, and he said there wasn't another room and nobody he could move around to give us a room on the breezy side of the house. We took the rules and regulations card off the door and fanned with it, but it did not help much. After half an hour or so Tish got up, pushed the washstand in front of a door that connected with the next room and crawled up on it. “If I had a chair,” she said, measuring the distance with her eye, “I could see if that cor- ner room next door is occupied. I could tell by that boy's face that he was lying.” Aggie was trying to hold down the baking soda, so, although I didn't feel any too well myself, I held the chair and Tish climbed up on it. 257 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES “What did I tell you?” she demanded when she got down. “That room's empty, and what's more there's nobody belonging there. There's nothing on the dresser but the towel; and there's a breeze coming in that sends the curtains straight into the room.” The connecting door was locked, and Tish put a bed sheet around her and tried the hall door. That was locked, too. And all the time we were getting hotter and hotter, and by putting our ears to the keyhole we could hear the breeze blowing on the other side. It was too much for Tish. “I’m going over the transom,” she an- nounced, after we had tried the dresser key in the door without any effect. And go over she did, after putting on her stockings to keep her legs from being scraped. It was much cooler. We brought in our clothes and Aggie's cot, and spread up the bed in the room we had left. Then we locked the connecting door again, and after Aggie had 258 OF LETITIA CARBERRY shut my eyes and feel for it. And so, neither of us being certain the bureau had moved, and nothing more occurring, we lay back again. The next minute Tish clutched me and I looked over. Something had happened to the bureau. It looked phosphorescent, or as though it was on fire inside. There was a glow all around it. The keyholes stood out like dots of flame, and every crack gleamed. It was the most awful thing I have ever seen. “Look!” gasped Tish, and, reaching over the side of the bed, she picked up a shoe and flung it with all her might at the thing. The thump was followed by a thud inside the bureau. Aggie stirred. “The milkman's knocking,” she said thickly, and sat up and yawned with her eyes shut. Tish and I leaped out of bed and I turned on the light. That gave us new courage, and the dresser stood there, just like any other dresser, with a towel on its yellow-pine top and fly- specks on the mirror. Tish and I looked at 261 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES each other and smiled in a sickly way. We felt foolish. But Tish wasn't satisfied. She picked up a hair-brush and banged it on the top. “Coming, Mr. Gibbs,” bawled Aggie, still with her eyes shut, and she began to fumble around on the floor for her slippers. “Wake her!” Tish commanded. “There's something moving in this thing. Lizzie, give me that pitcher of scalding water.” Of course there wasn't any hot water nearer than the bath-room, which was three turns to the right, one to the left and down a flight of stairs. And at that minute the bureau spoke. “Don’t, for God's sake, ladies!” it said. CHAPTER V. THE REPORTER AND THE RED-HAIRED MAN SCREAMED, and, as was perfectly nat- I ural, I backed away from the thing. My foot tripped over Tish's water-pitcher, and my sitting down was what wakened Aggie. She says she never will forget how she felt when she saw me prostrate and Tish holding a chair aloft and begging the bureau to come out so she could brain it. Of course she thought Tish had gone crazy, what with the sun and excite- ment of the day. “Tish!” she screeched. “Come out !” said Tish to the bureau. “Make no resistance; we are armed !” As Aggie says, when she saw the left-hand side of that bureau move slowly forward like a door when Tish spoke to it, she thought she had a touch of sun herself. But when she saw 263 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES this room, after the banquet, a bribe is going to be offered. That bureau has been ready for a month. Ladies, I implore you, go back to the other room!” It was too late. At that moment there were voices in the hall and somebody put a key into the lock of the door. There was no time to put the light out. The young man dropped behind the foot of the bed, the door swung open and a red-haired man stepped into the TOO111. “Suffering cats!” he exclaimed. “Go out immediately!” I said, pointing to the door. Tish was unwinding herself from the counterpane. She took it off airily and flung it over the foot of the bed, so that it covered the young man. It looked abandoned, but the necessity was terrible. As Tish said afterward, fifty years of respectable living would not have prevented the tongue of scan- dal licking up such a spicy morsel as that com- promising situation. 266 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES tleman. “These women in here came over the transom from the next room. It's empty.” “Good gracious!” Aggie gasped. “I left my forms hanging to the gas-jet!” The red-haired man backed into the hall, but he still held the door. “I’m going home,” said our Mr. Lewis again. “I’m sick of things around here, any- how. I’ve got a chance to get an orange grove cheap in California.” “Fiddlesticks!” retorted the red-haired man. “Why don't you stick by the plum tree here at home?” On that the door closed, and we could hear them talking guardedly in the hall. “The wretches!” Tish fumed. “Oh, why haven't women the vote? I tell you”—she fixed Aggie and me with a gesture—“the day of conscience is coming. Women stand for civic purity, for the home, for right against might!” It was the “right against might” that we 208 OF LETITIA CARBERRY repeated to her afterward, when we had stolen—but that is coming soon. “But he loves the girl,” said