TISH PLAYS THE GAME

TISH PLAYS THE GAME

by
Mary Roberts Rinehart

PUBLISHED IN NEW YORK
By P. F. COLLIER & SON COMPANY

Copyright, 1926
By Mary Roberts Rinehart
All Rights Reserved

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

TISH PLAYS THE GAME

We met Nettie Lynn on the street the other day, and she cut us all dead. Considering the sacrifices we had all made for her, especially our dear Tish, who cut a hole in her best rug on her account, this ungrateful conduct forces me to an explanation of certain events which have caused most unfair criticism. Whatever the results, it is never possible to impugn the motives behind Tish’s actions.

As for the janitor of Tish’s apartment house maintaining that the fruit jar buried in the floor was a portion of a still for manufacturing spirituous liquors, and making the statement that Tish’s famous blackberry cordial for medicinal use was fifty per cent alcohol—I consider this beneath comment. The recipe from which this cordial is made was originated by Tish’s Greataunt Priscilla, a painting of whom hangs, or rather did hang, over the mantel in Tish’s living room.

The first notice Aggie and I received that Tish was embarked on one of her kindly crusades again was during a call from Charlie Sands. We had closed our cottage at Lake Penzance and Aggie was spending the winter with me. She had originally planned to go to Tish, but at the last moment Tish had changed her mind.

“You’d better go with Lizzie, Aggie,” she said. “I don’t always want to talk, and you do.”

As Aggie had lost her upper teeth during an unfortunate incident at the lake, which I shall relate further on, and as my house was near her dentist’s, she agreed without demur. To all seeming the indications were for a quiet winter, and save for an occasional stiffness in the arms, which Tish laid to neuritis, she seemed about as usual.

In October, however, Aggie and I received a visit from her nephew, and after we had given him some of the cordial and a plate of Aggie’s nut wafers he said, “Well, revered and sainted aunts, what is the old girl up to now?”

We are not his aunts, but he so designates us. I regret to say that by “the old girl” he referred to his Aunt Letitia.

“Since the war,” I said with dignity, “your Aunt Letitia has greatly changed, Charlie. We have both noticed it. The great drama is over, and she is now content to live on her memories.”

I regret to say that he here exclaimed, “Like——she is! I’ll bet you a dollar and a quarter she’s up to something right now.”

Aggie gave a little moan.

“You have no basis for such a statement,” I said sternly. But he only took another wafer and more of our cordial. He was preventing a cold.

“All right,” he said. “But I’ve had considerable experience, and she’s too quiet. Besides, she asked me the other day if doubtful methods were justifiable to attain a righteous end!”

“What did you tell her?” Aggie inquired anxiously.

“I said they were not; but she didn’t seem to believe me. Now mark my words: After every spell of quiet she has she goes out and gets in the papers. So don’t say I haven’t warned you.”

But he had no real basis for his unjust suspicions, and after eating all the nut wafers in the house he went away.

“Just one thing,” he said: “I was around there yesterday, and her place looked queer to me. I missed a lot of little things she used to have. You don’t suppose she’s selling them, do you?”

Well, Tish has plenty of money and that seemed unlikely. But Aggie and I went around that evening, and it was certainly true. Her Cousin Mary Evans’ blue vases were gone from the mantel of the living room, and her Grandaunt Priscilla’s portrait was missing from over the fireplace. The china clock with wild roses on it that Aggie had painted herself had disappeared, and Tish herself had another attack of neuritis and had her right arm hung in a sling.

She was very noncommital when I commented on the bareness of the room.

“I’m sick of being cluttered up with truck,” she said. “We surround our bodies with too many things, and cramp them. The human body is divine and beautiful, but we surround it with—er—china clocks and what not, and it deteriorates.”

“Surround it with clothes, Tish,” I suggested, but she waved me off.

“Mens sana in corpore sano,” she said.

She had wrenched her left knee, too, it appeared, and so Hannah let us out. She went into the outside corridor with us and closed the door behind her.

“What did she say about her right arm and her left leg?” she inquired.

When we told her she merely sniffed.

“I’ll bet she said she was sick of her aunt’s picture and that clock, too,” she said. “Well, she’s lying, that’s all.”

“Hannah!”

“I call it that. She’s smashed them, and she’s smashed her Grandfather Benton and the cut-glass salad bowl, and a window. And the folks below are talking something awful.”

“Hannah! What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” Hannah wailed, and burst into tears. “The things she says when she’s locked me out! And the noise! You’d think she was killing a rat with the poker. There’s welts an inch deep in the furniture, and part of the cornice is smashed. Neuritis! She’s lamed herself, that’s all.”

“Maybe its a form of physical culture, Hannah,” I suggested. “They jump about in that, you know.”

“They don’t aim to kick the ceiling and break it, do they?”

Well, that was quite true, and I’ll admit that we went away very anxious. Aggie was inclined to return to the unfortunate incident of the janitor and the furnace pipe when Tish was learning to shoot in the basement some years ago, and to think that she had bought a muffler or whatever it is they put on guns to stop the noise, and was shooting in her flat. I myself inclined toward a boomerang, one of which Tish had seen thrown at a charity matinée, and which had much impressed her. In fact, I happened to know that she had tried it herself at least once, for on entering her sitting room one day unexpectedly my bonnet was cut off my head without the slightest warning. But Hannah had known about the boomerang, and there would have been no need of secrecy.

However, it was not long before Tish herself explained the mystery, and to do so now I shall return to the previous summer at Lake Penzance. When we arrived in June we found to our dismay that a new golf course had been laid out, and that what was called the tenth hole was immediately behind our cottage. On the very first day of our arrival a golf ball entered the kitchen window and struck Hannah, the maid, just below the breast bone, causing her to sit on the stove. She was three days in bed on her face and had to drink her broth by leaning out over the edge of the bed. This was serious enough, but when gentlemen at different times came to the cottage with parcels wrapped to look like extra shoes, and asked Tish to keep them in the refrigerator on the back porch, we were seriously annoyed. Especially after one of them broke and leaked into the ice-tea pitcher, and Aggie, who is very fond of iced tea, looked cross-eyed for almost half an hour.

Some of the language used, too, was most objectionable, and the innocent children who carried the clubs learned it, for I cannot possibly repeat what a very small urchin said to Tish when she offered him a quarter if he would learn the Shorter Catechism. And even our clergyman’s wife—the Ostermaiers have a summer cottage near us—showed what we had observed was the moral deterioration caused by the game. For instance, one day she knocked a ball directly into our garbage can, which happened to have its lid off. Owing to the vines she could not see us, and she hunted for some time, tearing at Aggie’s cannas as though they were not there, and finally found her ball in the can.

“Do I pick it out or play it out, caddie?” she called.

“Cost you a shot to pick it out,” said the caddie.

“I’ll play it,” she said. “Give me a spoon.”

Well, it appeared that she did not mean a table spoon, although that was certainly what she needed, for he gave her a club, and she began to dig after the ball. She made eleven jabs at it, and then the can overturned.

“Oh, damm!” she said, and just then Aggie sneezed.

“Darn!” said Mrs. Ostermaier, trying to pretend that that was what she had said before. “Are you there, Miss Carberry?”

“I am,” Tish replied grimly.

“I suppose you never expected to see me doing this!”

“Well,” Tish said slowly, “if anyone had told me that I would find my clergyman’s wife in my garbage can I might have been surprised. Hannah, bring Mrs. Ostermaier the coal shovel.”

Looking back I perceive that our dear Tish’s obsession dated from that incident, for when Mrs. Ostermaier had cleaned up and moved angrily away she left the old ball, covered with coffee grounds, on the path. I am inclined, too, to think that Tish made a few tentative attempts with the ball almost immediately, for I found my umbrella badly bent that night, and that something had cracked a cane left by Charlie Sands, which Aggie was in the habit of using as a pole when fishing from the dock. Strangely enough, however, her bitterness against the game seemed to grow, rather than decrease.

For instance, one day when Aggie was sitting on the edge of our little dock, fishing and reflecting, and Tish was out in the motor boat, she happened to see a caddie on the roof looking for a ball which had lodged there. She began at once to shout at him to get down and go away, and in her indignation forgot to slow down the engine. The boat therefore went directly through the dock and carried it away, including that portion on which Aggie was sitting. Fortunately Aggie always sat on an air cushion at such times, and as she landed in a sitting position she was able to remain balanced until Tish could turn the boat around and come to the rescue. But the combination of the jar and of opening her mouth to yell unfortunately lost Aggie her upper set, as I have before mentioned.

But it was not long before dear Tish’s argus eye had discovered a tragedy on the links. A very pretty girl played steadily, and always at such times a young man would skulk along, taking advantage of trees et cetera to keep out of her sight, while at the same time watching her hungrily. Now and then he varied his method by sitting on the shore of the lake. He would watch her until she came close, and then turn his head and look out over the water. And if ever I saw misery in a human face it was there.

Aggie’s heart ached over him, and she carried him a cup of tea one afternoon. He seemed rather surprised, but took it, and Aggie said there was a sweetheart floating in it for him.

“A mermaid, eh?” he said. “Well, I’m for her then. Mermaids haven’t any legs, and hence can’t play golf, I take it.” But he looked out over the lake again and resumed his bitter expression. “You can’t tell, though. They may have a water variety, like polo.” He sighed and drank the tea absently, but after that he cheered somewhat and finally he asked Aggie a question.

“I wish you’d look at me,” he said. “I want an outside opinion. Do I look like a golf hazard?”

“A what?” said Aggie.

“Would you think the sight of me would cut ten yards off a drive, or a foot off a putt?” he demanded.

“You look very nice, I’m sure,” Aggie replied. But he only got up and shook the sand off himself and stared after the girl.

“That’s it,” he said. “Very nice! You’ve hit it.” Then he turned on her savagely, to her great surprise. “If I weren’t so blamed nice I’d set off a dozen sticks of dynamite on this crazy links and blow myself up with the last one.”

Aggie thought he was a little mad.

We saw him frequently after that, never with the girl, but he began to play the game himself. He took some lessons, too, but Tish had to protest for the way he and the professional talked to each other. Mr. McNab would show him how to fix his feet and even arrange his fingers on the club handle. Then he would drive, and the ball would roll a few feet and stop.

“Well, I suppose I waggled my ear that time, or something,” he would say.

“Keep your eye on the ball!” Mr. McNab would yell, dancing about. “Ye’ve got no strength of character, mon.”

“Let me kick it, then. I’ll send it farther.”

After that they would quarrel, and Tish would have to close the windows.

But Tish’s interest in golf was still purely that of the onlooker. This is shown by the fact that at this time and following the incident of the dock she decided that we must all learn to swim. That this very decision was to involve us in the fate of the young man, whose name was Bobby Anderson, could not have been foreseen, or that that involvement would land us in various difficulties and a police station.

Tish approached the swimming matter in her usual convincing way.

“Man,” she said, “has conquered all the elements—earth, air and water. He walks. He flies. He swims—or should. The normal human being to-day should be as much at home in water as in the air, and vice versa, to follow the great purpose.”

“If that’s the great purpose we would have both wings and fins,” said Aggie rather truculently, for she saw what was coming. But Tish ignored her.

“Water,” she went on, “is sustaining. Hence boats. It is as easy to float the human body as a ship.”

“Is it?” Aggie demanded. “I didn’t float so you could notice it the night you backed the car into the lake.”

“You didn’t try,” Tish said sternly. “You opened your mouth to yell, and that was the equivalent of a leak in a ship. I didn’t say a leaking boat would float, did I?”

We thought that might end it, but it did not. When we went upstairs to bed we heard her filling the tub, and shortly after that she called us into the bathroom. She was lying extended in the tub, with a Turkish towel covering her, and she showed us how, by holding her breath, she simply had to stay on top of the water.

“I advise you both,” she said, “to make this experiment to-night. It will give you confidence to-morrow.”

We went out and closed the door, and Aggie clutched me by the arm.

“I’ll die first, Lizzie,” she said. “I don’t intend to learn to swim, and I won’t. A fortune teller told me to beware of water, and that lake’s full of tin cans.”

“She was floating in the tub, Aggie,” I said to comfort her, although I felt a certain uneasiness myself.

“Then that’s where I’ll do my swimming,” Aggie retorted, and retired to her room.

The small incident of the next day would not belong in this narrative were it not that it introduced us to a better acquaintance with the Anderson boy, and so led to what follows. For let Charlie Sands say what he will, and he was very unpleasant, the truth remains that our dear Tish’s motives were of the highest and purest, and what we attempted was to save the happiness of two young lives.

Be that as it may, on the following morning Tish came to breakfast in a mackintosh and bedroom slippers, with an old knitted sweater and the bloomers belonging to her camping outfit beneath. She insisted after the meal that we similarly attire ourselves, and sat on the veranda while we did so, reading a book on the art of swimming, which she had had for some time.

Although she was her usual calm and forceful self both Aggie and I were very nervous, and for fear of the chill Aggie took a small quantity of blackberry cordial. She felt better after that and would have jumped off the end of the dock, but Tish restrained her, advising her to wet her wrists first and thus to regulate and not shock the pulse.

Tish waded out, majestically indifferent, and we trailed after her. Of what followed I am not quite sure. I know, when we were out to our necks, and either I had stepped on a broken bottle or something had bitten me, she turned and said:

“This will do. I am going to float, Lizzie. Give me time to come to the surface.”

She then took a long breath and threw herself back into the water, disappearing at once. I waited for some time, but only a foot emerged, and that only for a second. I might have grown anxious, but it happened that just then Aggie yelled that there was a leech on her, sucking her blood, and I turned to offer her assistance. One way and another it was some time before I turned to look again at Tish—and she had not come up. The water was in a state of turmoil, however, and now and then a hand or a leg emerged.

I was uncertain what to do. Tish does not like to have her plans disarranged, and she had certainly requested me to give her time. I could not be certain, moreover, how much time would be required. While I was debating the matter I was astonished to hear a violent splashing near at hand, and to see Mr. Anderson, fully dressed, approaching us. He said nothing, but waited until Tish’s foot again reappeared, and then caught it, thus bringing her to the surface.

For some time she merely stood with her mouth open and her eyes closed. But at last she was able to breathe and to speak, and in spite of my affection for her I still resent the fact that her first words were in anger.

“Lizzie, you are a fool!” she said.

“You said to give you time, Tish.”

“Well, you did!” she snapped. “Time to drown.” She then turned to Mr. Anderson and said, “Take me in, please. And go slowly. I think I’ve swallowed a fish.”

I got her into the cottage and to bed, and for an hour or two she maintained that she had swallowed a fish and could feel it flopping about inside her. But after a time the sensation ceased and she said that either she had been mistaken or it had died. She was very cold to me.

Mr. Anderson called that afternoon to inquire for her, and we took him to her room. But at first he said very little, and continually consulted his watch and then glanced out the window toward the links. Finally he put the watch away and drew a long breath.

“Four-seven,” he said despondently. “Just on time, like a train! You can’t beat it.”

“What is on time?” Tish asked.

“It’s a personal matter,” he observed, and lapsed into a gloomy silence.

Aggie went to the window, and I followed. The pretty girl had sent her ball neatly onto the green and, trotting over after it, proceeded briskly to give it a knock and drop it into the cup. He looked up at us with hopeless eyes.

“Holed in one, I suppose?” he inquired.

“She only knocked it once and it went in,” Aggie said.

“It would.” His voice was very bitter. “She’s the champion of this part of the country. She’s got fourteen silver cups, two salad bowls, a card tray and a soup tureen, all trophies. She’s never been known to slice, pull or foozle. When she gets her eye on the ball it’s there for keeps. Outside of that, she’s a nice girl.”

“Why don’t you learn the game yourself?” Tish demanded.

“Because I can’t. I’ve tried. You must have heard me trying. I can’t even caddie for her. I look at her and lose the ball, and it has got to a stage now where the mere sight of me on the links costs her a stroke a hole. I’ll be frank with you,” he added after a slight pause. “I’m in love with her. Outside of golf hours she likes me too. But the damned game—sorry, I apologize—the miserable game is separating us. If she’d break her arm or something,” he finished savagely, “I’d have a chance.”

There was a thoughtful gleam in Tish’s eye when he fell into gloomy silence.

“Isn’t there any remedy?” she asked.

“Not while she’s champion. A good beating would help, but who’s to beat her?”

“You can’t?”

“Listen,” he said. “In the last few months, here and at home, I’ve had ninety golf lessons, have driven three thousand six hundred balls, of which I lost four hundred and ninety-six, have broken three drivers, one niblick and one putter. I ask you,” he concluded drearily, “did you ever hear before of anyone breaking a putter?”

The thoughtful look was still in Tish’s eye when he left, but she said nothing. A day or two after, we watched him with Mr. McNab, and although he was standing with his back to the house when he drove, we heard a crash overhead and the sheet-iron affair which makes the stove draw was knocked from the chimney and fell to the ground.

He saw us and waved a hand at the wreckage.

“Sorry,” he called. “I keep a roofer now for these small emergencies and I’ll send him over.” Then he looked at Mr. McNab, who had sat down on a bunker and had buried his face in his hands.

“Come now, McNab,” he said. “Cheer up; I’ve thought of a way. If I’m going to drive behind me, all I have to do is to play the game backwards.”

Mr. McNab said nothing. He got up, gave him a furious glance, and then with his hands behind him and his head bent went back toward the clubhouse. Mr. Anderson watched him go, teed another ball and made a terrific lunge at it. It rose, curved and went into the lake.

“Last ball!” he called to us cheerfully. “Got one to lend me?”

I sincerely hope I am not doing Tish an injustice, but she certainly said we had not. Yet Mrs. Ostermaier’s ball——But she may have lost it. I do not know.

