Aggie got up with the light of desperation in her eyes. Aggie hates woods and gnats, has no eye for Nature, and for almost half a century has pampered her body in a featherbed poultice, with the windows closed, until the first of June each year. Yet Aggie rose to the crisis.
“You shan’t go alone, Tish,” she said stoutly. “You’ll forget to change your stockings when your feet are wet and you can’t make a cup of coffee fit to drink. I’m going too.”
Tish made a gesture of despair, but Aggie was determined. Tish glanced at me.
“Well?” she snapped. “We might as well make it a family excursion. Aren’t you coming along, too, to look after Aggie?”
“Not at all,” I observed calmly. “I’ll have enough to do looking after myself. But I like the idea, and since you’ve invited me I’ll come, of course.”
At first I am afraid Tish was not particularly pleased. She said she had it all planned to make four miles an hour, or about forty miles a day; and that any one falling back would have to be left by the wayside. And that if we were not prepared to sleep on the ground, or were going to talk rheumatism every time she found a place to camp, she would thank us to remember that we had really asked ourselves.
But she grew more cheerful finally and seemed to be glad to talk over the details of the trip with somebody. She said it was a pity we had not had some practice with firearms, for we would each have to take a weapon, the mountains being full of outlaws, more than likely. Neither Aggie nor I could use a gun at all, but, as Tish observed, we could pot at trees and fenceposts along the road by way of practice.
When I suggested that the sight of three women of our age—we are all well on toward fifty; Aggie insists that she is younger than I am, but we were in the same infant class in Sunday-school—three women of our age “potting” at fences was hardly dignified, Tish merely shrugged her shoulders.
She asked us not to let Charlie Sands learn of the trip. He would be sure to be fussy and want to send a man along, and that would spoil it all.
What with the secrecy, and the guns and everything, I dare say we were like a lot of small boys getting ready to run away out West and kill Indians. In fact, Tish said it reminded her of the time, years ago, when Charlie Sands and some other boys had run away, with all the carving knives and razors they could gather together, and were found a week later in a cave in the mountains twenty miles or so from town.