Aggie, begin- ning to sniffle. “I—I think as much of ci—civic purity as you do, Tish Carberry, but I th—think he is just p—pig-headed.” “The girl's a fool and so are you,” said Tish, beginning to take the counterpane off the reporter. And at that second there was a knock and the red-haired man opened the door again. “I beg your pardon,” he apologized, “but will you give me the key to the other room?” We did. Aggie unlocked the connecting door and brought back the key to our old room and the things she had left on the gas-jet. In the excitement she threw the key on the dresser and was just about to reach the other articles through the crack in the door when Tish caught her arm. CHAPTER VI A BRIBE AND A BRIDE AND IT's ALL over OW I am not defending what followed. N But the Lewis man had been nice to us, and, as Tish said tartly to Charlie Sands, women who had lived in single blessedness as long as we had, learned to think quick and act quicker. As to the law, we sent a check to the farmer whose pig we killed—and with pork at its present price it was ruinous, al- though we were glad it had not been a cow; and as to using our missionary money to make up for the packet Aggie lost—as we said, we considered that it had been used in missionary work. It was hardest, of course, on the Morn- ing Star reporter. Only a week or so ago we had to go to Noblestown to get a new handle for the meat-chopper. We were in the ma- chine outside the store, and when we saw him 270 LETITIA CARBERRY it was too late. Tish was wearing his necktie —having gathered it up with her clothes that awful night, and not knowing his name she could not send it back to him—and she clapped her hand over it. But he saw it. “Good afternoon,” he said, grinning. “What do you mean by addressing us?” Tish demanded, trying to pull the collar of her duster over the tie. “You don't mean to say you've forgotten me already!” he exclaimed, looking grieved. “Don’t you remember—your—our room at the Sherman House?” “Certainly not,” Tish said haughtily. He pulled out a card and scribbled some- thing on it.” “My card,” he said. He leaned over from the curb and gave it to Tish. “Don’t bother about the tie,” he said. “I never liked it anyhow. But—I lost a scarfpin that night. I—I suppose you don't know any- thing about it?” Out of the corner of her eye Tish saw Aggie 271 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES make a clutch at her neck, and she threw her a warning glance. “I am afraid you have made a mistake,” she said stiffly, and just then the hardware man brought out the handle. Tish was so excited that she started the car without paying for it, and when we looked back he and the reporter were staring after us; and the reporter dis- tinctly said, “Those women will be wealthy some day.” “Why didn't you let me give him his pin?” Aggie demanded when we were safely out of sight. “I—I feel like a thief.” “Fiddle ! And confess?” said Tish. “We’ll send it to him. I’ve got his card.” But all he had written on it, after all, was, “A. Dresser. Private Bureau.” Charlie Sands has promised to return the pin. Well, all this time I have left the three of us huddled in our nightgowns on the side of the bed, with sheets draped over us, and the Morning Star gentleman with his ear to the 272 OF LETITIA CARBERRY connecting door and taking down every word that was said, in shorthand. Robertson was offering the girl, and enough money for Mr. Lewis to marry on, for his vote on something or other. I reckon the balance between a man's honor and his cupidity hangs pretty even any- how, and when you throw a girl to one side or the other it swings the scale. The Lewis man was yielding and Tish was breathing hard. “The hussy!” she muttered. “Did you notice how pretty her hair was in the sunlight?” whispered Aggie. Somehow it came over me then how young the girl was, and what kind of moral sense could one expect of a girl with that red-headed scamp for a father? Strangely enough, the plot was gentle Ag- gie's. Aggie is like baking powder—she rises when she gets heated up. And she was mad clear through. We had no trouble gathering our clothes in our arms, although I could not find my shoe, which Tish had thrown at the 273 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES bureau. Then we sat and waited. At the last minute Aggie got a little weak and wanted blackberry wine, but I had nothing in the satchel but arnica. All we intended to do was to get the yellow notebook—to meet strategy with strategy. The rest, while unexpected, followed natu- rally. But when I look out the window from my desk and see Aggie's placid face, and Tish's austere Methodist profile, it is difficult to associate them or myself with the three partly dressed creatures who— But to go back. We had locked the door into the hall and each of us had her clothes. When the two men in the next room went out Mr. Morning Star turned to us with a chuckle. “Thanks for your forbearance, ladies,” he said, “we’ve got that villain Robertson where he ought to have been a dozen years ago. And He shut his notebook with a bang, and there was something in his face -> as for Lewis— 274 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES We had expected, of course, to get the note- book, to dress, and to leave in the machine quietly, but from that time on there was no time to think of the conventions. The young man began to hammer on the door and other doors opened along the hall. Then a bell-boy came up and ran off in a hurry for a key. I saw Tish putting on her ulster over her petti- coat, and Aggie and I did the same. The next thing we knew we were down in the empty lobby, and Tish had forgotten the spark plugs! We got started finally with a steel hairpin for a plug, and as we moved away I heard the chase coming down the stairs after us. They were howling “Stop thief!” We were hardly well under way when the bell-boy came in sight with the bureau man at his heels and a collection of people in all sorts of costumes fol- lowing. Tish says we did forty miles an hour going down the main street. I should have guessed more than that. I had a fearful exaltation: 276 OF LETITIA CARBERRY Aggie had advanced her speed limit since morning from four miles an hour to the ca- pacity of the engine, and kept bawling to Tish a phrase she had caught from Charlie Sands. “Letter out!” she cried, over and over. “Letter out!” We stopped on a quiet side street and lis- tened, but there was no noise of pursuit. Tish got out and stuck her wet finger on the hood, but it wasn't boiling. “There's nothing coming,” she said. “I’m going to stop long enough to put on my stock- ings.” “I don't see why you couldn't have flung your own shoe, Tish,” I snapped. “What use is one shoe?