It was Aggie who introduced us to Nettie Lynn, the girl in the case. Aggie is possibly quicker than the rest of us to understand the feminine side of a love affair, for Aggie was at one time engaged to a Mr. Wiggins, a gentleman who had pursued his calling as master roofer on and finally off a roof. [More than once that summer Tish had observed how useful he would have been to us at that time, as we were constantly having broken slates, and as the water spout was completely stopped with balls.] And Aggie maintained that Nettie Lynn really cared for Mr. Anderson.

“If Mr. Wiggins were living,” she said gently, “and if I played golf, if he appeared unexpectedly while I was knocking the ball or whatever it is they do to it, if I really cared—and you know, Tish, I did—I am sure I should play very badly.”

“You don’t need all those ifs to reach that conclusion,” Tish said coldly.

A day or two later Aggie stopped Miss Lynn and offered her some orangeade, and she turned out to be very pleasant and friendly. But when Tish had got the conversation switched to Mr. Anderson she was cool and somewhat scornful.

“Bobby?” she said, lifting her eyebrows. “Isn’t he screamingly funny on the links!”

“He’s a very fine young man,” Tish observed, eying her steadily.

“He has no temperament.”

“He has a good disposition. That’s something.”

“Oh, yes,” she admitted carelessly. “He’s as gentle as a lamb.”

Tish talked it over after she had gone. She said that the girl was all right, but that conceit over her game had ruined her, and that the only cure was for Bobby to learn and then beat her to death in a tournament or something, but that Bobby evidently couldn’t learn, and so that was that. She then fell into one of those deep silences during which her splendid mind covers enormous ranges of thought, and ended by saying something to the effect that if one could use a broom one should be able to do something else.

We closed up the cottage soon after and returned to town.

Now and then we saw Nettie Lynn on the street, and once Tish asked us to dinner and we found Bobby Anderson there. He said he had discovered a place in a department store to practice during the winter, with a net to catch the balls, but that owing to his unfortunate tendencies he had driven a ball into the well of the store, where it had descended four stories and hit a manager on the back. He was bent over bowing to a customer or it would have struck his head and killed him.

“She was there,” he said despondently. “She used to think I was only a plain fool. Now she says I’m dangerous, and that I ought to take out a license for carrying weapons before I pick up a club.”

“I don’t know why you want to marry her,” Tish said in a sharp voice.

“I don’t either,” he agreed. “But I do. That’s the hell—I beg your pardon—that’s the deuce of it.”

It was following this meeting that the mysterious events occurred with which I commenced this narrative. And though there may be no connection it was only a day or two later that I read aloud to Aggie an item in a newspaper stating that an elderly woman who refused to give her name had sent a golf ball through the practice net in a downtown store and that the ball had broken and sent off a fire alarm, with the result that the sprinkling system, which was a new type and not dependent on heat, had been turned on in three departments. I do know, however, that Tish’s new velvet hat was never seen from that time on, and that on our shopping excursions she never entered that particular store.

In coming now to the events which led up to the reason for Nettie Lynn cutting us, and to Charlie Sands’ commentary that his wonderful aunt, Letitia Carberry, should remember the commandment which says that honesty is the best policy—I am sure he was joking, for that is not one of the great Commandments—I feel that a certain explanation is due. This explanation is not an apology for dear Tish, but a statement of her point of view.

Letitia Carberry has a certain magnificence of comprehension. If in this magnificence she loses sight of small things, if she occasionally uses perhaps unworthy methods to a worthy end, it is because to her they are not important. It is only the end that counts.

She has, too, a certain secrecy. But that is because of a nobility which says in effect that by planning alone she assumes sole responsibility. I think also that she has little confidence in Aggie and myself, finding us but weak vessels into which she pours in due time the overflow from her own exuberant vitality and intelligence.

With this in mind I shall now relate the small events of the winter. They were merely straws, showing the direction of the wind of Tish’s mind. And I dare say we were not observant. For instance, we reached Tish’s apartment one afternoon to find the janitor there in a very ugly frame of mind. “You threw something out of this window, Miss Carberry,” he said, “and don’t be after denying it.”

“What did I throw out of the window?” Tish demanded loftily. “Produce it.”

“If it wasn’t that it bounced and went over the fence,” he said, “I’d be saying it was a flat-iron. That parrot just squawked once and turned over.”

“Good riddance, too,” Tish observed. “The other tenants ought to send me a vote of thanks.”

“Six milk bottles on Number Three’s fire escape,” the janitor went on, counting on his fingers; “the wash line broke for Number One and all the clothes dirty, and old Mr. Ferguson leaning out to spit and almost killed—it’s no vote of thanks you’ll be getting.”

When she had got rid of him Tish was her usual cool and dignified self. She offered no explanation and we asked for none. And for a month or so nothing happened. Tish distributed her usual list of improving books at the Sunday-school Christmas treat, and we packed our customary baskets for the poor. On Christmas Eve we sang our usual carols before the homes of our friends, and except for one mischance, owing to not knowing that the Pages had rented their house, all was symbolic of the peace and good will of the festive period. At the Pages’, however, a very unpleasant person asked us for —— sake to go away and let him sleep.

But shortly after the holidays Tish made a proposition to us, and stated that it was a portion of a plan to bring about the happiness of two young and unhappy people.

“In developing this plan,” she said, “it is essential that we all be in the best of physical condition; what I believe is known technically as in the pink. You two, for instance, must be able to walk for considerable distances, carrying a weight of some size.”

“What do you mean by ‘in the pink’?” Aggie asked suspiciously.

“What you are not,” Tish said with a certain scorn. “How many muscles have you got?”

“All I need,” said Aggie rather acidly.

“And of all you have, can you use one muscle, outside of the ordinary ones that carry you about?”

“I don’t need to.”

“Have you ever stood up, naked to the air, and felt shame at your flaccid muscles and your puny strength?”

“Really, Tish!” I protested. “I’ll walk if you insist. But I don’t have to take off my clothes and feel shame at my flabbiness to do it.”

She softened at that, and it ended by our agreeing to fall in with her mysterious plan by going to a physical trainer. I confess to a certain tremor when we went for our first induction into the profundities of bodily development. There was a sign outside, with a large picture of a gentleman with enormous shoulders and a pigeon breast, and beneath it were the words: “I will make you a better man.” But Tish was confident and calm.

The first day, however, was indeed trying. We found, for instance, that we were expected to take off all our clothing and to put on one-piece jersey garments, without skirts or sleeves, and reaching only to the knees. As if this were not enough, the woman attendant said when we were ready “In you go, dearies,” and shoved us into a large bare room where a man was standing with his chest thrown out, and wearing only a pair of trousers and a shirt which had shrunk to almost nothing. Aggie clutched me by the arm.

“I’ve got to have stockings, Lizzie!” she whispered. “I don’t feel decent.”

But the woman had closed the door, and Tish was explaining that we wished full and general muscular development.

“The human body,” she said, “instantly responds to care and guidance, and what we wish is simply to acquire perfect coördination. ‘The easy slip of muscles underneath the polished skin,’ as some poet has put it.”

“Yeah,” said the man. “All right. Lie down in a row on the mat, and when I count, raise the right leg in the air and drop it. Keep on doing it. I’ll tell you when to stop.”

“Lizzie!” Aggie threw at me in an agony. “Lizzie, I simply can’t!”

“Quick,” said the trainer. “I’ve got four pounds to take off a welterweight this afternoon. Right leg, ladies. Up, down; one, two——”

Never since the time in Canada when Aggie and I were taking a bath in the lake, and a fisherman came and fished from a boat for two hours while we sat in the icy water to our necks, have I suffered such misery.

“Other leg,” said the trainer. And later: “Right leg up, cross, up, down. Left leg up, cross, up, down.” Aside from the lack of dignity of the performance came very soon the excruciating ache of our weary flesh. Limb by limb and muscle by muscle he made us work, and when we were completely exhausted on the mat he stood us up on our feet in a row and looked us over.

“You’ve got a long way to go, ladies,” he said sternly. “It’s a gosh-awful shame the way you women neglect your bodies. Hold in the abdomen and throw out the chest. Balance easily on the ball of the foot. Now touch the floor with the finger tips, as I do.”

“Young man,” I protested, “I haven’t been able to do that since I was sixteen.”

“Well, you’ve had a long rest,” he said coldly. “Put your feet apart. That’ll help.”

When the lesson was over we staggered out, and Aggie leaned against a wall and moaned. “It’s too much, Tish,” she said feebly. “I’m all right with my clothes on, and anyhow, I’m satisfied as I am. I’m the one to please, not that wretch in there.”

Tish, however, had got her breath and said that she felt like a new woman, and that blood had got to parts of her it had never reached before. But Aggie went sound asleep in the cabinet bath and had to be assisted to the cold shower. I mention this tendency of hers to sleep, as it caused us some trouble later on.

In the meantime Tish was keeping in touch with the two young people. She asked Nettie Lynn to dinner one night, and seemed greatly interested in her golf methods. One thing that seemed particularly to interest her was Miss Lynn’s device for keeping her head down and her eye on the ball.

“After I have driven,” she said, “I make it a rule to count five before looking up.”

“How do you see where the ball has gone?” Tish asked.

“That is the caddie’s business.”

“I see,” Tish observed thoughtfully, and proceeded for some moments to make pills of her bread and knock them with her fork, holding her head down as she did so.

Another thing which she found absorbing was Miss Lynn’s statement that a sound or movement while she drove was fatal, and that even a shadow thrown on the ball while putting decreased her accuracy.

By the end of February we had become accustomed to the exercises and now went through them with a certain sprightliness, turning back somersaults with ease, and I myself now being able to place my flat hand on the floor while standing. Owing to the cabinet baths I had lost considerable flesh and my skin seemed a trifle large for me in places, while Aggie looked, as dear Tish said, like a picked spare rib.

At the end of February, however, our training came to an abrupt end, owing to a certain absent-mindedness on Tish’s part. Tish and Aggie had gone to the gymnasium without me, and at ten o’clock that night I telephoned Tish to ask if Aggie was spending the night with her. To my surprise Tish said nothing for a moment, and then asked me in a strained voice to put on my things at once and meet her at the door to the gymnasium building.

Quick as I was, she was there before me, hammering at the door of the building, which appeared dark and deserted. It appeared that the woman had gone home early with a cold, and that Tish had agreed to unfasten the bath cabinet and let Aggie out at a certain time, but that she had remembered leaving the electric iron turned on at home and had hurried away, leaving Aggie asleep and helpless in the cabinet.

The thought of our dear Aggie, perspiring her life away, made us desperate, and on finding no response from within the building Tish led the way to an alleyway at the side and was able to reach the fire escape. With mixed emotions I watched her valiant figure disappear, and then returned to the main entrance, through which I expected her to reappear with our unhappy friend.

But we were again unfortunate. A few moments later the door indeed was opened, but to give exit to Tish in the grasp of a very rude and violent watchman, who immediately blew loudly on a whistle. I saw at once that Tish meant to give no explanation which would involve taking a strange man into the cabinet room, where our hapless Aggie was completely disrobed and helpless; and to add to our difficulties three policemen came running and immediately placed us under arrest.

Fortunately the station house was near, and we were saved the ignominy of a police wagon. Tish at once asked permission to telephone Charlie Sands, and as he is the night editor of a newspaper he was able to come at once. But Tish was of course reticent as to her errand before so many men, and he grew slightly impatient.

“All right,” he said. “I know you were in the building. I know how you got in. But why? I don’t think you were after lead pipe or boxing gloves, but these men do.”

“I left something there, Charlie.”

“Go a little further. What did you leave there?”

“I can’t tell you. But I’ve got to go back there at once. Every moment now——”

“Get this,” said Charlie Sands sternly: “Either you come over with the story or you’ll be locked up. And I’m bound to say I think you ought to be.”

In the end Tish told the unhappy facts, and two reporters, the sergeant and the policemen were all deeply moved. Several got out their handkerchiefs, and the sergeant turned quite red in the face. One and all they insisted on helping to release our poor Aggie, and most of them escorted us back to the building, only remaining in the corridor at our request while we entered the cabinet room.

Although we had expected to find Aggie in a parboiled condition the first thing which greeted us was a violent sneeze.

“Aggie!” I called desperately.

She sneezed again, and then said in a faint voice, “Hurry up. I’b dearly frozed.”

We learned later that the man in charge had turned off all the electricity when he left, from a switch outside, and that Aggie had perspired copiously and been on the verge of apoplexy until six o’clock, and had nearly frozen to death afterwards. Tish draped a sheet around the cabinet, and the policemen et cetera came in. Aggie gave a scream when she saw them, but it was proper enough, with only her head showing, and they went out at once to let her get her clothing on.

Before he put us in a taxicab that night Charlie Sands spoke to Tish with unjustifiable bitterness.

“I have given the watchman twenty dollars for that tooth you loosened, Aunt Tish,” he said. “And I’ve got to set up some food for the rest of this outfit. Say, fifty dollars, for which you’d better send me a check.” He then slammed the door, but opened it immediately. “I just want to add this,” he said: “If my revered grandfather has turned over in his grave as much as I think he has, he must be one of the liveliest corpses underground.”

I am happy to record that Aggie suffered nothing more than a heavy cold in the head. But she called Tish up the next morning and with unwonted asperity said, “I do thig, Tish, that you bight have put a strig aroud your figer or sobethig, to rebeber be by!”

It was but a week or two after this that Tish called me up and asked me to go to her apartment quickly, and to bring some arnica from the drug store. I went as quickly as possible, to find Hannah on the couch in the sitting room moaning loudly, and Tish putting hot flannels on her knee cap.

“It’s broken, Miss Tish,” she groaned. “I know it is.”

“Nonsense,” said Tish. “Anyhow I called to you to stay out.”

In the center of the room was a queer sort of machine, with a pole on an iron base and a dial at the top, and a ball fastened to a wire. There was a golf club on the floor.

Later on, when Hannah had been helped to her room and an arnica compress adjusted, Tish took me back and pointed to the machine.

“Two hundred and twenty yards, Lizzie,” she said, “and would have registered more but for Hannah’s leg. That’s driving.”

She then sat down and told me the entire plan. She had been working all winter, and was now confident that she could defeat Nettie Lynn. She had, after her first experience in the department store, limited herself—in another store—to approach shots. For driving she had used the machine. For putting she had cut a round hole in the carpet and had sawed an opening in the floor beneath, in which she had placed a wide-mouthed jar.

“My worst trouble, Lizzie,” she said, “was lifting my head. But I have solved it. See here.”

She then produced a short leather strap, one end of which she fastened to her belt and the other she held in her teeth. She had almost lost a front tooth at the beginning, she said, but that phase was over.

“I don’t even need it any more,” she told me. “To-morrow I shall commence placing an egg on the back of my neck as I stoop, and that with a feeling of perfect security.”

She then looked at me with her serene and confident glance.

“It has been hard work, Lizzie,” she said. “It is not over. It is even possible that I may call on you to do things which your ethical sense will at first reject. But remember this, and then decide: The happiness of two young and tender hearts is at stake.”

She seemed glad of a confidante, and asked me to keep a record of some six practice shots, as shown by the dial on the machine. I have this paper before me as I write:

1st drive, 230 yards. Slight pull.

2nd drive, 245 yards. Direct.

3rd drive, 300 yards. Slice.

4th drive, 310 yards. Direct.

5th drive. Wire broke.

6th drive. Wire broke again. Ball went through window pane. Probably hit dog, as considerable howling outside.

She then showed me her clubs, of which she had some forty-six, not all of which, however, she approved of. It was at that time that dear Tish taught me the names of some of them, such as niblick, stymie, cleek, mashie, putter, stance, and brassie, and observed mysteriously that I would need my knowledge later on. She also advised that before going back to Penzance we walk increasing distances every day.

“Because,” she said, “I shall need my two devoted friends this summer; need them perhaps as never before.”

I am bound to confess, however, that on our return to Penzance Tish’s first outdoor work at golf was a disappointment. She had a small ritual when getting ready; thus she would say, firmly, suiting the action to the phrase: “Tee ball. Feet in line with ball, advance right foot six inches, place club, overlap right thumb over left thumb, drop arms, left wrist rigid, head down, eye on the ball, shoulders steady, body still. Drive!” Having driven she then stood and counted five slowly before looking up.

At first, however, she did not hit the ball, or would send it only a short distance. But she worked all day, every day, and we soon saw a great improvement. As she had prophesied, she used us a great deal. For instance, to steady her nerves she would have us speak to her when driving, and even fire a revolver out toward the lake.

We were obliged to stop this, however, for we were in the habit of using the barrel buoy of the people next door to shoot at, until we learned that it was really not a buoy at all, but some fine old whiskey which they were thus concealing, and which leaked out through the bullet holes.

We were glad to find that Nettie Lynn and Bobby were better friends than they had been the year before, and to see his relief when Tish told him to give up his attempts at golf altogether.

“I shall defeat her so ignominiously, Bobby,” she said, “that she will never wish to hear of the game again.”

“You’re a great woman, Miss Carberry,” he said solemnly.

“But you, too, must do your part.”

“Sure I’ll do my part. Name it to me, and that is all.”

But he looked grave when she told him.

“First of all,” she said, “you are to quarrel with her the night before the finals. Violently.”

“Oh, I say!”

“Second, when she is crushed with defeat you are to extract a promise, an oath if you like, that she is through with golf.”

“You don’t know her,” he said. “Might as well expect her to be through with her right hand.”

But he agreed to think it over and, going out to the lake front, sat for a long time lost in thought. When he came back he agreed, but despondently.

“She may love me after all this,” he said, “but I’m darned if I think she’ll like me.”

But he cheered up later and planned the things they could do when they were both free of golf and had some time to themselves. And Mr. McNab going by at that moment, he made a most disrespectful gesture at his back.

It is painful, in view of what followed, to recall his happiness at that time.

I must confess that Aggie and I were still in the dark as to our part in the tournament. And our confusion as time went on was increased by Tish’s attitude toward her caddie. On her first attempt he had been impertinent enough, goodness knows, and Tish had been obliged to reprove him.

