"It's a lie!" says he. "She's nothing to me, nothing at all."
"Oh, well," says I, "that's between you and her. She says different. Anyway, she's come clear up here to put in her bid; so it's no more'n fair to give her a show. I'll just bring her in."
As I starts towards the front door Doc gives me one look, to see if I mean business. Then, Sadie says, he turns the color of pie-crust, drops Aunt Tillie as if she was a live wire, and jumps through the back door like he'd been kicked by a mule. I got back just in time to see him hurdle a five-foot hedge without stirrin' a leaf, and the last glimpse we got of him he was headin' for a stretch of woods up Connecticut way.
"Looks like you'd just missed assistin' at a case of bigamy," says I to the young preacher, as we was bringin' Aunt Tillie out of her faint.
"Shocking!" says he. "Shocking!" as he fans himself with a hymn book. He was takin' it hard.
Aunt Tillie wouldn't speak to any of us, and as we bundled her into her carriage and sent her home she looked as mad as a settin' hen with her feet tied.
"Shorty," says Sadie, on the way back, "that was an elegant bluff you put up."
"Lucky my hand wa'n't called," says I. "But it was rough on the preacher chap, wa'n't it? He had his mouth all made up to marry some one. Blamed if I didn't want to offer him a job myself."
"And who would you have picked out, Shorty?" says she.
"Well," says I, lookin' her over wishful, "there ain't never been but one girl that I'd choose for a side partner, and she's out of my class now."