—unless I lose a leg, and that's as like as not before this night's over.” “Do you see where we are?” Aggie asked. “Isn't this where we brought Miss Anne?” It was, for Anne opened the door just then and peered down at the car. “Is that you, father?” she called. She came 277 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES down the steps, and the light from the hall fell full on us. We must have looked rather strange, with Tish putting on her stocking in the driving seat and the most of our clothing in our laps instead of on us. “Something has happened!” she said, catch- ing her breath. “Ted" “Something has happened,” Tish retorted grimly, and held up the notebook. “Here's the Morning Star's shorthand report of the interview in which your Ted sold his honor for a mess of pottage—you being the pot- tage.” “Oh, no,” said Miss Anne, going wobbly. “Oh, he wouldn't—he didn't do such a thing!” “Upon my soul!” I broke in. “Weren't you fighting him all day to do it?” “You couldn't understand,” she said, look- ing at me with the eyes of a baby. “I didn't want him to do it; I wanted him to want to do it.” “Well, if that's being in love, thank Heaven 278 OF LETITIA CARBERRY us, and we overtook the other one as he was going into his doorway. The girl jumped out and ran after him. We distinctly heard him say, “Anne! Darling!” And then, what with anxiety and excitement, Aggie took the worst sneezing spell of the summer, and the rest was lost. He was terribly ashamed and humiliated, and he said he would take the girl away and be married right off, only he had that wretched package of bribe money that made him think, every time he saw it, how unworthy he was of her! He was going to put it down a sewer drop, but Tish suggested that they be married and go on a honeymoon, and let us return the bribe to Mr. Robertson. 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. Oster- maier. “I don't like him,” she remarked, “and his wife is a dowdy, but I suppose you don't 281 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES expect an organ prelude and floral decora- tions. 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 land- ing 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 282 OF LETITIA CARBERRY 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 des- peradoes. 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 283 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES 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 OTHING would have induced me to N 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 Water- melon Camp knew the kimono. He brought it up the next morning, hang- ing 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 285 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES 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 no- body 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 be- fore she knew what she was saying. Any- how, it did no good, for the young man in 286 OF LETITIA CARBERRY 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 whis- pered 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 287 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES 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 apo- plexy 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—cher- ish, go in and examine the house.” 288 OF LETITIA CARBERRY Carpenter had come up and stood respect- fully by, listening, and to my horror I saw that he held the other half of Aggie's broken Oat. “He won't go into my room!” Aggie said suddenly, and with amazing clearness, consid- ering 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 trous- ers to make a sensation on one of the nearby 289 OF LETITIA CARBERRY ing, 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 Hagel 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 thiroke.” 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 in- 29I THE AMAZING ADVENTURES stead of his pants and a bandage on his head, and the Witch Hagel stole last night by some- body 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 tri- umphantly. “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 Hagel last night. If them teeth ever belonged in a fish, then I'm a dentist.” 292 OF LETITIA CARBERRY 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 Ag- gie 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 Car- penter 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 293 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES down again, “but—but the wretches didn’t be- lieve 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 par- rot 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. THE AMAZING ADVENTURES out into the lake again, paying no attention to Tish, who ran down the path and tried to sig- nal 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 bit- ten 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 296 OF LETITIA CARBERRY 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 111OWe. 