“Your business here, young man,” she said, “is to keep your eye on the ball.”

“That’s just what you’re not doing,” he said smartly. “Lemme show you.”

Tish said afterwards that it was purely an accident, for he broke every rule of stance and so on, but before she realized his intention he had taken the club from her hand and sent the ball entirely out of sight.

“That’s the way,” he said. “Whale ’em!”

But recently her attitude to him had changed. She would bring him in and give him cake and ginger ale, and she paid him far too much. When Hannah showed her disapproval he made faces at her behind Tish’s back, and once he actually put his thumb to his nose. To every remonstrance Tish made but one reply.

“Develop the larger viewpoint,” she would observe, “and remember this: I do nothing without a purpose.”

“Then stop him making snoots at me,” said Hannah. “I’ll poison him, that’s what I’ll do.”

Thus our days went on. The hours of light Tish spent on the links. In the evenings her busy fingers were not idle, for she was making herself some knickerbockers from an old pair of trousers which Charlie Sands had left at the cottage, cutting them off below the knee and inserting elastic in the hem, while Aggie and I, by the shade of our lamp, knitted each a long woolen stocking to complete the outfit.

It was on such an evening that Tish finally revealed her plan, that plan which has caused so much unfavorable comment since. The best answer to that criticism is Tish’s own statement to us that night.

“Frankly,” she admitted, “the girl can beat me. But if she does she will continue on her headstrong way, strewing unhappiness hither and yon. She must not win!”

Briefly the plan she outlined was based on the undermining of Nettie’s morale. Thus, Aggie sneezes during the hay-fever season at the mere sight of a sunflower. She was to keep one in her pocket, and at a signal from Tish was to sniff at it, holding back the resultant sneeze, however, until the champion was about to drive.

“I’ll be thirty yards behind, with the crowd, won’t I?” Aggie asked.

“You will be beside her,” Tish replied solemnly. “On the day of the finals the caddies will go on a strike, and I shall insist that a strange caddie will spoil my game, and ask for you.”

It appeared that I was to do nothing save to engage Mr. McNab in conversation at certain times and thus distract his attention, the signal for this being Tish placing her right hand in her trousers pocket. For a sneeze from Aggie the signal was Tish coughing once.

“At all times, Aggie,” she finished, “I shall expect you to keep ahead of us, and as near Nettie Lynn’s ball as possible. The undulating nature of the ground is in our favor, and will make it possible now and then for you to move it into a less favorable position. If at the fourteenth hole you can kick it into the creek it will be very helpful.”

Aggie was then rehearsed in the signals, and did very well indeed.

Mr. McNab was an occasional visitor those days. He was watching Tish’s game with interest.

“Ye’ll never beat the champion, ma’m,” he would say, “but ye take the game o’ gowf as it should be taken, wi’ humility and prayer.”

More than once he referred to Bobby Anderson, saying that he was the only complete failure of his experience, and that given a proper chance he would make a golfer of him yet.

“The mon has aye the build of a gowfer,” he would say wistfully.

It is tragic now to remember that incident of the day before the opening of the tournament, when Bobby came to our cottage and we all ceremoniously proceeded to the end of the dock and flung his various clubs, shoes, balls, cap and bag into the lake, and then ate a picnic supper on the shore. When the moon came up he talked of the future in glowing terms.

“I feel in my bones, Miss Tish,” he said, “that you will beat her. And I know her; she won’t stand being defeated, especially by——” Here he coughed, and lost the thread of this thought. “I’m going to buy her a horse,” he went on. “I’m very fond of riding.”

He said, however, that it was going to be very hard for him to quarrel with her the evening before the finals.

“I’m too much in love,” he confessed. “Besides, outside of golf we agree on everything—politics, religion, bridge; everything.”

It was then that Tish made one of her deeply understanding comments.

“Married life is going to be very dull for you both,” she said.

It was arranged that in spite of the quarrel he should volunteer to caddie for the champion the day of the strike, and to take a portion of Aggie’s responsibility as to changing the lie of the ball, and so forth. He was not hopeful, however.

“She won’t want me any more than the measles,” he said.

“She can’t very well refuse, before the crowd,” Tish replied.

I pass with brief comment over the early days of the women’s tournament. Mrs. Ostermaier was eliminated the first day with a score of 208, and slapped her caddie on the seventeenth green. Tish turned in only a fair score, and was rather depressed; so much so that she walked in her sleep and wakened Aggie by trying to tee a ball on the end of her—Aggie’s—nose. But the next day she was calm enough, and kept her nerves steady by the simple device of knitting as she followed the ball. The result was what she had expected, and the day of the finals saw only Nettie Lynn and our dear Tish remaining.

All worked out as had been expected. The caddies went on a strike that day, and before the field Nettie was obliged to accept Bobby’s offer to carry her clubs. But he was very gloomy and he brought his troubles to me.

“Well, I’ve done it,” he said. “And I’m ruined for life. She never wants to see me again. It’s my belief,” he added gloomily, “that she could have bit the head off an iron club last night and never have known she had done it.”

He groaned and mopped his face with his handkerchief.

“I’m not sure it’s the right thing after all,” he said. “The madder she is the better she’ll play. All she’s got to do is to imagine I’m the ball, and she’ll knock it a thousand yards.”

There was some truth in this probably, for she certainly overshot the first hole, and the way she said “Mashie!” to Bobby Anderson really sounded like an expletive. Tish won that hole, they halved the second, and owing to Aggie sneezing without apparent cause during Tish’s drive on the third, Nettie took it. On the fourth, however, Tish was fortunate and drove directly into the cup.

We now entered the undulating portion of the course, and I understand that Bobby and Aggie both took advantage of this fact to place Nettie Lynn’s ball in occasional sand traps, and once to lose it altogether. Also that the device of sneezing during a putt was highly effective, so that at the ninth hole dear Tish was three up.

Considering the obloquy which has fallen to me for my own failure to coöperate, I can only state as follows: I engaged Mr. McNab steadily in conversation, and when he moved to a different position I faithfully followed him; but I was quite helpless when he suddenly departed, taking an oblique course across the field, nor could I approach Tish to warn her.

And on the surface all continued to go well. It was now evident to all that the champion was defeated, and that the champion knew it herself. In fact the situation was hopeless, and no one, I think, was greatly surprised when after driving for the fourteenth hole she suddenly threw down her club, got out her handkerchief and left the course, followed by Bobby.

Our misfortune was that Aggie was ahead in the hollow and did not see what had happened. Her own statement is that she saw the ball come and fall into a dirt road, and that all she did was to follow it and step on it, thus burying it out of sight; but also that no sooner had she done this than Mr. McNab came charging out of the woods like a mad bull and rushed at her, catching her by the arm.

It was at that moment that our valiant Tish, flushed with victory, came down the slope.

Mr. McNab was dancing about and talking in broad Scotch, but Tish finally caught the drift of what he was saying—that he had suspected us all day, that we would go before the club board, and that Tish would get no cup.

“You’ve played your last gowf on these links, Miss Carberry, and it’s a crying shame the bad name you’ve gien us,” was the way he finished, all the time holding to Aggie’s arm. It was thus I found them.

“Very well,” Tish said in her coldest tone. “I shall be very glad to state before the board my reasons, which are excellent. Also to register a protest against using the lake front before my cottage for the cooling of beer, et cetera. I dare say I may go home first?”

“I’ll be going with you, then.”

“Very well,” Tish replied. “And be good enough to release Miss Pilkington. She was merely obeying my instructions.” Thus our lion-hearted Tish, always ready to assume responsibility, never weakening, always herself.

I come now to a painful portion of this narrative, and the reason for Nettie Lynn cutting us dead on the street. For things moved rapidly within the next few moments. Mr. McNab settled himself like a watchdog on our cottage steps, and there Tish herself carried him some blackberry cordial and a slice of coconut cake. There, too, in her impressive manner she told him the story of the plot.

“Think of it, Mr. McNab,” she said. “Two young and loving hearts yearning for each other, and separated only by the failure of one of them to learn the game of golf!”

Mr. McNab was profoundly moved.

“He wouldna keep his eye on the ball,” he said huskily. “I like the lad fine, but he would aye lift his heid.”

“If this brings them together you would not part them, would you?”

“He wouldna fallow through, Miss Carberry. He juist hit the ball an’ quit.”

“If they were married, and he could give his mind to the game he’d learn it, Mr. McNab.”

The professional brightened. “Maybe. Maybe,” he said. “He has the body of the gowfer. If he does that, we’ll say na mair, Miss Carberry.”

And, do what we would, Mr. McNab stood firm on that point. The thought of his failure with Bobby Anderson had rankled, and now he made it a condition of his silence on the day’s events that he have a free hand with him that summer.

“Gie him to me for a month,” he said, “and he’ll be a gowfer, and na care whether he’s married or no.”

We ate our dinner that night in a depressed silence, although Tish’s silver cup graced the center of the table. Before we had finished, Bobby Anderson came bolting in and kissed us each solemnly.

“It’s all fixed,” he said. “She has solemnly sworn never to play golf again, and I’ve brought her clubs down to follow mine into the lake.”

“You’d better keep them,” Tish said. “You’re going to need them.”

She then broke the news to him, and considering the months she had spent to help him he was very ungrateful, I must say. Indeed, his language was shocking.

“Me learn golf?” he shouted. “You tell McNab to go to perdition and take his cursed golf links with him. I won’t do it! This whole scheme was to eliminate golf from my life. It has pursued me for three years. I have nightmares about it. I refuse. Tell McNab I’ve broken my leg. Wait a minute and I’ll go out and break it.”

But he could not refuse, and he knew it.

So far as we know, Nettie Lynn has never played golf since. She impresses me as a person of her word. But why she should be so bitter toward us we cannot understand. As dear Tish frequently remarks, who could have foreseen that Mr. McNab would actually make a golfer out of Bobby? Or that he would become so infatuated with the game as to abandon practically everything else?

They are married now, and Hannah knows their cook. She says it is sometimes nine o’clock at night in the summer before he gets in to dinner.

THE BABY BLIMP

I

Ever since last spring I have felt that a certain explanation is due to the public regarding Tish’s great picture, The Sky Pirate, especially as to the alteration at the end of that now celebrated picture. I have also felt that a full explanation of what happened to us on that final tragic night is due to our dear Tish herself. She has never yet made a statement of any case of hers, believing that her deeds must speak for her.

But perhaps, more than anything, I am influenced by the desire to present the facts to Charlie Sands, Tish’s nephew, for, owing to his attitude the day he met us at the train, Tish has never deigned to make a full explanation.

We were on the platform, and I was taking a cinder out of Aggie’s eye, when we perceived him, standing close by and surveying us gloomily.

“My life,” he said, “has resolved itself into meeting you three when you have come back from doing something you shouldn’t.” He then picked up a bag or two and observed: “Even the chap in the Bible only had one prodigal.”

He said nothing more until we were waiting for a taxi, when he observed that his nerves were not what they had been, and who was to secure bail for us when he was gone? We could only meet this with silence, but the fact is that he has never yet lost his money in that way, and never will.

“Some day,” he said, “I shall drop over of heart failure on receiving one of your wires, and then where will you be?”

“The circumstances were unusual,” Tish said with dignity.

“I’ll tell the world they were!” he said. “Unusual as h—l.”

He then lapsed into silence, and so remained until we were in the taxicab, on our way to Tish’s apartment. Then he leaned forward and stared fixedly at his Aunt Letitia.

“Now!” he said. “We’re going to have the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. What about that elephant?”

Tish raised her eyebrows.

“Elephant?” she said.

“‘Elephant’ is the word I used. Look me square in the eye, last surviving female relative of mine, and deny you had anything to do with it! The moment the Associated Press wires began to come in, I knew.”

“Very well,” Tish said acidly. “If you know, there is no need to explain.”

And from that moment to this, she never has.

In order to bring the elephant incident in its proper sequence it is necessary to return to the autumn of last year, and to tell of the various incidents which led up to that awful night, and the roof of the First National Bank of Los Angeles.

During all of last winter Tish had been making a survey of what she called the art, the educational value and the business of moving pictures. She was, in a word, studying them. And she came to certain conclusions. Thus, she believed that the public had wearied of sentiment and was ready for adventure without sex. Also, that the overemphasis on love in the pictures was weakening the moral fiber of the nations.

“It was when sex replaced war,” she observed to Aggie and myself, “that Rome fell and Babylon crumbled to the dust.”

I agreed with her, but Aggie had certain reservations. When, as frequently happened, Tish left the theater just before the final embrace, thus registering her disapproval, Aggie sometimes loitered, to put on her overshoes or to find her glasses. Indeed, once trying to take her departure while looking back over her shoulder, she had a really bad fall in the theater aisle.

But our dear Tish showed Aggie considerable indulgence, as Aggie’s life had at one time held a romance of its own, she having been engaged to a Mr. Wiggins, who had not survived the engagement.

I have mentioned Mr. Wiggins because, although it is thirty years since he passed over, it was Aggie’s getting into touch with him in the spirit world which brought Mr. Stein into our lives. And it was Stein who brought about all our troubles. We were both very happy to find our dear Tish occupied with a new interest, as since the war, when she had captured the town of X—— single handed—for Aggie was at the time on the church steeple and I had gone back for reënforcements—she had become rather listless.

“I find it difficult,” she had once acknowledged, “to substitute the daily dozen for my activities in France, and the sight of four women quarreling madly over a bridge table for a back scratcher with a pink bow on it simply makes me homesick for the war.”

Judge of our disappointment, therefore, when with the first of March, Tish’s interest in the pictures apparently lagged. From spending night after night watching them, she suddenly became invisible to us for long periods, and Hannah reported that at these times she would lock herself in her room, burning innumerable papers at the end of the period of seclusion. Also that, listening at the door, she could hear our dear Tish walking up and down the floor muttering to herself; and she reported that these active periods were followed by quiescent ones, when she could hear the rapid scratching of a pen.

Our first anxiety was that Tish had got herself into some sort of difficulty with her affairs, and this was not lessened by Hannah’s bringing to us one evening a scrap of charred paper on which were the words: “I will kill myself first.”

Had Charlie Sands not been out of town we would have gone to him, but he was in Europe, and did not return until four months later, when we were able to call on him for bail, as I have said. We had, therefore, no inkling of what was happening when, finding Tish in an approachable mood one evening, Aggie suggested that she try automatic writing.

Aggie had at last got into touch with Mr. Wiggins through a medium, and learned that he was very happy. But, although I have seen her sit for hours with a pencil poised over a sheet of paper, she had secured no written message from him. She therefore suggested that Tish try it.

“I’ve always felt that you are psychic, Tish,” she said. “Every now and then when I touch you I get a spark, like electricity. And I have frequently heard knocks on the furniture when you are in a dark room.”

“I’ve got bruises to show for them too,” Tish said grimly.

Well, though Tish at first demurred, she finally agreed, and after Aggie had placed a red petticoat over the lamp to secure what she called the psychic light, Tish made the attempt.

“I have no faith in it,” she said, “but I shall entirely retire my personality, and if there is a current from beyond, it shall flow through me unimpeded.”

Very soon we heard the pencil moving, and on turning on the light later we were electrified to see the rough outline of an animal, which Aggie has since contended might have been intended for Katie, the elephant, but which closely resembled those attempts frequently made to draw a pig with the eyes closed. Underneath was the word “stein.”

In view of later developments we know now that the word “stein” was not from Mr. Wiggins—although Aggie remembered that he had once or twice referred, when thirsty, to a stein of something or other—but that it was a proper name.

That at least a part of the message had a meaning for our dear Tish is shown by a cryptic remark she made to the room.

“Thanks,” she said, to whatever spirit hovered about us. “I’ll do it. It was what I intended, anyhow.”

II

Just a month later Tish telephoned one morning for Aggie and myself to go there that afternoon. There was a touch of sharpness in her manner, which with Tish usually means nervous tension.

“And put on something decent, for once,” she said. “There’s no need to look as though you were taking your old clothes for an airing, to keep out the moths.”

Tish was alone when we arrived. I could smell sponge cakes baking, and Tish had put on her mother’s onyx set and was sitting with her back to the light. She looked slightly feverish, and I commented on it, but she only said that she had been near the stove.

When she was called out, however, Aggie leaned over to me.

“Stove, nothing!” she said. “She’s painted her face! And she’s got a new transformation!”

Had Charlie Sands himself appeared wearing a toupee we could not have been more astounded. And our amazement continued when Hannah brought in a tea tray with the Carberry silver on it, silver which had been in a safe-deposit vault for twenty years.

“Hannah,” I demanded, “what is the matter?”

“She’s going to be married! That’s what,” said Hannah, putting down the tray with a slam. “No fool like an old fool!” Then she burst into tears. “She spent the whole morning in a beauty parlor,” she wailed. “Look at her finger nails! And callin’ me in to draw up her corset on her!”

Neither Aggie nor I could speak for a moment. As I have said, our dear Tish had never shown any interest in the other sex. Indeed, I think I may say that Tish’s virginity of outlook regarding herself is her strongest characteristic. It is her proud boast that no man has ever offered her the most chaste of salutes, and her simple statement as to what would happen if one did has always been a model of firmness.

I have heard her remark that when the late Henry Clay observed “Give me liberty or give me death,” he was referring to marriage.

But Aggie had been correct. There was a bloom on dear Tish’s face never placed there by the benign hand of Nature. Had I seen Mr. Ostermaier, our minister, preaching a sermon in a silk hat I should not have felt more horrified. And our anxiety was not lessened by Tish’s first remark when she returned.

“I shall want you two as witnesses,” she said. “And I shall make just one remark now. I know your attitude on certain subjects, so I ask you simply to remember this: I believe we owe a duty to the nation, especially with regard to children.”

“Good heavens, Tish!” Aggie said, and turned a sort of greenish white. “A woman of your age——”

“What’s my age got to do with it?” Tish snapped. “I simply say——”

But just then the doorbell rang, and Hannah announced a gentleman.

