CHAPTER V.
JOHN HENRY'S TELEGRAM.
When I reached the cottage I found all the members of my household dressed for the day, and lined up on the piazza, eager for news from the battlefield.
"Gee whiz!" exclaimed Uncle Peter, "the boy is bareheaded! Where's your hat, John?"
"Mercy! I hope you're not scalped!" Aunt Martha cried, sympathetically.
I explained that the desperado put up a stiff fight against Diggs and myself and, warming up to the subject, I went into the details of a hand to hand struggle that made them all shiver and blink their lanterns.
When finally I finished with the statement that the robber knocked us both down and had made a successful break for liberty. Uncle Peter gave expression to a yell of dismay, and once again he and his bow and arrow held a reunion.
Tacks suggested that we burn the house down so the burglar wouldn't be able to find it if he came around after dark. I thought extremely well of the suggestion, but didn't dare say so.
Aunt Martha had just about decided to untie a fit of hysterics, when Clara J. reached for the kerosene bucket and threw oil on the troubled waters.
"Let's drop all this nonsense about burglars and ghosts and go to breakfast," she suggested. "I don't believe there ever was a ghost within sixty miles of this house, and to save my soul I couldn't be afraid of a burglar whose specialty consisted of falling in the cellar and swearing till help came!"
After breakfast I was dragged away to the brook to fish for lamb chops or whatever kind of an animal it was that Uncle Peter and Tacks decided would bite. Aunt Martha posted off to the city on urgent business, the nature of which she carefully concealed from everybody.
Clara J. said she'd be delighted to have the house all to herself for an hour or two, there were so many rooms to look through and so many plans to make.
Uncle Peter gave her his bow and arrow with full instructions how to shoot if danger threatened, and Tacks carefully rubbed the steps leading up to the piazza with soap so the burglar would fall and break his neck. Then the little shrimp called my attention to his handiwork and demonstrated its availability by slipping thereon himself and going the whole distance on his face. He didn't break his neck, however, so to my mind his burglar alarm failed to make good.
As time wore on I felt more and more like a mock turtle being led to the soup house.
The fact that Bunch was sore worried me, and I began to realize that it was now only a question of a few hours when I'd have to crawl up to Clara J. and hand in my resignation.
Every time I drew a picture of that scene and heard myself telling her I was nothing but a fawn-colored four-flush I could see my future putting on the mitts and getting ready to hand me one.
And when I thought of the dish of fairy tales I had cooked for that girl I could feel something running around in my head and trying to hide. I suppose it was my conscience.
At the brook, Uncle Peter began to throw out hints that he was the original lone fisherman. The lobster never lived that could back away from him, and as for fly-casting, well, he was Piscatorial Peter, the Fancy Fish Charmer from Fishkill.
The old gentleman is very rich, but he loves to live around with his relatives, not because he's stingy, but simply because he likes them and knows they are good listeners.
Uncle Peter is a reformed money-maker. He wrote the first Monopoly that ever made faces at a defenceless public. He was the owner of the first Trust ever captured alive, and he fed it on government bonds and small dealers till it grew tame enough to eat out of a pocketbook.
Uncle Peter sat down on a rock overhanging the clay bank which sloped up about four feet above the lazy brooklet. He carefully arranged his expensive rod, placed his fish basket near by and entered into a dissertation on angling that would make old Ike Walton get up and leave the aquarium.
In the meantime Tacks decided to do some bait fishing, so with an old case knife he sat down behind Uncle Peter and began to dig under the rock for worms.
"Fishing is the sport of kings," the old man chuckled; "an it's a long eel that won't turn when trodden upon. If you're not going to fish, John, do sit down! You're throwing a shadow over the water and that scares the finny monsters. A fish diet is great for the brain, John! You should eat more fish."
"There's many a true word spoken from the chest," I sighed, just as Uncle Peter made his first cast and cleverly wound about eight feet of line around a spruce tree on the opposite bank.
The old man began to boil with excitement as he pulled and tugged in an effort to untangle his line, and just about this time Tacks became the author of another spectacular drama.
In the search for the elusive worm that feverish youth known as Tacks the Human Catastrophe, had finally succeeded in prying the rock loose and immediately thereafter Uncle Peter dropped his rod with a yell of terror and proceeded to follow the man from Cook's.
[Illustration: Tacks—the Boy Disaster.]
The rock reached the brook first, but the old gentleman gave it a warm hustle down the bank and finished a close second. He was in the money, all right.
Tacks also ran—but in an opposite direction.
For some little time my spluttering relative sat dumfounded in about two feet of dirty water, and when finally I dipped him out of the drink he looked like a busy wash-day. Everything was damp hut his ardor.
However, with characteristic good nature he squeezed the water out of his pockets and declared that it was just the kind of exercise he needed. He made me promise not to tell Aunt Martha, because she was very much opposed to his going in bathing on account of the undertow. Then I sneaked him up to his room and left him to change his clothes.
On the piazza I found Clara J., her face shrouded in the after-glow of a wintry sunset.
She handed me a telegram minus the envelope and asked me, with a voice that was intended to be cuttingly sarcastic, "Is there any answer?"
I opened the message and read:
New York.
John Henry,
Jiggersville, N. Y.
The two queens will be out this afternoon. They are good girls so treat them white.
Bunch.
