“Look here, Miss May,” I said, hoping to trap her, “how is it that you or your friends you’ve been interviewing can see what goes on on the Island? I’ve been there, and it seems to me it’s so walled in by trees and shrubs that there’s little visible from the lake.”
“That’s true, Mr. Norris,” Posy spoke seriously, “but there is a place at the back of the house, a sort of vista, small, but open. I think somebody removed a tree or two in order to see out. If your boat is in line with that, you can see in quite plainly. That’s where I saw Alma when she was paddywhacking the old nurse, and that’s where my friends have seen exhibitions of the same sort.”
Posy had a quaint way with her, when she was serious, and somehow she gave the impression of sincerity in what she said.
Anyway, she had the attention of her hearers and she went on, excitedly:
“So, I asked the girls, and they couldn’t remember at first, and then the three of them said yes, they had seen Alma through that opening in the trees. And they said—one of them did—that she saw Alma going for the nurse with a croquet mallet. And the man—that’s the nurse’s husband—had to come and pull Alma off of his wife!”
“Now, Posy,” Kee looked at her sternly, “I don’t want these yarns at all if there’s a bit of fairy story about them. Do you know them to be true?”
“I honestly think so, Mr. Moore, because I made Ethel—it was Ethel Wayne who told me this one—cross her heart and hope to never if it wasn’t true. And Ethel is a truthful girl, anyway. Why, once she——”
“Never mind side shows. Now, if you feel certain you have true stories to tell, get on with the others. Who next?”
“Oh, you hurry me so! Well, then I struck Mary Glenn. She is a very serious thinker, and she wouldn’t exaggerate a tiny mite, she wouldn’t. And she said she saw something she never had told anybody, not even her mother. And she wouldn’t tell me at first, till I told her it was official work I was doing and that if she didn’t tell I’d set the force on her. You know everybody is quelled at mention of the law and so she came off her perch, and told me.”
“Told you what? Now, repeat it as she said it, don’t embroider it any.”