That was exactly the way I felt. It seemed to me as though I simply had to get up that tree. The park policeman was nowhere in sight, and Zebedee ran lightly up the bent back of the ancient giant, Dum after him. It was easy climbing, and I would have followed suit in spite of my ankle, that I could not yet quite trust, if I had not seen the helmet of the policeman looming up over a near-by sepulchre.
Claire was shocked at what seemed to her a desecration, but Louis said afterward he knew just how Mr. Tucker felt. He had always wanted to get up that tree, and he considered it a kind of homage due the old oak. Trees were meant to climb, and it was no more a desecration to climb one even if it did happen to be in a cemetery, than it was to smell a rose that bloomed there.
The policeman, all unconscious of the coons he had treed, came ambling up and stood and talked to us for quite a while until Dee tactfully drew him off to descant on the glories of the William Washington monument. Zebedee and Dum sat very still in their leafy bower, so still that Zebedee declared a bird came and tweaked some of Dum's hair out to help line his nest; but Dum said he did it himself until she had to make a noise like a catbird to make him stop.
There is no telling what fine and punishment would have been imposed on the miscreants. It was not that it was such a terribly naughty thing to do, but just that it had never been done before. They slipped down, however, while the policeman's back was turned and came up smiling around the other side with the innocent expression a cat assumes when he has been in the cream jug.
"It was worth it," whispered Zebedee to me; "I am so sorry you couldn't get up, too. The old fellow was glad to have us up there. He told me that no children had climbed up to hug him for at least a hundred years. I didn't tell him that I was grown up, but just let him treat me like a little child. He didn't know the difference."
"I shouldn't think he would," I laughed, "when there isn't any difference."
And now it is time to stop, and I shall have to close my story of Charleston. All of us wanted to dream on there forever. It had been a wonderful time. We had made lifelong friends of Molly Brown and 'Fessor Green. We had flopped into the lives of the Gaillards and expected to stay. We had made our way into one of the most difficult and exclusive homes in the city of exclusive homes, and Miss Judith and Miss Arabella Laurens had taken us to their fluttering hearts.
Their thin pocketbooks had also opened to take in a fair and generous recompense for their kind hospitality—but it had been Zebedee and not Edwin Green who had finally and tactfully completed our business arrangements.
Now Zebedee said he must get back to his newspaper. He felt it calling him, as he had discovered an advertisement on the editorial page—a crime in newspaperdom that was deserving of capital punishment. He must get back and chop off somebody's head.