It was a Mr. Stein.

Aggie has told me since that the thought of Tish marrying was as nothing to her then, compared with the belief that she was marrying out of the Presbyterian Church. And she knew the moment she saw him that Mr. Stein was not a Presbyterian. But as it developed and as all the world knows now, it was not a matter of marriage at all.

Mr. Stein was the well-known moving-picture producer.

While Aggie and I were endeavoring to readjust our ideas he sat down, and looked at Tish while rubbing his hands together.

“Well, Miss Carberry,” he said, “I’ve brought the contracts.”

“And the advance?” Tish inquired calmly.

“And the advance. Certified check, as you requested.”

“You approve of my idea?”

“Well,” he said, “you’re right in one way. Sex has been overdone in pictures. The censors have killed it. When you’re limited to a five-foot kiss—well, you know. You can’t get it over, that’s all. We’ve had to fall back on adventure. Not even crime, at that. Would you believe it, we’ve had to change a murder scene just lately to the corpse taking an overdose of sleeping medicine by mistake. And we can’t have a woman show her figure on a chaise longue in a tea gown, while the bathing-suit people get by without any trouble. It’s criminal, that’s all. Criminal!”

“You have missed my idea,” Tish said coldly. “I wrote that picture to prove that a love interest, any love interest, is not essential to a picture.”

He agreed with what we now realize was suspicious alacrity.

“Certainly,” he said. “Certainly! After all, who pays the profits on pictures? The women, Miss Carberry. The women! Do up the dishes in a hurry—get me?—and beat it for the theater. Like to sit there and imagine themselves the heroine. And up to now we’ve never given them a heroine over seventeen years of age!”

He reflected on this, almost tearfully.

“Well,” he said, “that’s over now. There are twenty-nine million women over forty in America to-day, and every one will see this picture. That is, if we do it.”

“If you do it?” Tish inquired, gazing at him through her spectacles.

“When I told the casting director to find me a woman for the part he went out and got drunk. He’s hardly been sober since.”

“You haven’t found anyone?”

“Not yet.”

Tish had picked up her knitting, and Mr. Stein sat back and surveyed her for a few moments in silence. Then he leaned forward.

“Excuse me for asking, Miss Carberry,” he said, “but have you ever driven a car?”

“I drove an ambulance in France.”

“Really?” He seemed interested and slightly excited. “Then the sound of a gun wouldn’t scare you, I dare say?”

“I would hardly say that. I shoot very well. I’m considered rather good with a machine gun, I believe.”

He sat forward on the edge of his chair, and stared at her.

“Ever ride a horse?” he inquired. “Not hard, you know, with a Western saddle. You just sit in it and the horse does the rest.”

Tish looked at him through her spectacles.

“There is no argument for the Western saddle as against the English,” she said firmly. “I have used them both, Mr. Stein. One rides properly by balance, not adherence.”

Mr. Stein suddenly got out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead.

“Would you believe it!” he muttered. “And me just happening to be in town on a little matter of alimony! Does everything! By heaven, I believe she could fill a tooth!”

He then stared again at Tish and said, “You’re not by any chance related to the Miss Carberry who captured the town of X—— from the Germans, I suppose?”

“My friends here, and I, did that; yes.”

He stared at us all without saying anything for a moment. Then he moistened his lips.

“Well, well!” he said. “Well, well! Why, we ran a shot of you, Miss Carberry, in our news feature, when you were decorated and kissed by that French general, What’s-His-Name.”

“I prefer not to recall that.”

“Surely, surely,” he agreed. He then got up and bowed to Tish. “Miss Carberry,” he said, “I apologize, and I salute you. I came here to offer you a fixed price for your story. A moment ago I decided to offer you the part of the woman of—er—maturity in your picture, with two hundred dollars a week and a double for the stunts. I now remove the double, and offered you a thousand a week for your first picture. If that goes, we’ll talk business.”

If Tish reads this I will ask her at this moment to pause and think. Did I or did I not enter a protest? Did Aggie warn her or did she not? And was it not Tish herself who silenced us with a gesture, and completed her arrangements while Aggie softly wept?

She cannot deny it.

One final word of Tish’s I must record, in fairness to her.

“If I do this, Mr. Stein,” she said, “there must be a clear understanding. This is purely a picture of adventure and is to teach a real moral lesson.”

“Absolutely,” Mr. Stein said heartily. “Virtue is always triumphant on the screen. It is our greatest commercial asset. Without it, ladies, we would be nowhere.”

“And there must be no love element introduced.”

“Certainly not,” said Mr. Stein. “Certainly not!”

Those were almost his final words. We then had tea, and Tish gave him some of our homemade blackberry cordial. He seemed very pleased with it, and on departing remarked, “My admiration for you grows steadily, Miss Carberry. I did not fully estimate your powers when I said you could fill a tooth. You could, with that cordial, make a ouija board hiccup.”

III

Things were quiet for a month or two after that, and we understood that the production was being got ready. But Tish was very busy, having thrown herself into her preparations with her usual thoroughness.

She had found a teacher who taught how to register with the face the various emotions on the screen, and twice a week Aggie or myself held her book, illustrated with cuts, while Tish registered in alphabetical order: Amusement, anxiety, boredom, curiosity, devotion, envy, fatigue, generosity, hate, interest, jealousy, keenness, laughter, love, merriment, nobility, objection, pity, quarrelsomeness, ridicule, satisfaction, terror, uneasiness, vanity, wrath, and so on.

I must confess that the subtle changes of expression were often lost on me, and that I suffered extremely at those times, when discarding the book, she asked us to name her emotion from her expression. She would stand before her mirror and arrange her features carefully, and then quickly turn. But I am no physiognomist.

Her physical preparations, however, she made alone. That she was practicing again with her revolver Hannah felt sure, but we had no idea where and how. As has been previously recorded, the janitor of her apartment had refused to allow her to shoot in the basement after a bullet had embedded itself in the dining table of A flat while the family was at luncheon. We surmised that she was doing it somewhere outside of town.

Later on we had proof of this. Aggie and I were taking a constitutional one day in the country beyond the car line when, greatly to our surprise, we heard two shots beyond a hedge, followed by a man’s angry shouts, and on looking over the hedge, who should we behold but our splendid Tish, revolver in hand, and confronted by an angry farm laborer.

“Right through my hat!” he was bellowing. “If a man can’t do an honest day’s work without being fired at——”

“Work?” Tish said coldly. “You were so still I took you for a scarecrow.”

“Scarecrow yourself! When I yelled, you shot again!” he howled. “Deliberate attempt at murder. That’s what it was.”

“It went off by itself the second time,” Tish explained. “I’m rehearsing a certain scene, and——”

“Rehearsing?” said the man. “What for?”

“For the moving pictures.”

He looked at her, and then he bowed very politely.

“Well, well!” he said. “I didn’t recognize you at first, Miss Pickford. And how’s Doug?”

We did not tell Tish that we had witnessed this encounter. She might have been sensitive about mistaking a farmer for a scarecrow.

It was a day or so after, in our presence, that Tish informed Hannah she would take her along as her maid. And Hannah, who in twenty odd years had never been known to show enthusiasm, was plainly delighted with the prospect.

“D’you mean I can see them acting?” she inquired.

“I imagine so,” Tish said with a tolerant smile.

“Love scenes too?” Hannah asked, with an indelicacy that startled us.

“There will be no love scenes in this picture, Hannah,” Tish reproved her. “I am surprised at you. And even in the ones you see every evening, when you ought to be doing something better, it is as well to remember that the persons are not really lovers. Indeed, that often they are barely friends.”

She then told Hannah to go downtown and buy a book on moving-picture make-up and the various articles required, as, since she was to be a personal maid, she must know about such things.

I confess that Aggie and I were in a state of extreme depression when we left Tish that day. The thought of our dear friend altering the face her Creator gave her was a painful one, and both of us, I think, feared it as an index of a possible general demoralization, as too often happens in the movies. Aggie particularly feared the contacts with men, as mentioned by Hannah, in spite of Tish’s firm attitude. The well-known temptations of Hollywood were in both our minds.

“They aren’t paying her a thousand dollars a week just to ride, and so on,” Aggie said bitterly. “Did you ever see a picture without a love story? It isn’t only her neck she’s risking, Lizzie.”

I must confess to the same uneasiness.

We went to bed early that night, sorely troubled, and I had fallen asleep and was dreaming that Tish was trying to leap from an automobile to a moving train, and that everytime she did it the train jumped to another track, when the telephone bell rang, and it was Hannah. She said that Tish wanted me, and to go over right away, but not to waken Aggie.

I went at once and found all the lights going, and Tish in her bed, bolt upright, with both eyes closed.

“Tish!” I cried. “Your eyes! Can’t you see?”

“Not through my eyelids,” she said witheringly. “Don’t be a fool, Lizzie. Look at this stuff and then tell me what will take it off.”

I then saw that the rims of her eyelids were smeared with a black paste which had hardened like enamel, and that they had become glued together, leaving her, temporarily at least, sightless and helpless. My poor Tish!

“What will take it off?” she demanded. “That idiot Hannah offered to melt it with a burning match.”

“I don’t think anything but a hammer will do any good, Tish.”

I discovered then that Hannah had bought the make-up book, and that it laid particular emphasis on beading the eyelashes. With her impatient temperament Tish, although the shops were shut by that time, decided to make the experiment, and had concocted a paste of glue and India ink. She had experimented first on her eyebrows, she had thought successfully, although when I saw her they looked like two jet crescents fastened to her forehead; but inadvertently closing her eyes after beading her lashes, she had been unable to open them again.

She and Hannah had tried various expedients, among them lard, the yolk of an egg, cold cream and ammonia, but without result. I was obliged to tell her that it was set like a cement pavement.

In the end I was able, amid exclamations of pain and annoyance from Tish, to cut off her lashes, and later to shave her eyebrows with an old razor which Hannah had for some unknown purpose, and although much of the glue remained Tish was able to see once more. When I left her she was contemplating her image in her mirror, and a little of her fine frenzy of early enthusiasm seemed to have departed.

It is characteristic of Tish that, once embarked on an enterprise, she devotes her entire attention to it and becomes in a way isolated from her kind. Her mental attitude during these periods of what may be termed mind gestation is absent and solitary. Thus I am able to tell little of what preparations she made during the following weeks. I do know that she went to church on her last Sunday with her bonnet wrong side before, and that during the sermon she was unconsciously assuming the various facial expressions, one after the other, to the astonishment and confusion of Mr. Ostermaier in the pulpit.

But we also learned that she had again taken up her riding. The papers one evening were full of an incident connected with the local hunt, where an unknown woman rider had followed the hounds in to the death and had then driven them all off and let the fox go free.

My suspicions were at once aroused, and I carried the paper to Tish that night. I found her on her sofa, with the air redolent of arnica and witch hazel, and gave her the paper. She read the article calmly enough.

“I belong to the Humane Society, Lizzie,” she said. “Those dogs would have killed it.”

“But what made you join the hunt?”

“I didn’t join the hunt,” she said wearily. “How did I know that beast was an old hunter? I was riding along quietly when a horn blew somewhere, and the creature just went over the fence and started.” Tish closed her eyes. “We jumped eleven fences and four ditches,” she said in a tired voice, “and I bit my tongue halfway through. I think we went through some hotbeds, too, but I hadn’t time to look.”

“Tish,” I said firmly, “I want you to think, long and hard. Is it worth it? What are they going to pay you a thousand dollars a week to risk? Your beauty, your virtue or your neck? I leave it to you to guess.”

“It’s my neck,” said Tish coldly.

“Well, you’ve lost the head that belongs on it,” I retorted. And I went home.

We were to leave on a Monday, and the Saturday before Tish called me by telephone.

“I’ve been thinking, Lizzie,” she said. “A portion of my picture is laid in the desert. We’d better take some antisnake-bite serum.”

“Where do you get it?”

“For heaven’s sake, don’t bother me with detail,” she snapped. “Try the snake house at the Zoo.”

I did so, and I must say the man acted strangely about it.

“For snake bite?” he inquired. “Who’s been bitten?”

“Nobody’s been bitten,” I said with dignity. “I just want a little to have on hand in case of trouble.”

He looked around and lowered his voice. “I get you,” he said. “Well, I haven’t any now, but I will have next week. Eight dollars a quart. Prewar stuff.”

When I told him I couldn’t wait he stared at me strangely, and when I turned at the door he had called another man, and they were both looking after me and shaking their heads.

IV

It had been the desire of Tish’s life to fly in an aëroplane, and we knew by this time that much of her story was laid in the air. But during the trip west I believe she lost some of her fine enthusiasm. This was due, I imagine, to the repeated stories of crashes with which the newspapers were filled, and also to the fact that we passed one airship abandoned in a field, and showing signs of having fallen from a considerable height.

This theory was borne out, I admit, by Tish’s reception of Mr. Stein at the station in Los Angeles.

“We’ve got a small dirigible for the bootleggers, Miss Carberry,” he said cheerfully, “and a fast pursuit plane for you, machine gun and all. Got the plane cheap, after a crash. A dollar saved is a dollar earned, you know!”

Tish, I thought, went a trifle pale.

“You won’t need them, Mr. Stein. I’m going to take the story out of the air.”

“Great Scott! What for?” he exclaimed.

“It is too improbable.”

“Improbable! Of course it is. That’s the point.” Then he leaned forward and patted her reassuringly. “Now, see here, Miss Carberry,” he said, “don’t you worry! We’ve got a good pilot for you, and everything. You’re as safe there as you are in this car.”

Unfortunately the car at that moment failed to make a sharp turn, left the road, leaped a ditch, and brought up in a plowed field. It seemed a bad omen to begin with, and Tish, I think, so considered it.

“My nephew developed jaundice after an air ride, Mr. Stein,” she said as the driver backed the car onto the road, and we pulled Aggie from beneath the three of us. “An attack of jaundice on my part would hold up the picture indefinitely.”

But Mr. Stein was ready for that, as we later found him ready for every emergency.

“We’ve a doctor on the lot, Miss Carberry,” he said. “Specializes in jaundice. Don’t you worry at all.”

Looking back, both Aggie and I realize the significance of the remark he made on leaving us after having settled us at the hotel.

“We’ve made one or two changes in the story, Miss Carberry,” he said. “Nothing you will object to.” He smiled genially. “Have to give the scenario department something to do to earn their salaries!”

Had Tish not been preoccupied this would not have gone unchallenged. But she was staring up just then at the blue California sky, where an aviator was looping the loop, and so forth, and she made no comment.

When we recall our California experience, Aggie and I date our first disappointment from the following day, Tish’s first at the studio.

Though Tish cannot be termed a handsome woman, she has a certain majesty of mien, which has its own charm. Her new transformation, too, had softened certain of her facial angles, and we had felt that she would have real distinction on the screen. But it was to be otherwise, alas!

Aggie and I had been put out, and sat on the dressing-room steps, perspiring freely, while numerous people came and went from Tish’s room. We had heard of the great change effected by the make-up, and our hopes were high. We had not expected her to compete with the various beauties of the silver sheet, but we had expected to find her natural charms emphasized.

But when, some time later, the door opened and Tish appeared, what shall I say? It was Tish, of course, but Tish in an old skirt and a blouse, with no transformation, and her own hair slicked into a hard knot on top of her head.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and she can never be utterly plain to us. But I must say she was not ornamental.

She did not speak, nor did we. She simply passed us, stalking across the lot to a large glassed-in building, and I went in to comfort Hannah.

V

The picture, The Sky Pirate, having made a great success, I need only briefly outline Tish’s story. As an elderly clerk in the secret service, she is appalled by the amount of rum smuggling going on, especially by dirigible from Mexico. She volunteers to stop it, and is refused permission. She then steals an airship from the Army, funds from the Treasury in Washington, an air pilot from the Marines, and starts West, unheralded and unsung, in pursuit of her laudable purpose.

The various incidents, as the great American public will recall, include her fastening a Mexican governor in a cave by exploding dynamite in the hillside above him; dropping from a bridge to a moving train below to search the express car for liquor; trapping the chief smuggler on top of the structural-iron framework of a building, and so on. In the end, by holding up the smugglers’ dirigible with her own aëroplane and a machine gun, Tish forces them to hand over the valise containing their ill-gotten gains, and with it descends by a parachute to the ground and safety. Later on, as you will recall, she finds the smugglers at an orgy, and with two revolvers arrests them all.

This simple outline only barely reveals the plan of the story. It says nothing of the pursuits on horseback, the shipwreck, the fire, and so on. But it shows clearly that the original story contained no love interest.

I lay stress on this at this point in the narration, because it was very early in the picture that we began to notice Mr. Macmanus.

Mr. Macmanus was a tall gentleman with a gray mustache, and with a vague resemblance to Mr. Ostermaier, but lacking the latter’s saintliness of expression. We paid little attention to him at first, but he was always around when Tish was being photographed—or shot, as the technical term is—and in his make-up.

Aggie rather admired him, and spoke to him one day while he was feeding peanuts to Katie, the tame studio elephant—of whom more anon.

“Are you being shot to-day?” she inquired.

“No madam. Not to-day, nor even at sunrise!” he replied in a bitter tone. “From what I can discover, I am being paid my salary to prevent my appearance on any screen.”

He then gloomily fed the empty bag to Katie, and went away.

We had no solution for the mystery of Mr. Macmanus at that period, and indeed temporarily forgot him. For the time had come for Tish to take the air, and both Aggie and I were very nervous.

Even Tish herself toyed with her breakfast the morning of that day, and spoke touchingly of Charlie Sands, observing that she was his only surviving relative, and that perhaps it was wrong and selfish of her to take certain risks. To add to our anxiety, the morning paper chronicled the story of a fatal crash the day before, and she went, I think, a trifle pale. Later on, however, she rallied superbly.

