“Oh, that’s all right; we ain’t kickin’ on the quality,” Hank rumbled on, despite the pucker on her brow feeling he was making progress—that by a process of elimination of false scents he was gradually getting her on the track of a true apprehension. He motioned with his hand to include the others. “We ain’t kickin’ on that part of it, fer it’s all right; but—”
“Then I don’t see what isn’t all right,” she sighed helplessly, glancing at the sale-slip to make sure the joke wasn’t there. “Yes, thirty-seven.” With that a light dawned on her face, and she handed the slip to him. “Oh, I see,” she cried, “I’ve been asking the wrong gentleman to pay!”
Beany only shook his head and pushed the bill aside. He was beginning to perspire, and the others, coming to his rescue in a chorus, protested:
“But it was all a joke—this here. Don’t you see?” hoping she’d see and make the best of it by opening the door and telling them to get out for a mean lot of—, well, anything you like and can imagine as coming from her chaste lips. Getting out was now all they were capable of thinking of in the present predicament; they wouldn’t have cared what she called them. Hank added firmly, and as a sort of inspiration, “You see, we don’t want it now.”
She looked from one to the other of them, repeating, “Don’t want it now, did you say?” Then with another of her comprehending smiles, “But you ain’t the kind of gentlemen that orders things you don’t want, and then don’t pay up for ’em, and you wouldn’t disappoint a church. Besides—” Here she presented them with a smile apiece—“I know you wouldn’t leave a lady to roll up ’most two hundred yards of ribbon just for a matter of thirty-seven dollars.”
“It wouldn’t be kinder jes right,” Hank admitted, seeing a chance here to slide out on excuses. “Sure it wouldn’t; but we didn’t none of us fellas think o’ that—”
She broke in on him with a quick, “I see it now!” and they waited breathless while she looked at the price-tags on several rolls. “You think I made a mistake in the different prices, carrying the different widths in my head, and you’re all too nice to tell me for fear you’ll get me in trouble with Mrs. Ingersoll. Well, maybe I did. Nobody’s perfect; no matter how careful you are, you’re liable to a slip-up once in a while. But I’ll measure it again and count it over just to satisfy you.”
She took a long ribbon in her hand. Inwardly they groaned, and Roddy felt spurs digging at his legs and elbows at his ribs that said, “You got us into this fix; now get us out, and be quick about it, too.”
But Roddy seemed to have been struck with paralysis. The truth is, Miss Mittie had those young missioners cowed. They didn’t dare tell her to her face how they’d planned and played a mean joke on her confiding innocence when she’d never done anything to harm or annoy them in the whole of her blameless life. To leave her to roll up that pile of ribbon was, as Roddy afterward confessed when he told me the story, “sich a dirty, ornery trick to play on a lady as only a coyote would think of.” And, then, they didn’t dare to give Mrs. Ingersoll away. Yet if they didn’t make a clean breast of it and show Miss Mittie just how low-down cussed they’d been, how were they to get the key? They couldn’t take it from her by force; at least things hadn’t reached the point where they felt they could “do anything that was reely ungentlemanly,” as Roddy said. And then this thought came to all of them: suppose they did make her understand, and “she struck it hoppin’ mad an’ kep’ ’em there all night to pay ’em fer it an’ git even!” By this time they felt her capable of anything through sheer lack of imagination.
