“'I'll draw out all my capital,' says I.
“'I hope really you wont,' says she, 'till I've been there,' an' she leans out of the open winder to look into the street, but while she was a-lookin' out I see her left hand a-creepin' up to the gas by the winder, that wasn't lighted. I felt mad enough to take her by the feet an' pitch her out, as you an the boarder,” said Pomona, turning to me, “h'isted me out of the canal-boat winder.”
This, by the way, was the first intimation we had had that Pomona knew how she came to fall out of that window.
“But I didn't do it,” she continued, “for there wasn't no soft water underneath for her to fall into. After we went to bed I kep' awake for a long time, bein' afraid she'd get up in the night an' turn on all the gases and smother me alive. But I fell asleep at last, an' when I woke up, early in the mornin', the first thing I did was to feel for that lunertic. But she was gone!”
CHAPTER XVI. IN WHICH AN OLD FRIEND APPEARS AND THE BRIDAL TRIP TAKES A
FRESH START.
“Gone?” cried Euphemia, who, with myself, had been listening most intently to Pomona's story.
“Yes,” continued Pomona, “she was gone. I give one jump out of bed and felt the gases, but they was all right. But she was gone, an' her clothes was gone. I dressed, as pale as death, I do expect, an' hurried to Jone's room, an' he an' me an' the big man was all ready in no time to go an' look for her. General Tom Thumb didn't seem very anxious, but we made him hurry up an' come along with us. We couldn't afford to leave him nowheres. The clerk down-stairs—a different one from the chap who was there the night before—said that a middle-aged, elderly lady came down about an hour before an' asked him to tell her the way to the United States Bank, an' when he told her he didn't know of any such bank, she jus' stared at him, an' wanted to know what he was put there for. So he didn't have no more to say to her, an' she went out, an' he didn't take no notice which way she went. We had the same opinion about him that Mrs. Jackson had, but we didn't stop to tell him so. We hunted up an' down the streets for an hour or more; we asked every policeman we met if he'd seen her; we went to a police station; we did everything we could think of, but no Mrs. Jackson turned up. Then we was so tired an' hungry that we went into some place or other an' got our breakfast. When we started out ag'in, we kep' on up one street an' down another, an' askin' everybody who looked as if they had two grains of sense,—which most of 'em didn't look as if they had mor'n one, an' that was in use to get 'em to where they was goin.' At last, a little ways down a small street, we seed a crowd, an' the minute we see it Jone an' me both said in our inside hearts: 'There she is!' An' sure enough, when we got there, who should we see, with a ring of street-loafers an' boys around her, but Mrs. Andrew Jackson, with her little straw hat an' her green carpet-slippers, a-dancin' some kind of a skippin' fandango, an' a-holdin' out her skirts with the tips of her fingers. I was jus' agoin' to rush in an' grab her when a man walks quick into the ring and touches her on the shoulder. The minute I seed him I knowed him. It was our old boarder!”
“It was?” exclaimed Euphemia.