“After all,” she said, “the percentage of accident is only one in five hundred. I am sorry for the poor wretch, but it saves the lives of four hundred and ninety-nine others. Figures do not lie.”

From that time on she was quite buoyant, and ate a lamb chop with appetite.

During the flight Aggie, Hannah and I remained in the open, looking up, and I must admit that it was a nervous time for us, seeing our dear Tish head down above the earth, and engaged in other life-imperiling exploits. But she came down smiling and, when the aëroplane stopped, spoke cheerfully.

“A marvelous experience,” she observed. “One feels akin to the birds. One soars, and loses memory of earth.”

She was then helped out, but owing to the recent altitude her knees refused to support her, and she sank to the ground.

VI

There were, of course, occasional misadventures. There was that terrible day, for instance, when Tish hung from a bridge by her hands, ready to drop to a train beneath, when through some mistake the train was switched to another track and our dear Letitia was left hanging, like Mohammed’s coffin, between heaven and earth. And that other day, of wretched memory, when on exploding the hillside to imprison the governor, a large stone flew up and struck Aggie violently in the mouth, dislodging her upper plate and almost strangling her.

There was, again, the time when the smugglers set fire to the building Tish was in, and the fire department did not receive its signal and failed to arrive until almost too late.

But in the main, things went very well. There were peaceful days when Aggie and I fed peanuts to the little studio elephant, Katie, and indeed became quite friendly with Katie, who dragged certain heavy articles about the lot and often roamed at will, her harness chains dangling. And there were hot days when we sought the shelter of the cool hangar which housed the smugglers’ dirigible, or baby blimp as it was called, and where we had concealed several bottles of blackberry cordial against emergency.

At such times we frequently discussed what Aggie now termed the Macmanus mystery. For such it had become.

“He’s not hanging around for any good purpose, Lizzie,” Aggie frequently observed. “He’s in Tish’s picture somehow, and—I think he is a lover!”

We had not mentioned him to Tish, but on the next day after she took her parachute leap we learned that she had her own suspicions about him.

I may say here, before continuing with my narrative, that Tish’s parachute experience was without accident, although not without incident. She was to leap with the bag of stage money she had captured in the air from the smugglers, and this she did. But a gust of wind caught her, and it was our painful experience to see her lifted on the gale and blown out of sight toward the mountains.

Several automobiles and the dirigible immediately started after her, but dusk fell and she had not returned to us. Even now I cannot picture those waiting hours without emotion. At one moment we visualized her sitting on some lonely mountain crag, and at another still floating on, perhaps indefinitely, a lonely bit of flotsam at the mercy of the elements.

At nine o’clock that night, however, she returned, slightly irritable but unhurt.

“For heaven’s sake, Aggie,” she said briskly, “stop sneezing and crying, and order me some supper. I’ve been sitting in a ranch house, with a nervous woman pointing a gun at me, for three hours.”

It developed that she had landed in the country, and had untied the parachute and started with her valise full of stage money back toward the studio, but that she had stopped to ask for supper at a ranch, and the woman there had looked in the bag while Tish was washing, and had taken her for a bank robber.

“If she had ever looked away,” Tish said, “I could have grabbed the gun. But she was cross-eyed, and I don’t know yet which eye she watched with.”

As I have said, it was the next day that we learned that Tish herself had grown suspicious about Mr. Macmanus.

She sent for us to come to her dressing room, and when we appeared she said, “I want you both here for a few minutes. Light a cigarette, Hannah. Mr. Stein’s coming.”

To our horror Hannah produced a box of cigarettes and lighted one by holding it in the flame of a match. But we were relieved to find that Tish did not intend to smoke it. Hannah placed it in an ash tray on the table and left it there.

“Local color,” Tish said laconically. “They think a woman’s queer here if she doesn’t smoke. Come in, Mr. Stein.”

When Mr. Stein entered he was uneasy, we thought, but he wore his usual smile.

“Going like a breeze, Miss Carberry,” he said.

“Yes,” said Tish grimly. “And so am I!”

“What do you mean, going?” said Mr. Stein, slightly changing color. “You can’t quit on us, Miss Carberry. We’ve spent a quarter of a million dollars already.”

“And I’ve risked a million-dollar life.”

“We’ve been carrying insurance on you.”

“Oh, you have!” said Tish, and eyed him coldly. “I hope you’ve got Mr. Macmanus insured too.”

“Just why Mr. Macmanus, Miss Carberry?”

“Because,” Tish said with her usual candor, “I propose physical assault, and possibly murder, if he’s brought on the set with me.”

“Now see here,” he said soothingly, “you’re just tired, Miss Carberry. Ladies, how about a glass of that homemade TNT for Miss Tish? And a little all round?”

But when none of us moved he was forced to state his case, as he called it.

“You see, Miss Carberry,” he said, “we’ve made the old girl pretty hardboiled, so far. Now the public’s going to want to see her softer side.”

“As, for instance?”

“Well, something like this: The rancher who’s been the secret head of the smugglers, he’s a decent fellow at heart, see? Only got into it to pay the mortgage on the old home. Well, now, why not a bit of sentiment between you and him at the end? Nothing splashy, just a nice refined church and a kiss.” When he saw Tish’s face he went on, speaking very fast. “Not more than a four-foot kiss, if that. We’ve got to do it, Miss Carberry. I’ve been wiring our houses all over the country, and they’re unanimous.”

At Tish’s firm refusal he grew almost tearful, saying he dared not fly in the face of tradition, and that he couldn’t even book the picture if he did. But Tish merely rose majestically and opened the door.

“I warned you, Mr. Stein, I would have no sex stuff in this picture.”

“Sex stuff!” he cried. “Good Lord, you don’t call that sex stuff, do you?”

“I dare say you call it platonic friendship here,” Tish said in her coldest tone. “But my agreement stands. Good afternoon.”

He went out, muttering.

VII

Just what happened within a day or two to determine Tish’s later course, I cannot say. We know that she had a long talk with Mr. Macmanus himself, and that he maintained that his intentions were of the most honorable—namely, to earn a small salary—and that his idea was that the final embrace could be limited to his kissing her hand.

“I have ventured so to suggest, madam,” Hannah reported him as saying, “but they care nothing for art here. Nothing. They reduce everything to its physical plane, absolutely.”

That our dear Tish was in a trap evidently became increasingly clear to her as the next few days passed. Nothing else would have forced her to the immediate course she pursued, and which resulted in such ignominious failure.

It was, I believe, a week after the interview with Mr. Stein, and with the picture drawing rapidly to a close, that Tish retired early one night and was inaccessible to us.

We were entirely unsuspicious, as the day had been a hard one, Tish having been washed from her horse while crossing a stream and having sunk twice before they stopped shooting the picture to rescue her.

Aggie, I remember, was remarking that after all Macmanus was a handsome man, and that some people wouldn’t object to being embraced by him at a thousand dollars a week, when Hannah came bolting in.

“She’s gone!” she cried.

“Gone? Who’s gone?”

“Miss Tish. Her room’s empty and I can’t find her valise.”

Only partially attired we rushed along the corridor. Hannah had been only too right. Our dear Tish had flown.

I did not then, nor do I now, admit that this flight, and the other which followed it, indicate any weakness in Letitia Carberry. The strongest characters must now and then face situations too strong for them and depart, as the poet says, “to fight another day.”

I do, however, question the wisdom of her course, for it put her enemies on guard and involved us finally in most unhappy circumstances.

Be that as it may, we had closed Tish’s door on its emptiness and were about to depart, when on turning she herself stood before us!

She said nothing. She simply passed on and into the room, traveling bag in hand, and closed and locked the door between us.

We believe now that her flight was not unexpected, and that her door and windows had been under surveillance. Certainly she was met at the station by Mr. Stein and his attorney and was forced to turn back, under threat of such legal penalties as we know not of. Certainly, too, she had closed that avenue of escape to further attempts, and knew it.

But from Tish herself we have until now had no confidences.

Some slight revenge she had, we know, the following day. As this portion of the picture has received very good notices, it may interest the reader to know under what circumstances it was taken.

I have mentioned the scene in the studio where the smugglers were banqueting, and Tish, followed by revenue officers, was to appear and, after a shot or two, force them to subjection. Aggie and I had been permitted to watch this, the crowning scene of the picture, and stood behind the camera. The musicians were playing For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow, and the rum runners were drinking cold tea in champagne glasses and getting very drunk over it, when Tish entered.

Aggie took one look at her and clutched my arm.

“I don’t like her expression, Lizzie,” she whispered. “She——”

At that moment Tish fired, and the bandit who’d been standing gave a loud bellow. She had shot his wine glass out of his hand.

“Stop the camera!” the chief smuggler called in a loud voice. “She’s crazy! She’s got that gun loaded!”

The director, however, seemed delighted, and called to the camera men to keep on grinding.

“Great stuff, Miss Carberry!” he yelled. “I didn’t think anybody could put life in these wooden soldiers, but you have. Keep it up, only don’t kill anyone. Hold it, everybody! Camera! Camera! Now shoot out the lights, Miss Carberry, and I’ll think up something to follow while you’re doing it.”

I believe now that he referred to the candles on the table, but Tish either did not or would not understand. A second later there were two crashes of broken glass, and wild howls from the men with the arc lamps above, which lighted the scene. The stage was in semidarkness, and pieces of glass and metal and the most frightful language continued to drop from above. In the confusion all I could hear was the director muttering something about five hundred dollars gone to perdition, and the rush of the entire company from the stage.

It has been no surprise to me that this scene has made the great hit of the picture, the critics describing it as a classical study in fear. It was, indeed.

This small explosion of indignation had one good effect, however. Tish was almost her own self that night, recalling with a certain humor that a piece of one arc lamp had fallen down and had hit Mr. Macmanus on the head.

VIII

Tish is the most open and candid of women, and nothing so rouses her indignation as trickery. Had Mr. Stein not resorted to stratagem to compel her consent to the final scenes, I believe a compromise might have been effected.

It was his deliberate attempt to imprison Tish on the lot the night before those final shots which brought about the catastrophe. To pretend, as he does now, that he thought we had left at midnight does not absolve him.

The fact remains that after the final night shots, when Tish had her make-up off and we started to leave, we found that the gates were locked and the gatekeeper gone. What is more, there was a man across the street behind a tree box, watching the exit.

Tish called to him in an angry voice, but he pretended not to be there, and we finally turned away.

From the beginning Tish had recognized it as a trick, and she lost but little time in organizing herself for escape. A trial of the high fence which surrounded the lot, with Aggie on Tish’s shoulders while Tish stood on a box, revealed three strands of heavy barbed wire. But, more than that, Aggie declared that there were guards here and there all around.

On receiving this information Tish stood for a moment in deep thought. She then instructed Aggie to go on to the balloon hangar and open the doors, while she and I gathered up her personal possessions and followed.

It is not our method to question Tish at such times; ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die. But I confess to a certain uneasiness. If she proposed to escape by means of the baby blimp, well and good. At the same time, it required a dozen men to haul the balloon out of its shed, and we were but three weak women. I believed that she had overlooked this, but, as usual, I underestimated her.

On reaching the hangar I found the door open, and I could see in the darkness the large balloon, with what appeared to be a smaller one beside it, a matter of surprise to me, as I knew of no other. But I could not see Aggie.

I entered as quietly as possible and advanced into the hangar.

“Aggie!” I called in a low tone. “Aggie! Where are you?”

There was a silence, then from somewhere above came a sneeze, followed by Aggie’s voice, broken and trembling.

“On—on a r-r-rafter, Lizzie,” she said.

I could not believe my ears and advanced towards the sound. Suddenly Aggie yelled, and at the same moment the smaller balloon lurched and came toward me.

“Run!” Aggie yelled. “Run. She’s after you!”

Unfortunately, the warning came too late. Something reached out from the running balloon and caught me around the body, and the next moment, to my horror, I was lifted off the ground and thrust up into the timbers which supported the roof of the building. I am a heavy woman, and only by a desperate effort did I catch a rafter as the thing let go of me, and drew myself to safety. Aggie was somewhere close at hand, sobbing in the darkness.

It was a moment before I could speak. Then I managed to ask what had happened to me.

“It’s Katie, Lizzie,” Aggie said between sobs. “I think she must have found the blackberry cordial we left here, and it’s gone to her head!”

Our position was very unfortunate, especially as time was important. Katie was merely playful, but on any attempt to move on our part she would trumpet loudly and reach up for us. Most annoying of all, she had taken a fancy to one of my shoes and kept reaching up and pulling at it.

“Let her have it, if it keeps her quiet,” Aggie said tartly when I told her. “Give her anything she wants. Give her your bonnet. I never liked it, anyhow.”

It was then after midnight, but fortunately it was very soon after that that we saw an electric flash and heard our dear Tish’s voice.

“Aggie! Lizzie!” she called. And then she saw the elephant and advanced toward her.

“Katie!” she said. “What are you doing here? I’ve been looking for you all over the lot!” She then turned the flash on Katie and beheld her swaying. “Shame on you,” she said. “I believe you’ve been drinking.”

“Don’t reprove her; kill her”; Aggie said suddenly from overhead, and Tish looked up.

“I thought so,” she said rather sharply. “I cannot count on the faintest coöperation. I need two courageous hearts, and I find you roosting like frightened chickens on a beam. That elephant’s harmless. She’s only playing.”

“I don’t like the way she plays, then,” I protested angrily. “If you do, play with her yourself.”

But Tish had no time for irony. She simply picked up a piece of wood from the ground and hit Katie on the trunk with it.

“Now!” she said. “Bring them down, you shame to your sex. And be gentle. Remember you are not quite yourself.”

Thanks to Tish’s dominance over all types of inferior minds, Katie at once obeyed, and brought us down without difficulty.

Then she ambled unsteadily to a corner, and proceeded to empty another bottle of cordial we had concealed there.

I have always considered, in spite of its dénouement, that Tish’s idea of using Katie to drag the blimp out of the shed was a brilliant one. Katie herself made no demur. She stood swaying gently while we harnessed her to the balloon and at the word she bent to her work. Tish was in the car, examining the controls at the time, and turning up what I believe are called the flippers, which direct its course away from Mother Earth.

But I have blamed her for her impatience in starting the engine before we had unfastened Katie’s harness. Tish has a tendency now and then toward hasty action, which she always regrets later. There is this excuse for her, however: She had apparently no idea that the balloon would rise the moment the propeller reached a certain number of revolutions. But it did.

It seemed only a moment after we heard the engine start that I felt the car lifting from the earth, and in desperation flung myself into it, as Aggie did the same thing from the other side.

The next instant we were well above the ground, and from below there was coming a terrible trumpeting and squealing. We all looked over the side, and there beneath us was Katie, fastened to us by her harness and rising with us!

I shall never forget that moment. One and all, we are members of the Humane Society. And if Katie’s ropes and straps gave way, she would certainly fall to a terrible death. Even Tish lost her sang-froid and, frantically starting the engine, endeavored to maneuver the thing to earth again. But anybody who has traveled in a blimp knows that it cannot be brought to earth again without outside aid.

Moreover, we were already outside the studio grounds, and traveling over roofs which Katie barely escaped. Indeed, from certain sounds, we had reason to believe that she was striking numerous chimneys, and I think now that this may account for the stories of a mysterious electric storm that night, which destroyed a half dozen chimneys in one block.

It was a fortunate thing that Tish remembered in time to elevate the flippers still further, thus giving us a certain amount of leeway. But a strong breeze from the sea had sprung up and was carrying us toward the city, and it became increasingly evident that, even if we cleared the highest buildings, Katie would not.

It was a tragic moment. Aggie proposed lightening the craft by throwing out the bottles of liquor, which had been a part of the smugglers’ cargo in the picture, but Tish restrained her.

“Better to kill an elephant,” she said, “than to brain some harmless wretch below.”

Katie meanwhile had lapsed into the silence of despair, or possibly had fainted. I do not know, nor is it now pertinent, for in a few moments the situation solved itself. We had barely missed the roof of the First National Bank Building when the blimp gave a terrific jar, and momentarily stopped.

On looking over the side the cause of this was explained. Katie had landed squarely on the flat roof of the building, and had immediately thrown her trunk around a chimney and braced herself. Even as we looked, her harness parted and left her free of us.

Katie was saved.

Glancing again over the side as we quickly rose, we could see her in the moonlight still hugging her chimney and gazing after us. What thoughts were hers we cannot know.

I am glad to solve in this manner a problem which caused much perplexity throughout the country—namely, how an elephant could have reached the roof of the First National Bank Building, to which the only possible entrance was through a trapdoor two feet six inches each way. As will be seen, the explanation, like that of many mysteries, is entirely simple.

It is necessary to touch but lightly on the unfortunate incident which concluded our escape. That the apparently friendly villagers who, the next morning, ran out from their peaceful businesses to haul on our ropes and bring us to a landing, should so change in attitude in a few moments has ever since been a warning to us of the innate suspicion of human nature.

How could they look at Tish’s firm and noble face, and so misread it? Why did they not at once open the smugglers’ rum cargo which had remained in the car, and discover that the liquid in the bottles was only cold tea?

Can it be possible that Charlie Sands’ explanation is correct, and that the fact that many of them purchased the stuff from the sheriff and later threatened to lynch him, can account for his peculiar malignity to us?

One thing is certain—they held us in the local jail for days, until Charlie Sands was able to rescue us.

We never saw Mr. Stein again. Nor, frankly, did we ever expect to see Tish’s picture, since she had not finished it. But, as all the world now knows, it opened in June of this current year, and made a great success.

But our surprise at this was as nothing compared with the fact that Tish’s name did not appear in connection with it, and that the announcements read: “Featuring Miss Betty Carlisle.”

There had been no Miss Carlisle in Tish’s cast.

On the opening night we went to see it, accompanied by Charlie Sands. He said very little while watching Tish perform her various exploits, but when, after the shooting scene, Tish prepared to depart he protested.

