“Aggie!” I cried. “Aggie!”
Then Hannah and Mr. MacDonald came up. Mr. MacDonald picked up a bottle and said, “You wouldn’t believe me before. Is this eau de cologne or is it liquor?”
“Oh, get the h—— out of here,” said Christopher.
They took me into the house, and there was Aggie sitting before the fire, still shivering, and with a very bad cold. She had her feet in a mustard foot bath with a blanket over it, for Mr. MacDonald would not allow her to go upstairs, and she burst into tears the minute she saw me.
“I’b udder arrest, Lizzie,” she wailed. “I’ve beed soaked through, ad bit at by sharks, ad fired od, ad lost by teeth. Ad dow I’b arrested. It’s just too buch.”
She had lost her teeth, poor soul. She had taken them out because they were chattering so, and they had slipped out of her hand. She might have recovered them, but just as she was about to do so a huge fish had snapped at them and got them.
It had indeed been a day of misfortunes, and Aggie’s were not the least. For Mr. MacDonald and Christopher had heard her sneezing on the bell buoy, and had fired at her before they knew her.
Then, when they did find her, she was sitting on a case of liquor, and nothing she could say did any good.
“I told theb it was dried fish,” she said, “but the darded fools wouldd’t believe be, ad whed they looked, it wasd’t.”