"They have eloped!" she repeated. "Kitty Ross and Wilson Wibird! I saw them with these eyes. Isn't it awful? What did I always say? But I won't keep you, Jim!"
She waved her hand as if stricken speechless; in reality, she had spied Mr. Cheeseman, stumping along to take down his shutters and open shop. Him she attacked with such suddenness that he almost dropped his pipe.
"Let me prepare you for a shock!" cried the lady. "You are an aged man, Mr. Cheeseman, and your nerves are easy shook. What I have to tell might strike an aged person into palsy, I wouldn't wonder. There has been an elopement in Cyrus! a wicked, terrible elopement! Oh! what I say is, shall we ever hold up our heads again? When I think of what Tinkham will say!"
(Mrs. Sharpe came from Tinkham; we were too polite as a rule to say that that accounted for her.)
"I don't know what Tinkham will say," snapped Mr. Cheeseman, "nor I don't care. Cyrus will most likely say it ain't so. Who's eloped, I'd like to know!"
"Kitty Ross and Wilson Wibird!" The lady's thin neck shot forward, serpent-wise, as she hissed out the names. Mr. Cheeseman received the shock calmly.
"Don't believe a word of it!" he said.
"You don't! You don't believe the witness of these eyes? I tell you I saw them, the two of them, after midnight, in a sleigh, dashing through Cyrus Street, like—like flames of fire. The hoss was gallopin': they was fairly rushin' to their doom. Don't say you don't believe me, Mr. Cheeseman, because sight is sight, and I am not blind."
"No, nor dumb!" Mr. Cheeseman was not a patient man. "Likely the hoss got roused up, waitin' in the cold. I always tell Kitty she drives too tarnal fast. Wish you good mornin', Mis' Sharpe." And he stumped on, resuming his interrupted pipe in short, irritated puffs.
Mrs. Sharpe looked after him with a snort, half pitying, half contemptuous, and sped on her way. By this time the male part of Cyrus was trooping down to business. In half an hour every man in the street had heard with varying emotions that Kitty Ross had eloped with Wilson Wibird. I don't know that anybody exactly believed it; at least, no one was found who confessed afterward to having done so, but the Street certainly had an uncomfortable half hour till the counter report reached it; namely, that Wilson Wibird was lying in his bed, wounded and bleeding from a frightful accident with one of them wild hosses of Kitty Ross's. He had been hove out, and the hoss had gone off at a tearing gallop, and where Kitty was this minute no human being prob'ly knew. Likely she had been dragged to her death, and they would track her by the blood——