The unspeakable idiot, to send me a wire worded like that! No wonder Clara J. was sitting on the ice cream freezer! Of course it only meant that Bunch's sister and her daughter were coming out to look at their property, but—suffering mackerel! what an eye Clara J. was giving me!
"And who are the two queens?" she queried, bitterly.
My face grew redder and redder. Every minute I expected to turn into a complete boiled lobster. I could see somebody reaching for the mayonaise to sprinkle me.
"Well," she continued, "is there no answer? Of course, they are good girls, and you'll treat them white, but—" Then the heavens opened and the floods descended.
"Oh, John!" she sobbed; "how could you be so unkind, so cruel! Think of it, a scandal on the very first day in my new home, and I was so happy!"
I would confess everything. There was no other way out of it. I was on my knees by her side just about to blurt forth the awful truth when my courage failed and suddenly I switched my bet and gave the cards another cut.
"It's all a mistake," I whispered; "it's only Bunch Jefferson doing a comedy scene. Don't you understand, dear; when Bunch tries to get funny all the undertakers have a busy season. I simply don't know who he means by the two queens, and as for scandal, well, you know me, Pete!"
I threw out my chest and gave an imitation of St. Anthony.
"You must know who he means," she insisted, brightening a bit, however.
"Ah, I have it!" I cried, brave-hearted liar that I was; "he means my Aunt Eliza and her daughter, Julia! You remember Aunt Eliza, and Julia?"
"I never heard you speak of them before," she said, still unconvinced.
Good reason, too, for up to this awful moment I never had an Aunt Eliza or a cousin Julia, but relatives must be found to fit the emergency.
"Oh, you've forgotten, my dear," I said, soothingly. "Aunt Eliza and Julia are two of the best Aunts I ever had—er, I mean Aunt Eliza is the best cousin—well, let it go at that! Bunch may have met them on the street, you see, and they inquired for my address. Yes, that's it. Dear, old Aunt Eliza!"
"Is she very old?" Clara J. asked, willing to be convinced if I could deliver the goods.
"Old," I echoed, then suddenly remembering Bunch's description; "oh, no; she's a young widow, about 28 or 41, somewhere along in there. You'll like her immensely, but I hope she doesn't come out until we get settled in a year or two."
Clara J. dried her eyes, but I could see that she hadn't restored me to her confidence as a member in good standing.
She pleaded a headache and went away to her room, while I sat down with Bunch's telegram in my hands and tried to find even a cowpath through the woods.
Uncle Peter came out, none the worse for his cold plunge, and sat down near me.
"Ah, my boy, isn't this delightful!" he cried, drinking in the air. "There's nothing like the country, I tell you! Look at that view! Isn't it grand? John, to be frank with you, up until I saw this place I didn't have much faith in your ability as a business man, but now I certainly admire your wisdom in selecting a spot like this—what did it cost you?"
Cost me! so far it had cost me an attack of nervous prostration, but I couldn't tell him that. I hesitated for the simple reason that I hadn't the faintest idea what the place had cost Bunch. I had been too busy to ask him.
"It's all right, John," the old fellow went on; "don't think me inquisitive. A rubberneck is the root of all evil. It's only because I've been watching you rather closely since we came out here and you seem to be nervous about something. I had an idea maybe it took all your ready money to buy the place, and possibly you regret spending so much—but don't you do it! The best day's work you ever did was when you bought this place!"
"Yes, I believe you!" I sighed, wearily, as I turned to look down the road.
I stiffened in the chair for I saw my finish in the outward form of two women rapidly approaching the house,
"It's Bunch's sister and her daughter," I moaned to myself. "Well,
I'll be generous and let the blow fall first on Uncle Peter!"
Accordingly, I made a quick exit,
In the kitchen I found Clara J., her headache forgotten, busily preparing to cook the dinner.
She's a foxy little bundle of peaches, that girl is; and I was wise to the fact that her suspicion factory was still working over-time, turning out material for the undersigned.
I felt it in my bones that the steer I gave her about Aunt Eliza had been placed in cold storage for safe keeping.
Her brain was busy running to the depot to meet the scandal Bunch's telegram hinted at, but she pretended to catch step and walk along with me.
"John," she said, "I certainly do hope your relatives won't come out for some little time, because we really aren't ready for visitors, now are we, dear?"
"Indeed we are not," I groaned.
"I can't help thinking it awfully strange that you should be notified of their coming by Mr. Jefferson, and in such peculiar language," she said, after a pause.
"Didn't I tell you Bunch is a low comedian," I said, weakly.
"Besides, he knows them very well. Aunt Fanny is very fond of
Bunch."
"Aunt Fanny," she repeated, dropping a tin pan to the floor with a crash; "I thought you said her name was Eliza?"
"Sure thing!" I chortled; while my heart fell off its perch and dropped in my shoes. "Her name is Eliza Fanny; some of us call her Aunt Eliza, some Aunt Fanny—see?"
She hadn't time to see, for at that moment Tacks rushed in, exclaiming, "Say, sister, they's two strange women on the piazza talking to Uncle Peter, and maybe when they go one of them will fall down the steps if I put some more soap there!"
Like a whirlwind he was gone again. Clara J. simply looked at me queerly and said, "The queens are here; treat them white, John!"
I felt as happy as a piece of cheese.