She made the experiment on Hannah, and it worked well enough. She would say “butter” or “spoon” and point to her place at the table; but Hannah almost left on the strength of it, and when she tried it on Mr. Jennings, the fishman, he told all over Penzance that she had lost either her mind or her teeth.
Aggie and I were extremely uneasy all of July, for Tish does nothing without a motive, and she was learning in French such warlike phrases as “Take the trenches,” “The enemy is retiring,” and “We must attack from the rear.” She also took to testing out the engine of her automobile in various ways, and twice, trying to cross a plowed field with it, had to be drawn out with a rope. She took to driving at night without lights also, and had the ill luck to run into the Penzance doctor’s buggy and take a wheel off it.
It was after that incident, when we had taken the doctor home and put him to bed, that I demanded an explanation.
But she only said with a far-away look in her eyes: “It may be a useful accomplishment sometime. If one were going after wounded at night it would be invaluable.”
“Not if you killed all the doctors on the way!” I snapped.
The limit to our patience came soon after that. One morning about the first of August the boatman from the lake came up the path with a spade over his shoulder. Tish, we perceived, tried to take him aside, but he gave her no time.
“Well, I’ve done it, Miss Tish,” he said, “and God only knows what’ll happen if somebody runs into it between now and tomorrow morning.”
“Nobody will know you did it unless you continue to shout the way you are doing now.”
“Oh, I’ll not tell,” he observed; “I’m not so proud of it. But ’twouldn’t surprise me a mite if we both did some time together in the county jail, on the head of it, Miss Tish.”
Well, Aggie went pale, but Tish merely gave him five dollars and spent the rest of the day shut in the garage with her car. I went back and looked in the window during the afternoon, and she was on her back under it, hammering at something.