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 297 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES the dog was awake and had eaten part of the sponge. It was a terrible disappointment. As Tish said afterward, we should have anaes- thetized 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 deter- mination, 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 con- science and hunted up a bottle of cleaning fluid to put in the boat. “It's mostly gasoline,” she said. “If it's 300 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES 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 1” she gur- gled. “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 im- mortal soul.” Agatha sloshed a half-dozen steps up the dock. Then she turned on us both in the dark- 1162SS. 302 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES 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 a11 Oal". “There!” she snapped, turning on me, of course. “Just look what your pig-headed- ness—” She never finished. She was staring, petri- fied, 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 306 OF LETITIA CARBERRY 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 say- ing, “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 un- wound 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 307 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES yourself?” she asked furiously. “Cover your- self. Your back! Look at your legs!” “As long as you sit quiet and behave your- self, you may stay in the boat,” I added with as much composure as I could get over my trem- bling 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. “Upon my soul!” he muttered, and then aloud: “How in the name of all that is nau- tical did you ladies get as far from shore as this, when you are rowing in different direc- tions?” 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 308 OF LETITIA CARBERRY 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!” 309 OF LETITIA CARBERRY 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 im- pression 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 thank- ful,” when the boat bumped without warning into something. It was just in time. As I, the last, was 3I5 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES hauled into the motor-launch, the Witch Hagel slid greasily under the surface, to rise no more. (The loss of the Witch Hagel was deplor- able, and later on we sent Carpenter, anony- mously, 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.) THE AMAZING ADVENTURES 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 318 OF LETITIA CARBERRY. —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 not 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 ad- versity, and sank in a sea of woe.” He raged up and down the launch, muttering strange 319 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES 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 some- thing. 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 ex- claimed. “He hath mange.” “Fleas!” Tish snapped. 32O OF LETITIA CARBERRY “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 gaso- line?” 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 fa- ther's) and obtain some gasoline. Also, he would try to find some clothes. It shows how thoroughly demoralized we were that not one 32I THE AMAZING ADVENTURES man behind it, desperation gave me a courage that has appalled me since. I went over to the engine and tried to “spin- ner.” 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 quiv- ered. 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 326 OF LETITIA CARBERRY 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. OF LETITIA CARBERRY 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 dark- ness ahead. “Better than I expected,” he said with sup- pressed 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 daunt- lessly 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 333 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES Long Point, and our lantern showed two peo- ple, 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 triangu- lar 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- 334 wºuliº ſtay m" -- OF LETITIA CARBERRY 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 Carle- ton 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, 335 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES from the darkness. “If you are a gentleman you will take your boat and your ruffianly ac- complices 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 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 336 OF LETITIA CARBERRY 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 oc- casionally, not often, both heads were above water at the same time. And it was then that Aggie, the president of the Civic Club and cor- responding 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' Donl” Donald being the Mans- field 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” W M re got them all into a launch finally, for there was only five feet of water, which explained much that we had not under- stood about the fight, and they were as discon- solate 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 338 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES 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 magnifi- cently 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 after- ward 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 fel- low 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. 340 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES “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 sec- ond 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. 342 OF LETITIA CARBERRY “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 Water- melon 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 hap- pened 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 343 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES 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 344