“The Germans,” she said at last, “are over there behind that chicken house. The machine is stalled in a shell hole and contains a wounded soldier. We are being shelled and there are those what-you-call-’em lights overhead. We must escape or be killed. There is only one thing to do. Lizzie, what is your idea of the next step?”
“Anybody but a lunatic would know that,” I said tartly. “The thing to do is to go home and make an affidavit that we never saw that car, and that the hole in this road is where it was struck by lighting.”
“Aggie,” Tish said without paying any attention to me, “here is a shovel for you.”
But Aggie sniffed.
“Not at all, Tish Carberry,” she observed. “I am the wounded soldier, and I don’t stir a foot.”
In the end, however, we all went to work to dig the car out of the hole, and at three o’clock in the morning Tish climbed in and started the engine. It climbed out slowly, but as Tish observed it gave an excellent account of itself.
“And I must say,” she said, “I believe we have all shown that we can meet emergency in the proper spirit. As for the hole, that driveling idiot who dug it can fill it up tomorrow morning and no one be the wiser.”
I have made this explanation because of the ugly reports spread by the boatman himself. It is necessary, because it appears that he became intoxicated on the money Tish had so generously given him, and the milk wagon which supplied us going into the hole an hour or so after we had left he shamelessly told his own part and ours in the catastrophe. The result was that waking the next morning with a severe attack of lumbago I heard our splendid Tish being attacked verbally by the milkman and forced to pay an outrageous sum in damages.
By September Tish had had the old body removed from her automobile and an ambulance body built on. She made the drawings for it herself, and it contained many improvements over the standard makes. It contained, for instance, a cigarette lighter—not that Tish smokes, but because wounded men always do, and we knew that matches were scarce in France. It also contained an ice-water tank, a reading lamp, with a small portable library of improving books selected by our clergyman, Mr. Ostermaier, and a false bottom. This last Tish was rather mysterious about, merely remarking that it might be a good place for Aggie to retire to if she took a sneezing spell within earshot of the enemy.
When I look back and recall how foresighted Letitia Carberry was I am filled with admiration of those sterling qualities which have so many times brought us safely out of terrible danger.