"Yes, I do," continued Susan, with growing indignation. "Jathrop has done his best to make me out a liar, and I don't know as I'll ever be able to hold my head up again. He's struck me in the tenderest spot he could strike me in, and not boldly neither, but in a skulking, underhand way that makes it all the bitterer pill to swallow."
"I can't see—" objected Mrs. Lathrop.
"No, nor me neither. But he did, and in no time everybody'll know it from Johnny, at the station, to Mrs. Lupey in Meadville, not forgettin' the poor demented over to the insane asylum. And it all comes of those letters I have been getting from Jathrop during the summer."
"But—"
"Yes, I know and you know there was no letters a tall. But everybody else, except you and me and the postmaster, believed I had a letter regular every week. Whenever I run short of subjects at the Sewing Society, I just fell back on my last letter from Jathrop and told them all about what he was doing in those islands. I'd read the book he sent, and I'd read it to good profit. There was some things as I didn't quite understand, of course, but on them I just put my own interpretations, and knowing Jathrop as I did, it was easy enough for me to figure out how he'd be most likely to act in a strange, barbaric land. The book didn't have a word to say about the costumes of the native tribes, but I'm not so ignorant as not to know how those South Sea Islanders never wear nothing more hamperin' than sea-shell earrings and necklaces of sharks' teeth; and I'd read, too, that foreign visitors, on account of the unbearable heat, was in the habit of adoptin' the native fashions in dress. When you get started makin' things up, there's no knowing just where you're likely as to end. It's so easy to go straight ahead and say just whatever you please that seems in any way interesting. And so, when Mrs. Fisher asked me one day whether I supposed there was any cannibals there, I said there was one cannibal tribe that was most ferocious and had appetites that there was no such thing as quenchin'. I said that in Jathrop's last letter he had written me about how this tribe had captured the cook off the yacht and that when they finally found his captors and defeated them in a desperate battle lasting three days, all that was found of the cook was two chicken croquettes."
"For gra—!" cried Mrs. Lathrop.
"That's what Mrs. Fisher said. Of course, with the cook eat up—all but what was in the two croquettes, that is,—Jathrop and his millionaire friends was a good deal put about. There wasn't a one of 'em as knew the first thing about cooking, and after the exercise of the three days' battle they was most awful hungry. And then, I says, quoting from the letter from Jathrop which never came, they had a piece of real luck, just as millionaires is always having. They had taken one prisoner, and by means of signs, not knowin' a word of the cannibal language, they discovered that the prisoner was the cook of the tribe. He pointed to the croquettes as a example of his handiwork, and Jathrop said that he never saw anything in the cookin' line that looked more toothsome than they did. So, of course they engaged the cannibal cook on the spot and carried him back to the yacht with 'em. Everything went well for a few days, but on a day when they had invited the chief of a friendly tribe to dinner, there was something as aroused their suspicions. The principal dish for the feast was, so far as they could make out from the cook's sign-language, a savory rabbit stew. Now as they had never seen or heard tell of a rabbit in the Bahamas, they was naturally curious to learn where the cook had managed to dig it up. He either couldn't or wouldn't tell. I says that Jathrop says you might 'a' thought that the cook was a thirty-second degree mason and that the origin of the rabbit was a thirty-second degree masonic secret. The millionaires gathered in council and discussed the question, pro and con, from every obtainable or imaginable angle. Then, just as they were about to adjourn without having reached any conclusion whatever, they rang for the cabin boy to fetch some liquid refreshment. But there wasn't no answer. And they might 'a' been ringing yet as to any good it would do. They never did see that cabin boy, and the only one to eat the savory rabbit stew was the visiting chief."
"I don't—" observed Mrs. Lathrop, rocking faster.
"Well, Mrs. Lathrop, you're right about that," Susan confirmed, loosening her shawl, for the oil-stove was rapidly lifting the room's temperature. "I don't see, myself, why anybody should ever have known any better, and nobody would have, if it hadn't been as Jathrop took it into his head to talk to a newspaper man at Atlantic City on about the same day as I had him missing the cabin boy and refusing a helping to the rabbit stew. Mr. Kimball showed me the paper as came from New York wrapped around a new ledger he just received by express. The reporter had written two columns and over about the 'Klondike Bonanza King,' and if Jathrop had set his mind to makin' me out a Ananias and a Saphira boiled into one, he couldn't have succeeded better. He hasn't been in the Bahamas a tall. The yacht started for there, but it went to Cuba instead, and he and his friends only stayed in Cuba a week. From there they went down to Panama and looked over the canal as far as it's gone. They spent the summer sailin' from one summer resort to another, and I must say I should think there was better ways of passin' the time than that. When it comes to eatin', I'd about as leave eat the dishes of a cannibal cook as eat things made of the salt water that people go bathin' in, and that's what they do at Atlantic City. The minister showed me some candy 'Liza Em'ly sent him from Atlantic City in July, and I know what I'm talkin' about, for it was printed on the paper around each piece. 'Salt-water Taffy.' Think of that! It's plain to be seen that they ain't got any fresh water there, or they wouldn't use salt. Jathrop and the other millionaires, I suppose, drink nothin' but wine, but the poor folks must drink salt water or go thirsty. I suppose it saves salt in seasonin', but I'd rather have my vituals unseasoned than have 'em salted with water that folks has swum in. They certainly ain't got no enterprise, that's sure. If they had they'd pipe water—fresh water—from somewheres. And if there's no place near enough to pipe it from, they'd build cisterns. But water's not the only thing as shows their shiftlessness. Our town isn't exactly a metropolis, but we got a few cement sidewalks. Atlantic City ain't got a one. I heard about that long ago. And in these days of progress, too! Nothing but a board walk on its principal street—nothing a tall."
"What did—?" asked Mrs. Lathrop.