“What I think you need,” I retorted, “is six months’ complete seclusion in a sanitarium.”
“You nearly shot us in the upper hall,” Aggie put in warmly.
“Well, as long as I didn’t shoot you in the upper hall or any other place, I guess you needn’t fuss,” said Tish. “Ready, Hannah.”
This time she shot Hannah in the broomhandle, and practically put her hors de combat; but the shot immediately after was what Tish triumphantly called a clean bull’s-eye—that is, it hit the center of the target.
That is the time to stop, when one has made a bull’s-eye in any sort of achievement, I take it. And Tish is nobody’s fool. She took off her spectacles and wiped the perspiration and gunpowder streaks from her face. She was immediately in high good humor.
“Every unprotected female should know how to handle a weapon,” she said oracularly, and, sitting down on the edge of the coal-bin, proceeded to swab out the gun with a wad of cotton on the end of a stick.
“The poker has been good enough for you for fifty years,” I retorted. “And if you think you look sporty, or anything but idiotic, sitting there in a flowered kimono and swabbing out the throat of that gun——?”
Just then the janitor came down, and Tish gave him a dollar for the use of the cellar and did not mention the furnace pipe. Aggie and I glanced at each other. Tish’s demoralization had begun. From that minute, to the long and entirely false story she told the red-bearded man in Thunder Cloud Glen several days later, she trod, as Aggie truthfully said, the downward path of mendacity, bringing up in the county jail and hysterics.
We went upstairs, Tish ahead and Aggie and I two flights behind, believing that Tish with an unloaded gun was a thousand times more dangerous than any outlaw with an entire arsenal loaded to the muzzle.
We had a cup of tea in Tish’s parlor, but she kept us out of the bedroom, where we could hear Miss Swift running the sewing machine. Finally Aggie said out of a clear sky: