“I guess I’m nervous,” she said, in a choking voice. “I had no idea it was so much trouble to get married.”
Tish heard her, although she had her hands full getting the car back to the street. She said nothing until we were in the street again, and moving away slowly.
“Then you might as well settle down and be quiet,” she said. “Because you are not going to be married today.”
Myrtle may have suspected something before that, perhaps when she first saw Tish’s hat, for she looked dazed for a moment, and then stood up in the car and yelled that she was being kidnapped. Tish threw on the gas just then, and she had to sit down, but I looked back just in time to see Mr. Culver and the policeman standing in the center of the street, gesticulating madly.
“Little fool!” Tish muttered, and bent low over the wheel.
Well, they followed us. At the top of the first hill the girl was crying hard, and there were eleven automobiles, Aggie counted, not far behind us. At the end of the next rise there were still ten. It was then that Tish, with her customary presence of mind, told us to scatter the tacks over the road behind us.
The result was that only four were to be seen when we got to the top of Graham’s Hill, and they had lost time and were far away. Tish was in a terrible way. Her plan had been merely to take the girl away, because Culver belonged in her precinct and it was her business, as ordered by the government, to gather in all the slackers, matrimonial or otherwise. Then, after Culver had registered as a single man, he could, as Tish tersely observed later, either marry or go and drown himself. It was immaterial to her.
But now we were likely to be arrested for abduction, and the whole thing would get in the papers.
“Tish,” Aggie begged, “do stop and put her out in the road. That Culver and the policeman are in the first car. I can see them plainly—and they can pick her up and take her back.”
But Tish ignored her, and kept on. She merely asked, once, if we had any scissors with us, and on Aggie finding a pair in her knitting bag, said to get them out and have them ready.