I pause here for a moment to reflect on Tish’s resourcefulness. How many times, in the years of our association, has her active brain come to our rescue in trying times? And, once the danger is over, how quickly she becomes again one of us, busy with her charities, her Sunday school class, and her knitting for the poor! Indomitable spirit and Christian soul, her only fault, if any, perhaps a slight lack of humor, that is Letitia Carberry.
“Watch for a barbed wire fence, Lizzie,” she said, as we flew along. “And see how near they are.”
Well, they were very close, but owing to Tish leaving the macadam at this point, they lost time at a crossroads. At the top of the next hill Aggie said she could not see anything of them. It was then that Myrtle tried to jump out, and would have succeeded had not Tish speeded up the car.
I could hear Aggie trying to soothe her, and telling her that Tish was not insane, but was merely saving her from a terrible fate.
“I have never been married, my dear, owing to an unfortunate circumstance,” she said, in her gentle voice. “But to marry without love——”
The girl sat up, startled.
“But how do you know I don’t love him?” she demanded.
“I am speaking of the young man,” said Aggie. “My dear child, all over this great land of ours today, here and there are wretches who would use a confiding young woman in order——”
“Barbed wire!” said Tish exultantly, and stopped the car with a jerk. In an instant she was out in the road, cutting lengths of barbed wire from a fence with the scissors and placing them across the road behind us. Her expression was set and tense. When she had placed some six pieces of wire in position, she returned to the car.
“We can thank the war for that,” she observed, coolly. “As long as the barbed wire fences hold out they’ll never get us.”