“I’ve stood it up to this point,” he said grimly. “I propose to see it through.”

“There will be no more, Charles,” Tish explained in an indulgent manner. “I quit at the end of this scene. Be glad of one picture which does not end with an embrace.”

But she had spoken too soon!

Judge of our amazement when we saw our Tish, on the screen, disappear through a doorway, and return a moment later, a young and beautiful girl, who was at once clasped in Mr. Macmanus’ arms.

The title was: Her Elderly Disguise at Last Removed!

HIJACK AND THE GAME

I

It was last May that Tish’s cousin, Annabelle Carter, wrote to her and asked her to take Lily May for the summer.

“I need a rest, Tish,” she wrote. “I need a rest from her. I want to go off where I can eat a cup custard without her looking at my waistline, and can smoke an occasional cigarette without having to steal one of hers when she is out. I may even bob my hair.”

“She’ll smoke no cigarettes here,” Tish interjected. “And Annabelle Carter’s a fool. Always was and always will be. Bob her hair indeed!”

She read on: “I want you to take her, Tish, and show her that high principles still exist in the older generation. They seem to think we are all hypocrites and whited sepulchers. But most of all, I want to get her away from Billy Field. He is an enchanting person, but he couldn’t buy gas for her car. Jim says if he can earn a thousand dollars this summer he’ll think about it. But outside of bootlegging, how can he? And he has promised not to do that.”

Tish had read us the letter, but she had already made up her mind.

“It is a duty,” she said, “and I have never shirked a duty. Annabelle Carter has no more right to have a daughter than I have; I’ve seen her playing bridge and poker before that child. And she serves liquor in her house, although it is against the law of the nation.”

And later on: “What the girl needs,” she said, “is to be taken away from the artificial life she is living, and to meet with Nature. Nature,” she said, “is always natural. A mountain is always a mountain; the sea is the sea. Sufficient of either should make her forget that boy.”

“Too much of either might, Tish,” I said, rather tartly. “You can drown her or throw her over a precipice, of course. But if you think she’ll trade him for a view or a sailboat, you’d better think again.”

But Tish was not listening.

“An island,” she said, “would be ideal. Just the four of us, and Hannah. Simple living and high thinking. That’s what the young girls of to-day require.”

“I often wonder,” Aggie said sadly, “what Mr. Wiggins would have thought of them! I remember how shocked he was when his Cousin Harriet used ice on her face before a party, to make her cheeks pink.”

So the matter was determined, and Tish appealed to Charlie Sands, her nephew, to find her an island. I shall never forget his face when she told him why.

“A flapper!” he said. “Well, your work’s cut out for you all right.”

“Nonsense!” Tish said sharply. “I have been a girl myself. I understand girls.”

“Have you made any preparations for her?”

“I’ve bought a set of Louisa M. Alcott. And I can hire a piano if she wants to keep in practice.”

“Oh, she’ll keep in practice all right,” he said, “but I wouldn’t bother with a piano.” He did not explain this, but went away soon after. “I’ll do my best to find you an island,” he said cryptically, as he departed, “but the chances are she can swim.”

That last sentence of his made Tish thoughtful, and she determined that, if our summer was to be spent on the sea, we should all learn to swim. I cannot say that the result was successful. Indeed, our very first lesson almost ended in a tragedy, for it was Tish’s theory that one must start in deep water.

“The natural buoyancy of the water is greater there,” she said. “One goes in and then simply strikes out.”

She did this, therefore, standing on the diving board in the correct position—the instructor was not yet ready—and made a very nice dive. But she did not come up again, although the water was very agitated, and after a time Aggie became alarmed and called the instructor. He found her at last, but she was so filled with water that we abandoned the lesson for the day.

As the instructor said to her, “All you need is a few goldfish, lady, and you’d be a first-class aquarium.”

And then, with all our ideas of setting Lily May an example of dignity and decorum, along about the middle of June Hannah, going out on a Thursday, came creeping in about nine o’clock at night and brought in the tray with cake and blackberry cordial, with her hat on.

“What do you mean,” Tish demanded, fixing her with a stony glare, “by coming in here like that?”

Hannah set the tray down and looked rather pale.

“It’s my hat, Miss Tish,” she said; “and it’s my head.”

“Take it off,” said Tish. “Your hat, not your head. Not that you’d miss one more than the other.”

So Hannah took her hat off, and she had had her hair shingle-bobbed! I never saw anything more dreadful, unless it was our dear Tish’s face. She looked at her for some moments in silence.

“Have you seen yourself?” she demanded.

“Yes.”

“Then I shall add no further punishment,” said Tish grimly. “But as I do not propose to look at you in this condition, you will continue to wear a hat until it grows out again.”

“I’m to wear a hat over the stove?”

“You’re to wear a hat over yourself, Hannah,” Tish corrected her, and Hannah went out in tears.

It was very strange, after that, to see Hannah serving the table with a hat on, but our dear Tish is firmness itself when it comes to a matter of principle, and even the discovery of an artificial rosebud in the stewed lamb one day did not cause her to weaken. I shall, however, never forget Lily May’s expression when Hannah served luncheon the day she arrived.

She came in, followed by a taxi man and the janitor of Tish’s apartment building, who were loaded down with bags and hat boxes, and having kissed Tish without any particular warmth, turned to the janitor.

“Go easy with that bag, Charles,” she said. His name is not Charles, but this seemed not to worry her. “If you break the contents Miss Carberry will be out her summer liquor.”

As Tish has been for many years a member of the W.C.T.U., she protested at once, but the taxi man seemed to think it funny until Tish turned on him.

“It is you,” she said, “and your kind who make it impossible to enforce the best law our nation has ever passed. If there is liquor in that bag,” she said to Lily May, “it will not remain in this apartment one instant. Lizzie, open the bag, and pour the wretched stuff into the kitchen sink.”

I was about to open the bag, when the taxi man said that, while he was not a drinking man, plenty of hospitals need stimulants.

“You pour it down the sink,” he said, “and where is it? Nowhere, lady. But if I take it to the Samaritan, and they use it—why, it’s a Christian action, as I see it.”

I will say for Lily May that she offered no objection. She stood by, looking at each of us in turn and seeming rather puzzled. She only spoke once.

“Look here, Aunt Tish,” she began, “I was only——”

“I shall discuss this with you later and in private,” Tish cut in sternly, and motioned me to open the bag.

I did so, but it contained no alcoholic stimulant whatever; only a number of bottles and jars for the toilet. Tish eyed them, and then turned to Lily May.

“Have I your word of honor,” she said, “that these are what they purport to be?”

“Probably not,” said Lily May coolly. “Nothing is these days. But there’s nothing there for Volstead to beat his breast about. I tried to tell you.”

While she was in her room taking off her things, Tish expressed herself with her usual clearness on the situation in which she found herself.

“Already,” she said, “the girl has shown two of the most undesirable modern qualities—flippancy and a disregard for the law of the nation. I am convinced that I saw a box of rouge in that bag, Lizzie.”

But when, later on, she accused Lily May of making up her face, Lily May only smiled sweetly and said she was obliged to do so.

“Obliged!” Tish sniffed. “Don’t talk nonsense.”

“Not nonsense at all,” said Lily May. “All the——” She seemed to hesitate. “It’s like this,” she said. “Make-up is respectable. The other thing isn’t. When you see a woman these days with a dead-white face, watch her. That’s all.”

Poor Aggie cast an agonized glance at herself in the mirror, but Tish stared hard at Lily May.

“There are certain subjects on which I do not wish to be informed,” she said coldly.

“Oh, very well,” said Lily May. “If you like to think that the Easter bunny lays hardboiled eggs——”

I must say things looked very uncomfortable from the start. Nobody could accuse Lily May of being any trouble, or even of being unpleasant; she had a very sweet smile, and she did everything she was told. But she seemed to regard the three of us as mere children, and this was particularly galling to Tish.

“Why shouldn’t we see that picture?” Tish demanded one night, when she steered us away from a movie we had been waiting three weeks to see.

“It’s not a nice movie,” said Lily May gently, and took us to see The Ten Commandments, which we had already seen three times.

It was a difficult situation, for of course Tish could not insist on going, after that. And Aggie suffered also, for on the hay-fever season coming on she brought out her medicinal cigarettes, and Lily May walked right out and bought her a vaporizing lamp instead, which smelled simply horrible when lighted.

But it was over Hannah that Tish suffered the most, for of course Lily May had had her hair bobbed, and Hannah rebelled the first minute she saw it.

“Either she wears a hat or I don’t, Miss Tish,” she said. “And you’d better put a hat on her. The way that janitor is hanging around this place is simply sinful.”

It ended by Hannah abandoning her hat, copying Lily May’s method of fixing her hair; only where Lily May’s hair hung straight and dark, Hannah was obliged to use soap to gain the same effect.

As Tish observed to her scathingly, “It will break off some night in your sleep. And then where will you be?”

It became evident before long that the city simply would not do for Lily May. The grocer’s boy took to forgetting things so he could make a second trip, and in the market one day Mr. Jurgens, Tish’s butcher, handed Lily May a bunch of pansies.

“Pansies are for thoughts, Miss Lily May,” he said.

And Tish said he looked so like a sick calf that she absently ordered veal for dinner, although she had meant to have lamb chops.

Other things, too, began to worry us. One was that although Lily May had, according to orders, received no letters from the Field youth, Hannah’s mail had suddenly increased. For years she had received scarcely anything but the catalogue of a mail-order house, and now there was seldom a mail went by without her getting something.

Another was Tish’s discovery that Lily May wore hardly any clothes. I shall never forget the day Tish discovered how little she actually wore. It was wash day, and Tish had engaged Mrs. Schwartz for an extra day.

“There will be extra petticoats and—er—undergarments, Mrs. Schwartz,” she explained. “I well remember in my young days that my dear mother always alluded to the expense of my frillies.”

It has been Tish’s theory for years that no decent woman ever appears without a flannel petticoat under her muslin one, and I shall never forget the severe lecture she read Aggie when, one warm summer day, she laid hers aside. It was therefore a serious shock to her to come home the next day and find Mrs. Schwartz scrubbing the kitchen floor, while Hannah was drinking a cup of tea and gossiping with her.

“The young lady’s clothes!” said Mrs. Schwartz. “Why, bless your heart, I pressed them off in fifteen minutes.”

It turned out that Lily May wore only a single garment beneath her frock. I cannot express in words Tish’s shock at this discovery, or her complete discouragement when, having brought out her best white flannel petticoat and a muslin one with blind embroidery, of which she is very fond, Lily May flatly refused to put them on.

“Why?” she said. “I’m not going to pretend I haven’t got legs. My feet have to be fastened to something.”

It was in this emergency that Tish sent for Charlie Sands, but I regret to say that he was of very little assistance to us. Lily May was demure and quiet at first, and sat playing with something in her hand. Finally she dropped it, and it was a small white cube with spots on each side. Charlie Sands picked it up and looked at Lily May.

“Got the other?” he asked.

Well, she had, and it seems one plays a sort of game with them, for in a very short time they were both sitting on the floor, and she won, I think, a dollar and thirty cents.

I cannot recall this situation without a pang, for our dear Tish never gambles, and is averse to all games of chance. Indeed, she went so pale that Aggie hastily brought her a glass of blackberry cordial, and even this was unfortunate, for Lily May looked up and said, “If you want mother’s recipe for homemade gin I think I can remember it.”

Tish was utterly disheartened when Charlie Sands went away, but he seemed to think everything would be all right.

“She’s a nice child,” he said. “She’s only living up to a type. And there isn’t an ounce of hypocrisy in her. I can see through her, all right.”

“I dare say,” Tish retorted grimly. “So can anyone else, when the sun is shining.”

But the climax really came when old Mr. Barnes, on the floor above Tish’s apartment, sent her a note. It seems that he had asthma and sat at the window just above Lily May’s, and the note he sent was to ask Tish not to smoke cigarettes out her window. I really thought Tish would have a stroke on the head of it, and if Annabelle Carter hadn’t been in Europe I am quite sure she would have sent Lily May back home.

But there we were, with Lily May on our hands for three months, and Hannah already rolling her stockings below her knees and with one eyebrow almost gone, where she had tried to shave it to a line with a razor. And then one day Aggie began to talk about long hair being a worry, and that it would be easier to put on her tonic if it was short; and with that Tish took the island Charlie Sands had found, and we started.

II

I shall never forget Lily May’s expression when she saw Tish trying on the knickerbockers which are her usual wear when in the open.

“Oh, I wouldn’t!” she said in a sort of wail.

“Why not?” Tish demanded tartly. “At least they cover me, which is more than I can say of some of your clothes.”

“But they’re not—not feminine,” said Lily May, and Tish stared at her.

“Feminine!” she said. “The outdoors is not a matter of sex. Thank God, the sea is sexless; so are the rocks and trees.”

“But the people——”

“There will be no people,” said Tish with an air of finality.

The next few days were busy ones. Tish had immediately, on learning that the New England coast has several varieties of fish, decided that we could combine change and isolation with fishing for the market.

“Save for the cost of the bait,” she said, “which should be immaterial, there is no expense involved. The sea is still free, although the bootleggers seem to think they own it. But I do not intend to profit by this freedom. The money thus earned will go to foreign missions.”

She bought a book on New England fish, and spent a long time studying it. Then she went to our local fish market and secured a list of prices.

“With any luck,” she said, “we should catch a hundred pounds or so a day. At sixty cents a pound, that’s sixty dollars, or we’ll say thirty-six hundred dollars for the summer. There may be a bad day now and then.”

Mr. Ostermaier, our clergyman, was greatly impressed, and felt that the money should perhaps go toward a new organ. Tish, however, held out for missions, and in the end they compromised on a kitchen for the parish house.

Toward the end, Lily May began to take more interest in our preparations. At first she had been almost indifferent, observing that any old place would do, and the sooner the better.

“It will give you something to do,” Tish told her severely.

“So would a case of hives,” she replied, and lapsed again into the lethargy which Tish found so trying.

But, as I have said, she cheered up greatly before our departure, and we all felt much encouraged. She never spoke to us of Billy Field, but she had made Hannah a confidante, and Hannah told Aggie that it was apparently off.

“It’s this way, Miss Aggie,” she said. “He’s got to earn a thousand dollars this summer, one way or another, and I guess he’s about as likely to do it as you are to catch a whale.”

Perhaps it was significant, although I did not think of it at the time, that Aggie did catch a whale later on; and that indeed our troubles began with that unlucky incident.

But Lily May became really quite cheery as the time for departure approached, and we began to grow very much attached to her, although she inadvertently got us into a certain amount of trouble on the train going up.

She had brought along a pack of cards, and taught us a game called cold hands, a curious name, but a most interesting idea. One is dealt five cards, and puts a match in the center of the table. Then one holds up various combinations, such as pairs, three of a kind, and so on, and draws again. Whoever has the best hand at the end takes all the matches.

Tish, I remember, had all the matches in front of her, and rang for the porter to bring a fresh box. But when he came back the conductor came along and said gambling was not allowed.

“Gambling!” Tish said. “Gambling! Do you suppose I would gamble on this miserable railroad of yours, when at any moment I may have to meet my Creator?”

“If it isn’t gambling, what is it?”

And then Lily May looked up at him sweetly and said, “Now run away and don’t tease, or mamma spank.”

That is exactly what she said. And instead of reproving her that wretched conductor only grinned at her and went away. What, as Tish says, can one do with a generation which threatens an older and wiser one with corporal punishment?

We had telegraphed ahead for a motor boat to meet us and take us over to Paris Island, and we found it waiting; quite a handsome boat named the Swallow, a name which Tish later observed evidently did not refer to the bird of that sort, but to other qualities it possessed.

“Swallow!” she snorted. “It’s well named. The thing tried to swallow the whole Atlantic Ocean.”

It was in charge of a young fisherman named Christopher Columbus Jefferson Spudd.

“It sounds rather like a coal bucket falling down the cellar stairs,” said Lily May, giving him a cold glance.

And indeed he looked very queer. He had a nice face and a good figure, but his clothes were simply horrible. He wore a checked suit with a short coat, very tight at the waist, and pockets with buttons on everywhere. And he had a baby-blue necktie and a straw hat with a fancy ribbon on it, and too small for his head.

Lily May put her hand up as if he dazzled her, and said, “What do we call you if we want you? If we ever do,” she added unpleasantly.

“Just call me anything you like, miss,” he said with a long look at her, “and I’ll come running. I kind of like Christopher myself.”

“You would!” said Lily May, and turned her back on him.

But, as Tish said that night, we might as well employ him as anyone else.

“Do what we will,” she said, “we might as well recognize the fact that the presence of Lily May is to the other sex what catnip is to a cat. It simply sets them rolling. And,” she added, “if it must be somebody, better Christopher, who is young and presumably unattached, than an older man with a wife and children. Besides, his boat is a fast one, and we shall lose no time getting to and from the fishing grounds.”

We therefore decided to retain Christopher and the Swallow, although the price, two hundred and fifty dollars a month, seemed rather high.

“We do not need Christopher,” she said, “but if we must take him with the boat we must. He can chop wood and so on.”

We spent the next day getting settled. The island was a small one, with only a few fishermen’s houses on it, and Tish drew a sigh of relief.

“No man except Christopher,” she said to me. “And she detests him. And who can be small in the presence of the Atlantic Ocean? She will go back a different girl, Lizzie. Already she is less selfish. I heard her tell Hannah to-night, referring to Christopher, to ‘feed the brute well.’ There was true thoughtfulness behind that.”

Christopher, of course, ate in the kitchen.

It was the next morning that Tish called him in from the woodpile and asked him about the size of codfish.

“Codfish?” he said. “Well, now, I reckon they’d run a pound or so.”

“A pound or so?” Tish demanded indignantly. “There is one in the natural history museum at home that must weigh sixty pounds.”

