“Certainly I am going on,” said Tish, shutting her jaw. “You and Aggie needn’t come. I’m sure you asked yourselves; I didn’t.”
Well, that was true, of course. I crawled out and, going over, prodded at Aggie with my foot.
“Aggie,” I said, “it is raining and Tish is going on anyhow. Will you go on with her or start back home with me?”
But Aggie refused to do either. She was terribly stiff and she had slept near a bed of May-apple blossoms. In the twilight she had not noticed them, and they always bring on her hay fever.
“I’b goi’g to stay right here,” she said firmly between sneezes. “You cad go back or forward or whatever you please; I shad’t bove.”
Tish was marking out a route on the road map by making holes with a hairpin, and now she got up and faced us.
“Very well,” she said. “Then get your things out of the suitcase, which happens to be mine. Lizzie, the canned beans and the sardines are yours. Aggie, your potato salad is in those six screw-top jars. Come, Modestine.”
She untied the beast and, leading him over, loaded her sleeping-bag and her share of the provisions on his back. She did not glance at us. At the last, when she was ready, she picked up her rifle and turned to us.
“I may not be back for a week or ten days,” she said icily. “If I’m longer than two weeks you can start Charlie Sands out with a posse.”
Charlie Sands is her nephew.