“Please ring the bell—a glass of wine!” And Missy, while reading, had been able to vision herself, in some like quandary, also ordering a “glass of wine”; but, now!... the wine was only too terribly at hand!
“Get up!—there's a good old Ben!”
“Good old Ben—get up!”
But he was not a good old Ben. He was a mean old Ben—mean with inborn, incredibly vicious stubbornness. How terrible to live to come to this! But Missy was about to learn what a tangled web Fate weaves, and how amazingly she deceives sometimes when life looks darkest. Raymond and the Stranger (Missy knew his name was Ed Brown; alas! but you can't have everything in this world) started forth to rescue at the same time, knocked into each other, got to Ben's head simultaneously, and together tugged and tugged at the bridle.
Ben stood planted, with his four huge feet firmly set, defying any force in heaven or earth to budge them. His head, despite all the boys could do, maintained a relaxed attitude—a contradiction in terms justified by the facts—and also with a certain sidewise inclination toward the saloon. It was almost as if he were watching the saloon door. In truth, that is exactly what old Ben was doing. He was watching for Tim. Ben had good reason for knowing Tim's ways since, for a considerable time, no one save Tim had deigned to drive him. Besides having a natural tendency toward being “set in his ways,” Ben had now reached the time of life when one, man or beast, is likely to become a creature of habit. Thus he had unswervingly followed Tim's route to Tim's invariable first halt; and now he stood waiting Tim's reappearance through the saloon door. Other volunteer assistants, in hordes, hordes, and laughing as if this awful calamity were a huge joke, had joined Raymond and the Other. Missy was flamingly aware of them, of their laughter, their stares, their jocular comments.
But they all achieved nothing; and relief came only when Ben's supreme faith was rewarded when Tim, who had been spending his afternoon off in his favourite club, was attracted from his checker-game in the “back room” by some hubbub in the street and came inquisitively to the front door.
Ben, then, pricked his ears and showed entire willingness to depart. Tim, after convincing himself that he wasn't drunk and “seeing things,” climbed up on the “box”; the two girls, “naturally covered with confusion,” were only too glad to sink down unobtrusively into the back seat. Not till they were at the sanitarium again, did they remember the undelivered invitations; but quickly they agreed to put on stamps and let Tim take them, without empressement, to the Post Office.
All afternoon Missy burned and chilled in turn. Oh, it was too dreadful! What would people say? What would her parents, should they hear, do? And what, oh what would the interesting-looking Stranger think? Oh, what a contretemps!
If she could have heard what the Stranger actually did say, she would still have been “covered with confusion”—though of a more pleasurable kind. He and Raymond were become familiar acquaintances by this time. “What's the matter with 'em?” he had inquired as the steed Ben turkey-trotted away. “Doing it on a bet or something?”
“Dunno,” replied Raymond. “The blonde one's sort of bughouse, anyway. And the other one, Missy Merriam, gets sorta queer streaks sometimes—you don't know just what's eating her. She's sorta funny, but she's a peach, all right.”