“Oh, well,” he said, “if you’re talking about museum pieces, there are whales around here that weigh pretty considerable. But you take the run of cod, the oil variety, and you get ’em all sizes. Depends on their age,” he added.

Tish says that she knew then that he was no fisherman, but it was not for several days that he told her his story.

“I am not exactly a fisherman,” he said. “I can run a boat all right, so you needn’t worry, but in the winter I clerk in a shoe store in Bangor, Maine. But there is no career in the shoe business, especially on a commission basis. In New England the real money goes to the half-sole-and-heel people.”

“I suppose that’s so,” said Tish. “I never thought of it.”

“Then,” he went on, “you take automobiles. Did you ever think how they’ve hurt the sale of shoes? Nobody walks. Folks that used to buy a pair of shoes every year have dropped clean off my list. The tailors are getting my business.”

“Tailors?” Tish asked.

“Putting new seats in trousers,” he said gloomily, and stalked away.

The boat, he told us later, belonged to his uncle, who was a tailor. But he was not tailoring at present. As a matter of fact, he was at the moment in the state penitentiary, and that was how Christopher had the Swallow.

“He took to bootlegging on the side,” he explained.

“It was a sort of natural evolution, as you may say. He noticed the wear and tear on hip pockets from carrying flasks, and it seized on his imagination.” He mopped discouragedly at the boat, in which we were about to go on our first fishing trip, and sighed. “Many a case of good hard liquor has run the revenue blockade in this,” he said.

“Well, there will be no liquor run in it while I’m renting it,” said Tish firmly.

III

I cannot say that the fishing was what we had expected. There was plenty of fish, and Tish grew quite expert at opening clams and putting them on her hook. But as Aggie could never bear the smell of clams at any time, and as the rocking of the boat seriously disturbed her, we had rather a troublesome time with her. Once she even begged to be thrown overboard.

“Nonsense!” Tish said. “You can’t swim and you know it.”

“I don’t want to swim, Tish,” she said pitifully “I just want to die, and the quicker the better.”

On rough days, too, when an occasional wave dashed over us, and Tish would shake herself and speak of the bracing effect of salt water, our poor Aggie would fall into violent sneezing, and more than once lost a fish by so doing. And I shall never forget the day when she drew up a squid, and the wretched thing squirted its ink all over her. There was a certain dignity in the way she turned her blackened face to Tish.

“I have stood for clams, Tish,” she said, “and I have stood for the rocking of this d-damned boat. But when the very creatures of the deep insult me I’m through!”

As, however, a wave came overboard just then and removed practically all the ink, as well as the squid itself, she was fortunately unable to express herself further. It speaks well for our dear Tish’s self-control that she allowed Aggie’s speech to pass without reproof, and even offered her a small glass of blackberry cordial from the bottle we always carried with us.

But it was in the matter of payment for the fish that our plans suffered a serious reverse. We had on our first day out taken what we imagined was a hundred pounds of various sorts, many unknown to us, and on the way to the fish wharf, while Aggie and I neatly arranged them as to sizes, Tish figured out the probable value.

“About forty dollars,” she said. “And if they take that thing with whiskers under its chin, even more. Gasoline, one dollar. Christopher’s wages and boat hire per day, eight dollars. Clams, a dollar and a quarter. Leaving a net profit of twenty-nine dollars and seventy-five cents, or clear every month eight hundred and seventy dollars and fifty cents.”

She closed her notebook and we drew in under the fish wharf, where a man who was chewing tobacco came to the edge and looked down at us.

“We are selling these fish,” Tish said with her usual dignity. “They are quite fresh, and ought to bring the best market rates.”

The man spit into the water and then glanced at our boxes.

“Jerry!” he called. “Want any more fish?”

“What kind of fish?” a voice replied from back in the shed.

The man squinted again at our catch.

“Looks like succotash to me,” he called.

Jerry came out and stared down at us, and then slowly descended the ladder to the boat. He had a mean face, Tish says, and he made us about as welcome as the bubonic plague. He said nothing, but picked out six haddock and handed them up to the man above.

“Thirty cents,” he said.

“I’m paying sixty in the market,” Tish protested.

“Thirty-five,” he repeated, and started up the ladder.

“Forty,” said Tish firmly.

“Look here,” he said with bitterness, “all you’ve had to do is to catch those fish. That’s easy; the sea’s full of ’em. What have I got to do? I’ve got to clean ’em and pack ’em and ice ’em and ship ’em. I’m overpaying you; that’s what I’m doing.”

“What am I going to do with the others?” Tish demanded angrily. “Seventy pounds of good fish, and half the nation needing food.”

“You might send it to Congress,” he suggested. “They say it’s good for the brain—phosphorus.”

“You must eat a great deal of fish!” said Tish witheringly.

“Or,” he said, brightening, “take it home to the cat. There’s nothing a cat will get real worked up about like a nice mess of fish.”

He then went up the ladder, leaving us in speechless fury. But Tish recovered quickly and began figuring again. “Six haddock at seven pounds each,” she said. “Forty-two pounds at thirty-five cents per pound, or about fourteen dollars. At least we’ve made our expenses. And of course we can eat some.”

Aggie, who had felt the motion severely coming in, raised herself from the bottom of the boat at this, and asked for another sip of cordial.

“They smell,” she wailed, and fell back again.

“All perfectly healthy fish smell,” said Tish.

“So does a healthy skunk,” said Aggie, holding her handkerchief to her nose, “but I don’t pretend to like it.”

And then Jerry came down the ladder and handed Tish a quarter and a five-cent piece!

“There you are,” he said cheerfully. “One of them’s a bit wormy, but we say here that a wormy fish is a healthy fish.”

I draw a veil over the painful scene that followed. That fish house paid two-thirds of a cent a pound for fish, no more and no less, and the more Tish raged the higher Jerry retreated up the ladder until he was on the wharf again. From there he looked down at us before he disappeared.

“You might get more out in the desert, lady,” he said as a parting shot. “But then, you’d get a pretty good price for a plate of ice cream in hell too.”

And with that he disappeared, and left us to face our situation.

Our deficit on the day, according to Tish, was ten dollars. In three months it would amount to nine hundred dollars. She closed her notebook with a snap.

“Unless we count intangible assets,” she said, “we shall certainly be bankrupt. Of course there is the gain in health; the salt air——”

“Health!” said Aggie feebly. “A little more of this, Tish Carberry, and Jerry will be cleaning and packing and icing and shipping something that isn’t fish.”

“Then again,” said Tish, ignoring this outburst, “we may find something unusual. There are whales about here, according to Christopher. And the oil of the whale is still used, I believe.”

But after learning from Christopher that whales ranged in size from fifty to one hundred feet, and were not caught on a line, however heavy, but with a knife thrown into some vital part, she was compelled to abandon this idea. Indeed, I do not know how we should have filled up our summer had it not been that on that very evening we received a visit from a Mr. MacDonald, who turned out to be the deputy sheriff on the island.

Aggie was still far from well that night. She said the floor kept rising and falling, and at dinner several times she had clutched at her plate to keep it from sliding off the table. So she had been about to pour herself a glass of blackberry cordial, when Lily May saw Mr. MacDonald coming, and hastily took the bottle and hid it under a table.

Christopher brought him in, and he sat down and began to sniff almost immediately. But he said that he had called to secure our assistance; it wasn’t often he needed help, but he needed it now.

“It’s these here rum runners, ladies,” he said. “You take a place like this, all islands and about a million of them. We’ve got as much coast line as the state of California.”

“Indeed?” said Tish politely.

“And they know every inch of it. And every trick,” he added. “’Tain’t more than a week now since the government inspector found a case of Black and White tied under the surface to one of the channel buoys. And who’s to know whether the fellows hauling up lobster pots aren’t hauling up something else too?”

“Very probably they are,” said Tish dryly—“from the price of lobsters.”

“There’s liquor all around these waters. Last big storm we had, a lot of it must have got smashed up, and there was a porpoise reeling around the town wharf for two or three hours. Finally it brought up against one of the poles of the fish pier and went asleep there. It was a disgraceful exhibition.”

“Tish,” Aggie said suddenly, “if this floor doesn’t keep still that bottle will upset.”

Mr. MacDonald stared at her and then cleared his throat.

“Of course I’m taking for granted,” he said, “that you ladies believe in upholding the law.”

“We are members of the W.C.T.U.,” Tish explained. “We stand ready to assist our nation in every possible way. We do not even believe in beer and light wines.”

He seemed reassured at that, and explained what he wanted. The Government had a number of patrol boats outside, and they were doing their best, but in spite of them liquor was coming in and was being shipped hither and yon.

“The worst of it is,” he said, “we don’t know who we can trust. Only last week I paid a fellow fifteen dollars good money to take me out and locate a rum runner, and he got lost in the fog and had to come back. Yesterday I learned he got forty dollars from the other side for getting lost.”

His idea was that under pretense of fishing we could assist him by watching for the criminals, and reporting anything we saw that was suspicious. As Tish said afterward, there was no profit for the church in the arrangement, but there was a spiritual gain to all of us.

“There are things one cannot measure in dollars and cents,” she said.

We all agreed, and rose to see Mr. MacDonald to the door. But I think he left in a divided state of mind, for Christopher, standing near the table, upset the bottle of blackberry cordial, and Aggie, who had been watching it, gave a wail and started for it. But the floor was still going up and down to her, and her progress across the room was most unsteady.

It is to this unfortunate combination undoubtedly that we owe our later ill luck. For Mr. MacDonald caught her as she was about to bump the mantel, and still holding her, turned to Tish.

“That fellow that double-crossed me,” he said with meaning, “he got thirty days.”

“When we agree to do a thing we do it,” Tish said stiffly.

“So did he,” said Mr. MacDonald, and went away, taking a final sniff at the door.

Tish made her usual preparations for our new rôle. She at once sent to Bar Harbor for a pair of field glasses, and oiled and loaded her revolver.

“Not that I mean to shoot them,” she said, “but a well-placed shot or two can wreck their engine. In that case all we shall have to do is to tow them in.”

She procured also a good towing rope for this purpose, and spent her odd time the next day or two shooting at a floating target in the water. Unfortunately, the fact that a bullet will travel over the water like a skipping stone escaped her, and our next-door neighbor, who was just hauling in the largest halibut of the season, had the misfortune to have his line cut in half and of seeing the halibut escape.

On the other hand, her resolution was strengthened by a letter from Charlie Sands, her nephew, which showed the moral deterioration being fostered by these wretched liquor smugglers.

“Dear Aunt Tish,” he wrote. “It has just occurred to me that you are near the Canadian border. Scotch ought to be good and also cheap there. Why not fill a hot-water bag or two for me? Even a bottle or two would not come amiss, and if you are nervous on the train I suggest the space outside your ventilator in the drawing-room.”

Tish’s indignation was intense. She wrote him a very sharp letter, informing him that she was now in the government service. “If the worst comes,” she said, “I shall not hesitate to arrest my own family. No Carberry has been jailed yet for breaking the nation’s laws, but it is not too late to begin.”

It may have been pure coincidence, but Lily May ordered a hot-water bag from the mainland soon after that. She said her feet got cold at night.

I must confess Lily May puzzled us at that time. She would not go fishing, but stayed at home and insulted poor Christopher. She claimed that he spent most of his time at the woodpile smoking cigarettes, and so she would go out and watch him. Hannah said that her manner to him was really overbearing, and that she believed she said quite insulting things to him under her breath.

She counted the wood he cut too. Once Hannah heard her say, “Twice two fifty is five hundred. You’ve still five hundred to go.”

And he groaned and said, “It’s the h—— of a long way yet.”

She was very odd about the revenue matter, also, and said very little when Tish got her badge.

“Well,” she said, “it may stop a bullet. But that’s all it will stop.”

As Tish said, such cynicism in the young was really bewildering.

IV

It was the middle of July when Tish finally started on her dangerous duty. Aggie had begged to be left at home, but Tish had arranged a duty for each of us.

“I shall steer the boat,” she said. “Aggie is to lower and lift up the anchor, and you, Lizzie, are to take charge of the fishing tackle and the bait.”

We were, as I have said, to pretend to be fishing, and thus avert the suspicion of the bootleggers.

Lily May and Christopher saw us off, and Lily May’s farewell was characteristic of her.

“Pick out a good-looking rum runner for me,” Lily May called. “I know father would love to have one in the family.”

We had gone about three miles, I think, when I heard a peculiar noise, like the rumbling of steam, but no one else noticed it. A little later, however, Aggie called out that there was a fountain playing not far ahead. Tish at once announced that it was a whale spouting, and changed our course so as to avoid it.

We saw no more of it, and Aggie was beginning to look white about the ears and the tip of the nose as usual, when Tish decided to drop our anchor and there take up our position. She therefore stopped the engine and Aggie heaved the anchor overboard. But we did not stop.

“There’s certainly a very fast tide,” Tish said, looking over the side. “We are going as fast as before.”

“Then the bottom’s moving too,” Aggie said sharply. “The anchor’s caught, all right.”

We looked about. Either we were moving out to sea or Smith’s Island was going toward the mainland and would soon collide with it. And at that moment the front end of the boat dipped down, shipping an enormous amount of sea, and throwing us all forward, and then the entire boat shot ahead as if it had been fired out of a gun.

“It’s an earthquake, Tish,” Aggie groaned, lying prone in the water.

Tish pulled herself to her knees and stared about her.

“It may be a tidal wave,” she said. “But they go in, not out.” She then stared again, forward, and finally rose to her feet. I followed her, and she lifted a shaking finger and pointed ahead. Only a hundred feet or so from us, and heading for Europe, was an enormous whale. One point of our anchor had caught in his blowhole, and we were traveling at what I imagine was sixty miles an hour or more.

“Really, Aggie,” Tish said, “this is a little too much! I gave you the lightest duty on the boat—simply to anchor this boat to the bottom. Instead——”

“What did you want me to do?” Aggie demanded. “Go down with it, and hook it to a rock?”

“When I want a whale I’ll ask for a whale,” said Tish with dignity. But with her usual alertness she was already making a plan. She at once started the engine and put it in reverse. “After all,” she said, “we have the thing, and we may as well try to take it in.”

But there was no perceptible effect, and after a moment or so the engine choked, and would not start again. Tish’s second thought, therefore, of running at the whale and stunning it until we could free ourselves, was not practical. And the creature itself began to show signs of extreme nervous irritation; it struck the water really terrific blows with its enormous broad flat tail, and Aggie remembered a moving picture she had seen, where a whale had turned in anger on a boat and had crushed it like a peanut shell.

And to add to our difficulties there was a fishing fleet ahead of us, and the creature was heading directly for it. We went through that fleet without touching a boat!

One fisherman yelled to us. “Better let go!” he called. “If you do get him what’ll you do with him?”

“If I ever get him,” Tish said grimly, “I’ll know what to do with him.”

But of course the man was a mile behind us by that time.

We had left the islands far behind us, and the last bit of land was out of sight. With her usual forethought Tish ordered us to put on our life preservers, and after that we set to work to endeavor to loosen the anchor rope from the ring to which it was fastened.

But the tension was too great, and careful search revealed no hatchet with which to cut ourselves free. Our knife had gone overboard with the first jerk. In this emergency my admiration for Tish was never greater.

“One of two things will happen,” she said. “Either he will go down to the sea bottom, taking the boat with him, or he will strike for his native haunts, which to the north whale is probably the arctic region around Greenland. In the first event, we have our life preservers; in the second case, our sweaters. And as there is nothing more to do, we may as well have our luncheon.”

Her courage was contagious, and while Aggie spread the cloth on our folding table, I brought out the sandwiches and coffee. I daresay the schooner had been in sight for some time, just ahead of us, before we noticed it, and Tish thinks that the whale was too excited to see it at all. Anyhow, we were within half a mile of it and heading directly at it when we first saw it.

Aggie was the first to see what was happening, and she ran forward and yelled to the other boat to head him off. But there was no one in sight on it, and the whale kept straight on. Within a hundred feet or so, however, he suddenly dived; the Swallow went on, however, striking the other boat in the center, and the jar must have loosened the anchor, for we remained on the surface.

It was then that a man carefully peered over the edge of the revenue boat and looked down at us.

“My land!” he said. “I was just waiting for you to explode!”

He then said that he had thought they had been struck by a torpedo, and on Tish explaining, he looked rather odd and brought two other men to look at us. In the end, however, we convinced them, and they invited us on board while they bailed our boat and fixed our engine.

The first man was the captain, and while Aggie made us some fresh tea in the galley Tish confided to him our real purpose, and showed him her badge.

He seemed greatly impressed, and said, “If more people would see their duty and do it, we would get rid of the rum evil.”

He then said that they were also a part of the revenue fleet, or had been. He didn’t know how long they could stick it out.

“I’m all right,” he said. “But now you take Joe and Bill, there. They’re not normal any more; it’s the loneliness gets them. Nothing to do but wait, you see.”

“You might try cross-word puzzles,” Tish suggested.

“We had a book of them,” he said dejectedly. “But Bill got mad one day trying to think of a South American river, in five letters, and flung it overboard.”

Over our tea Tish discoursed of the reasons which had turned us from our original idea to the revenue service, and the captain nodded his head.

“I know Jerry,” he said. “Now you take us. Wouldn’t you think we could fish out here, and fill in our spare time? Not a bit of it. It’s my belief Jerry’s running liquor, and he won’t let a revenue boat near the wharf.”

But he had, he said, discovered a way to circumvent Jerry. He and Bill and Joe fished, all right, only they dried the fish and packed them in boxes.

“Some day,” he said, “we’ll land those fish, and old Jerry will find the market glutted. That’s all; glutted.” He had, he said, a hundred boxes in the hold already. “Only trouble is,” he went on, “we’re getting overloaded. If a big sea comes along, and one’s due most any time, they may shift, and then where are we?”

