Well, I didn’t exactly like the idea of mixin’ up with a fam’ly surprise party like that; but Dyke is so anxious for me to go along, and he gets me so curious to see what’ll happen at the reunion, that I fin’lly grabs my coat and hat, and out we trails.
It seems that Aunt Elvira is due at the Grand Central. Never having tried the subway, she’s come to town just as she used to thirty years ago: drivin’ to Kingsbridge station, and takin’ a Harlem river local down. We finds the whole fam’ly, includin’ Mr. and Mrs. Craig Mallory, and their two married daughters, waitin’ outside the gates, with the gloom about ’em so thick you’d almost think it was a sea turn.
From the chilly looks they shot at Dyke you could tell just how they’d forecasted the result when Aunt Elvira got him all sized up; for, with his collar turned up and his green hat slouched, he looks as much like a divinity student as a bulldog looks like Mary’s lamb. And they can almost see them blocks of apartment houses bein’ handed over to the heathen.
As for Mr. Craig Mallory, he never so much as gives his only son a second glance, but turns his back and stands there, twistin’ the ends of his close cropped gray mustache, and tryin’ to look like he wa’n’t concerned at all. Good old sport, Craig,—one of the kind that can sit behind a pair of sevens and raise the opener out of his socks. Lucky for his nerves he didn’t have to wait long. Pretty soon in pulls the train, and the folks from Yonkers and Tarrytown begin to file past.
“Most of Auntie was obscured by the luggage she carries”
“There she is!” whispers Dyke, givin’ me the nudge. “That’s Aunt Elvira, with her bonnet on one ear.”
It’s one of the few black velvet lids of the 1869 model still in captivity, ornamented with a bunch of indigo tinted violets, and kept from bein’ lost off altogether by purple strings tied under the chin. Most of the rest of Aunty was obscured by the hand luggage she carries, which includes four assorted parcels done up in wrappin’ paper, and a big, brass wire cage holdin’ a ragged lookin’ gray parrot that was tryin’ to stick his bill through the bars and sample the passersby.
She’s a wrinkled faced, but well colored and hearty lookin’ old girl, and the eyes that peeks out under the rim of the velvet lid is as keen and shrewd as a squirrel’s. Whatever else she might be, it was plain Aunt Elvira wa’n’t feeble minded. Behind her comes a couple of station porters, one cartin’ an old-time black valise, and the other with his arms wrapped around a full sized featherbed in a blue and white tick.