It was just before we left, I remember, that he asked us if we wouldn’t carry in a few boxes for him and land them at a cove on our island, where a friend of the captain’s was living alone. And Tish agreed at once.

I have no wish to reflect on Tish; her motive, then as later, was of the highest, and for Charlie Sands to say what he does is most ungenerous. At the same time, her reckless kindness led us into serious trouble later on, and I hope will be a lesson to her.

We not only took the boxes of fish to Al Smith, at the cove, that day, but we made repeated excursions to the revenue boat from that time on, carrying back a dozen boxes or so at a time, and taking out an occasional batch of Aggie’s doughnuts, a parcheesi game, and once a bottle of blackberry cordial.

“For mal de mer,” Tish said kindly as she presented it, and it created a profound impression. Bill and Joe seemed quite overcome, and the captain was so moved that he had to walk away and wipe his eyes.

“It’s not the gift,” he said later. “It’s the thought.”

We had naturally not told Lily May. But one day when Mr. Smith, the captain’s friend, was unpacking the boxes of fish at the cove, who should wander into sight but the child herself.

She came right up and looked at the boxes, and said, “What’s that anyhow?”

“It’s dried fish,” said Tish. “And I’ll thank you to say nothing about it.”

I must say she gave Tish a very strange look.

“Well,” she said, “I only hope you’re getting something out of it.”

“I am getting the pleasure of assisting people who need assistance.”

“I’ll tell the world you are!” said Lily May. And after giving Mr. Smith a most unpleasant look she went away again.

But the very next day, rounding the corner, who should we see but Lily May at Smith’s wharf, sitting on the edge of the boat and smiling, and Mr. Smith talking in a very loud and angry voice. Once he even seemed to shake his fist at her, but she kept right on smiling.

She was certainly a queer child.

Then, one night early in August, we had another visit from Mr. MacDonald. He said that liquor was coming in from somewhere in quantities, and that trucks on the mainland were distributing it all over the country. I happened to have my eye on Lily May, and she turned pale. I said nothing to Tish, but from that time on Aggie and I kept a watch on her, and I really shudder to recall what we discovered. Night after night our boat was going out; sometimes with Christopher alone in it, and sometimes with Lily May also. And on one such night we quietly searched her room.

We knew she had practically no money, for her mother had been afraid she would run away, back to the Field boy. But under her mattress we found three hundred and twenty dollars, mostly in small bills!

I simply cannot record how we felt about it. Especially as in other ways the child was really quite lovable. She and Aggie had become great friends, and she would listen for hours while Aggie told her of Mr. Wiggins. But on Aggie’s endeavoring to discuss bootlegging with her she would shut up like a clam. Aggie tried to draw her out.

“Of course,” she said one day, “if we knew some of the reasons behind bootlegging, we might be more lenient.”

But there was no use trying to gain her confidence. She only gave Aggie another of her strange looks, and got up and went away.

Tish knew nothing of our worry, and day after day we went out in the boat, watching for rum runners. On Tuesdays and Fridays we made our trips to the revenue boat, but on other days Aggie and I fished, while Tish stood erect with her glasses, sweeping the surface of the sea. She was particularly severe with the lobster men, and after showing her badge would search their boats carefully. On one such occasion a lobster fastened itself to her and remained unnoticed until Aggie gave a terrible scream. She had sat down on the thing.

But mostly life in the Swallow moved quietly enough. Aggie worked at a bag she was making out of steel beads, with a fishing line looped around her arm; a habit she was obliged to alter, after a very large fish one day unexpectedly took her hook and but for Tish’s presence of mind in grasping her feet would have taken her overboard. And I did most of my Christmas fancy-work.

And thus things were up to the twenty-ninth of August, a day, or rather a night, which none of us will ever forget. At two o’clock that afternoon three of us started out; at four in the morning I returned home alone, in such agony of spirit as can only be imagined when the facts are known.

V

It was our day to go out to the revenue boat, and there were indications of a fog. Poor Aggie did not want to go. It was as though she had a premonition of trouble, but Tish insisted, and even took along some seasick remedy. Aggie, who has been somewhat bitter since, should remember that, and the real kindness which lay behind it.

We made jelly in the morning, so it was late when we started, and the fog was fairly thick already. But Tish took along a compass, and we started at two p.m. For once Lily May insisted on going along, although the sea was very rough, and she flirted quite dreadfully with the captain of the revenue boat while Joe and Bill were loading.

But she was seasick on the way back, and so was Aggie. I took the lookout, therefore, and it must have been four or five miles from land that I saw something straight ahead in the fog, and Tish turned out just in time to avoid a bell buoy. It was not ringing!

Tish at once stopped and examined it. It consisted of a small platform above which rose a superstructure with a bell at the top, and clappers which struck the bell as the sea moved it this way and that. But the bell had fallen down and now lay on the platform.

“This is a very serious matter,” Tish said. “This buoy is here to save our shipping. Undoubtedly it marks a reef. And now when it is most needed its warning voice is stilled.”

“I wish you’d still your own voice, Tish,” Aggie groaned. “Or else get out on it and yell ding-dong.”

It was an unfortunate suggestion. Aggie was taking a dose of her remedy for sea-sickness at the moment, and she did not see Tish’s eyes as they traveled from her to me, but I did.

“You couldn’t do it, Lizzie,” she said. “You’re too stout. But Aggie could.”

“Could what?” said Aggie, giving her a cold glance.

“Your duty,” said Tish gravely. “That bell must ring, Aggie. The fog is intense, and all about are—or may be—men who depend on its warning signal for their lives. Can we fail them?”

“I can,” said Aggie shortly.

Lily May said it was all nonsense, but “Give me a hammer and I’ll do it,” she said. “I suppose I can stick it out for an hour or so, and after that I dare say I’ll not care.”

But Tish said the child was in her care, and she was to stay just where she was. And in the end Aggie crawled onto the bell buoy, and we placed one of the boxes on the platform as a seat for her.

“It will take only a short time,” were Tish’s final words, “to get to the coast-guard station. We shall return at once.”

But it was a painful sight, as we moved away, to see our poor Aggie thus marooned, watching us into the fog with wistful eyes and ever and anon striking the bell with the hammer as she sat on the box.

I did not see her again until three o’clock the next morning!

It was when we had gone about six miles by Tish’s watch, while I watched the compass, that Tish suddenly announced something was wrong.

“Either we’ve missed the land altogether, Lizzie,” she said, “or we’ve passed right over the Baptist church and are now at Graham’s grocery store.”

I handed the compass to her, but the moment she took it the needle turned about and continued pointing toward me. It was very unusual, and Tish stared at me with a justifiable irritation.

“Don’t stand there pretending you’re the magnetic pole,” she snapped. “Move around, and see what the dratted thing will do.”

Well, wherever I went that needle pointed at me. As events proved, for Tish to blame it on my gold tooth was quite unjustified, but it was not until in a burst of irritation she had flung it overboard that we discovered the true cause.

Aggie’s workbag, containing a magnet for picking up steel beads, was on my arm.

All the time the fog was growing thicker, so that we could not see ten feet in any direction. And although we kept moving we never seemed to arrive anywhere. Once, indeed, I thought I heard faintly the sound of Aggie’s hammer striking the bell, but it was very feeble and soon died away.

At seven o’clock it was already dark, and we had just two gallons of gasoline left. Tish shut off the engine and we considered our position.

“If we use all our gasoline the tide will carry us straight out to sea, and we may never get back,” she said.

“And Aggie!” I said. “Our poor Aggie!”

“Aggie is all right,” she said impatiently. “At least she doesn’t have to get anywhere. We do.”

We decided at last until the fog lifted to save our gasoline, in case we had to get out of the way of some vessel; and Tish—who can knit quite well in the dark—got out her work. But Lily May seemed to have recovered, and was acting very strangely.

For instance, she roused once from deep thought to suggest that we throw the boxes of fish overboard, and she seemed quite worried when Tish refused.

“Why should I?” Tish said. “They represent money and effort. They have a certain value.”

Lily May muttered something about a thousand dollars and ten years, which I did not catch, and then became silent once more. But when, about seven o’clock, we all heard the engine of a boat not far off and Tish was for hailing it at once, she sharply said we’d better not.

“Nonsense!” said Tish, and had started to call when Lily May put a hand over her mouth.

“Haven’t you any sense?” she demanded. “It may be a revenue boat.”

“And what if it is?” said Tish.

Lily May sat down on the edge of a thwart and stared at us.

“Look here,” she said, “is the little old bean gone, or has that shot of blackberry cordial gone to my head? What about this stuff you’re loaded with?”

“If there is any fine connected with running fish,” Tish said shortly, “I have yet to hear of it.”

“Fish!” said Lily May in a disgusted tone. “I could do better than that myself. Why not canned corn? Or artificial legs? Or bunion plasters?”

“Fish,” Tish repeated. “Dried fish. And if you dare to intimate——”

“Oh, don’t be so silly!” said Lily May, and yawned. “Now see here, you may be older than I am in years, but I was old when I was born. And I can’t remember the time when I didn’t know whiskey from fish.”

“Whiskey!” said Tish in a terrible voice.

“Booze,” said Lily May. “You’re loaded to the gunwales with booze. You’ve landed, so far, about a hundred cases of first-grade Canadian Club, and if you haven’t made more than I have out of it you’ve been stung. That’s all.”

Tish got up at that and gave her a really terrible look.

“You have made money out of this iniquitous traffic?” she demanded.

“Oh, a bagatelle,” Lily May replied languidly. “I had to protect you, you see. If you will run liquor——”

“Silence!” Tish thundered. “What have you made?”

“I got three hundred for keeping Christopher busy while you unloaded,” she said a trifle sulkily.

“Christopher?” Tish said in a dazed manner.

“He’s in the revenue service,” said Lily May. “So am I, for that matter. There’s been hardly a day since we came when I couldn’t have arrested you all. But it would have upset mother a lot. If you don’t believe me——”

She turned up her skirt, and I shall never forget Tish’s eyes when she saw what I saw. That chit had her revenue badge pinned to the top of her stocking!

It was after that that our dear Tish was taken with a sudden shuddering spell and we had to give her quite a heavy dose of blackberry cordial. It is possible that in the darkness we gave her more than we intended, on an empty stomach, and there is undoubtedly a small percentage of alcohol in it to preserve it. When, later on, she insisted on opening one of the boxes and on tasting its contents before she would be entirely convinced, the combination was unfortunate.

She lapsed into silence soon after that, rousing once to shed a few tears, a most unusual proceeding for her, and with her voice slightly thickened she said, “We have been ushed by those sons of Belial, Lizzie. I musht think of a way to shettle with them.”

She dozed a little then, but shortly thereafter she wakened and said a sea serpent had just stuck its head up beside her, and what if it should find Aggie? I was greatly alarmed, but Lily May was quite calm.

“She’s only slightly binged,” she said, “but she will sleep it off. Do her good probably; like having a good cry.”

I pass over the next few hours. Tish slept, and we drifted about at the mercy of wind and tide. About midnight a gale came up and gave us considerable trouble, as the boxes kept shifting. Lily May once more suggested flinging them overboard, but I dared not do this without Tish’s consent, and when I roused her and asked her she gave me no satisfaction.

“Shertainly not,” she said. “It’s evidench. Never destroy evidench, Lizzie.”

“She’ll snap out of it after a while,” Lily May comforted me. “But she’s sure gifted. I’ll bet a brandied peach would give her the D.T.’s.”

I was about to reprove her when I suddenly perceived that the wind had lifted the fog, and there was even a pale moonlight. And at that, Lily May clutched my arm and pointed ahead.

We had indeed been drifting with the tide, and the schooner was just ahead, within a hundred yards or so. We were moving slowly toward it.

I wakened Tish, and this time she responded. I can still see her, majestic and calm, clutching the rail and staring ahead. I can still hear the ringing tone of her voice when she said, “The hour of vengeance is at hand, Lizzie.”

“I’ll tell the world it is, if you go up there,” said Lily May.

But she brushed the child aside, and immediately Bill yelled from the schooner, “Stand by, there! What do you want?”

“We’re looking for trouble, Bill,” said Lily May. “If you have any around——”

But Bill recognized her voice, and he smiled down at us.

“Trouble’s my middle name, ladies,” he said. “Come up and make yourselves at home. Hi, cap!” he shouted. “Here’s company.”

I had not an idea of what was in the wind until I saw Tish pick up her knitting bag. Her revolver was in it.

How can I relate what followed? Tish went up first, Lily May was on the ladder, and I was in the very act of tying up, our rope in my hands, when I heard Tish say, “Hands up! You are under arrest.”

Immediately on that, a most terrible uproar broke out above, and a shot rang out. Just after that my poor Tish’s revolver fell into the boat with a terrible thud, and so startled me that I let go of the rope. There was a frightful noise going on overhead, and as I drifted away I heard another shot or two, and then the captain’s voice.

“I’ve got her, the h—— cat!” he called. “Start the engine, Bill. We’d better get out of here.”

And the next minute the engine of the schooner was starting and they were getting the anchor up. The schooner was moving away.

I cannot write my sensations without pain. The schooner starting off; my dear Tish a prisoner on that accursed boat, helpless, possibly injured; and Lily May, who had been placed in our care, on that accursed vessel.

I stood up and called.

“Tish!” I said in agony. “Tish, where are you?”

“I am here, Lizzie,” I heard the dear familiar tones. And that was all.

In a few moments I was alone on the bosom of the raging deep, and Tish and Lily May were on their way probably to the Canadian border.

I have no very clear idea of what happened next. As I had no knowledge of a motor I could but experiment, and finally about two a.m. I did start the engine. I managed the steering fairly well after a time, and started back. The fog was quite gone by that time, and it was clear moonlight. I seemed to be going very fast, but I did not know how to stop the thing and could but keep on. I have one very clear and tragic impression, however. In the moonlight I passed the bell buoy where we had left Aggie—and Aggie was not there!

After that I remember little, except seeing our beach in front of me with a group of people on it, and steering at it. They have told me since that I came in on the top of a high roller, and that the Swallow simply crossed the beach and went up onto the lawn, where it stopped finally in the pansy bed, but I did not.

And then Christopher was lifting my head from a bottle of Canadian Club whiskey as I lay on the ground, and saying in a shaken voice, “Where is she?”

“Gone,” I said sadly. “They are all gone, Christopher. Tish and Aggie and Lily May. Gone.”

“My God!” he said. “Lily May!”

“Canada,” I said. “Or maybe England; or Spain. I don’t know. But Aggie——”

“What do you mean?” yelled Christopher. “Canada or England?”

“They’ve been stolen. Abducted. By rum runners, Christopher,” I said. “But my dear Aggie——”

And at that minute I heard a sneeze from the house.

“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.”

VI

As soon as possible Christopher and Mr. MacDonald had aroused the island, and every possible boat had started out. I telegraphed to Charlie Sands also, and he was on his way by the first train.

But all the next day went by, and no sign of the schooner or of Tish and Lily May. And as Aggie said, sitting up in bed with a bowl of junket—she could only eat soft food, poor thing—“We bay dever see theb agaid, Lizzie. They bay have to walk the plak or sobethig.”

I spent all my time on the beach, awaiting news, and at evening Charlie Sands arrived from the mainland. He came over to me as I sat disconsolately on a rock, cutting up fish and feeding the sea gulls as our poor Tish had always done, and listened to my story.

“Now,” he said when I had finished, “how many men were on that boat?”

“Three.”

“Three,” he repeated thoughtfully. “And my dear Aunt Letitia and Lily May. Is that correct?”

“And boxes and boxes of-f—of liquor, Charlie.”

“I wouldn’t worry about the liquor,” he said. “I imagine by this time——” He hesitated and sighed. “It seems rather a pity, in a way. Still——”

“A pity!” I said angrily. “Your Aunt Letitia and Lily May Carter abducted, and you say it is a pity!”

“I’m sorry,” he apologized. “Just for the moment my mind had wandered. Now let’s see. They’ve had eighteen hours, and the percentage was favorable. I rather think—of course, I’m not sure—but I rather think it’s about time something happened.”

He then rose to his feet and looked out over the water, and said, “What kind of a boat was it anyhow?”

“It was a schooner.”

“Of course,” he said. “It would be a schooner, naturally. And while I am not a betting man, I’ll wager ten dollars against a bottle of blackberry cordial that this is it now.”

I leaped to my feet, and there, coming around the point of our cove, was the revenue boat! I could only stand and stare. Our beloved Tish was at the helm, and as we gazed she shouted to Lily May, who at once shoved the anchor overboard. As all the sails were still up, the boat listed heavily to one side, but it stopped.

There was no one else in sight, and this seemed to make Charlie Sands somewhat uneasy.

“By the gods,” he said, “she’s done away with them!”

But this proved to be erroneous. Our dear Tish, having brought the vessel to a halt, straightened her bonnet, and then drawing the small boat which trailed behind to the foot of the rope ladder, she and Lily May got into it and Tish rowed it to the shore.

Her first words were typical.

“I want a policeman, Lizzie,” she said briefly, “and a room in the jail, and a bath.”

“I doubt if the jails are arranged that way,” said Charlie Sands, coming forward. “Still, we can inquire.”

She had not noticed him before, and his presence startled her. I have never seen our Tish flinch, but she very nearly did so then. And she gave Lily May a curious look.

“I have taken three prisoners,” she said with dignity. “They are locked in, down below in that ship. And here’s the key, for Mr. MacDonald.”

She then felt in her workbag, handed a key to Charlie Sands, and started with dignity to the house. Charlie Sands looked at the key and then called after her.

“Is that all you’ve got?” he said.

She stiffened and glared at him.

“If you mean the curse of this nation, rum,” she said coldly, “I have thrown it overboard.”

“Not every bottle?” he said in a pleading voice.

“Every bottle,” she said, and walked firmly into the house.

Lily May did not follow her. She stood eying Charlie Sands through her long lashes.

“Well?” she said. “Doesn’t papa still love mamma?”