The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  "I told her the young man she had expected was on Island Eleven and had sent me to get her. She was awfully excited. She said they'd seen his signal, but nothing of him. And when they'd found a number of feminine things round they all felt a little--well, you can understand. She went back to get a coat, and while she was gone I untied the canoes and pushed them out into the river. I'm thorough, and I wasn't going to have a lot of people interfering before we got things fixed."

  It was here, I think, that Charlie Sands gave a low moan and collapsed on the sofa. "Certainly!" he said in a stifled voice. "I believe in being thorough. And, of course, a few canoes more or less do not matter."

  "Later," Tish said, "I knew I'd been thoughtless about the canoes; but, of course, it was too late then."

  "And when was it that you assaulted the detective?"

  "He fired first," said Tish. "I never felt more peaceable in my life. It's absurd for him to say that he was watching our camp, as he had every night we'd been there. Who asked him to guard us? And the idea of his saying he thought we were Indians stealing things, and that he fired into the air! The bullets sang past me. I had hardly time to get my revolver out of my stocking."

  "And then?" asked Charlie Sands.

  "And then," said Tish, "we went calmly down the river to Island Eleven. We went rapidly, for at first the detective did not know I had shot a hole in his canoe, and he followed us. It stands to reason that if I'd shot his heel off he'd have known there was a hole in the boat. Luckily the girl was in the bottom of the canoe when she fainted or we might have been upset."

  It was at this point, I believe, that Charlie Sands got his hat and opened the door.

  "I find," he said, "that I cannot stand any more at present, Aunt Tish. I shall return when I am stronger."

  * * * * *

  So I shall go back to my own narrative. Really my justification is almost complete. Any one reading to this point will realize the injustice of the things that have been said about us.

  We were despairing of Tish, as I have said, when we heard the shots and then the approach of a canoe. Then Tish hailed us.

  "Quick, somebody!" she said. "I have a cramp in my right leg."

  [The canoeing position, kneeling as one must, had been always very trying for her. She frequently developed cramps, which only a hot footbath relieved.]

  Mr. McDonald waded out into the water. Our beach fire illuminated the whole scene distinctly, and when he saw the P.T.S. huddled in the canoe he stopped as though he had been shot.

  "How interesting!" said Hutchins from the bank, in her cool voice.

  I remember yet Tish, stamping round on her cramped limb and smiling benevolently at all of us. The girl, however, looked startled and unhappy, and a little dizzy. Hutchins helped her to a fallen tree.

  "Where--where is he?" said the P.T.S.

  Tish stared at her. "Bless the girl!" she said. "Did you think I meant the other one?"

  "I--What other one?"

  Tish put her hand on Mr. McDonald's arm. "My dear girl," she said, "this young man adores you. He's all that a girl ought to want in the man she loves. I have done him a grave injustice and he has borne it nobly. Come now--let me put your hand in his and say you will marry him."

  "Marry him!" said the P.T.S. "Why, I never saw him in my life before!"

  We had been so occupied with this astounding scene that none of us had noticed the arrival of the detective. He limped rapidly up the bank--having lost his heel, as I have explained--and, dripping with water, confronted us. When a red-haired person is pale, he is very pale. And his teeth showed.

  He ignored all of us but the P.T.S., who turned and saw him, and went straight into his arms in the most unmaidenly fashion.

  "By Heaven," he said, "I thought that elderly lunatic had taken you off and killed you!"

  He kissed her quite frantically before all of us; and then, with one arm round her, he confronted Tish.

  "I'm through!" he said. "I'm done! There isn't a salary in the world that will make me stay within gunshot of you another day." He eyed her fiercely. "You are a dangerous woman, madam," he said. "I'm going to bring a charge against you for abduction and assault with intent to kill. And if there's any proof needed I'll show my canoe, full of water to the gunwale."

  Here he kissed the girl again.

  "You--you know her?" gasped Mr. McDonald, and dropped on a tree-trunk, as though he were too weak to stand.

  "It looks like it, doesn't it?"

  Here I happened to glance at Hutchins, and she was convulsed with mirth! Tish saw her, too, and glared at her; but she seemed to get worse. Then, without the slightest warning, she walked round the camp-fire and kissed Mr. McDonald solemnly on the top of his head.

  "I give it up!" she said. "Somebody will have to marry you and take care of you. I'd better be the person."

  * * * * *

  "But why was the detective watching Hutchins?" said Charlie Sands. "Was it because he had heard of my Aunt Letitia's reckless nature? I am still bewildered."

  "You remember the night we got the worms?"

  "I see. The detective was watching all of you because you stole the worms."

  "Stole nothing!" Tish snapped. "That's the girl's house. She's the Miss Newcomb you read about in the papers. Now do you understand?"

  "Certainly I do. She was a fugitive from justice because the cat found dynamite in the woods. Or--perhaps I'm a trifle confused, but--Now I have it! She had stolen a gold-mounted traveling-bag and given it to McDonald. Lucky chap! I was crazy about Hutchins myself. You might tip her the word that I'm badly off for a traveling-case myself. But what about the P.T.S.? How did she happen on the scene?"

  "She was engaged to the detective, and she was camping down the river. He had sent her word where he was. The red flag was to help her find him."

  Tish knows Charlie Sands, so she let him talk. Then:--

  "Mr. McDonald was too wealthy, Charlie," she said; "so when she wanted him to work and be useful, and he refused, she ran off and got a situation herself to teach him a lesson. She could drive a car. But her people heard about it, and that wretched detective was responsible for her safety. That's why he followed her about."

  "I should like to follow her about myself," said Charlie Sands. "Do you think she's unalterably decided to take McDonald, money and all? He's still an idler. Lend me your car, Aunt Tish. There's a theory there; and--who knows?"

  "He is going to work for six months before she marries him," Tish said. "He seems to like to work, now he has started."

  She rang the bell and Hannah came to the door.

  "Hannah," said Tish calmly, "call up the garage and tell McDonald to bring the car round. Mr. Sands is going out."

  MY COUNTRY TISH OF THEE--

  We had meant to go to Europe this last summer, and Tish would have gone anyhow, war or no war, if we had not switched her off onto something else. "Submarines fiddlesticks!" she said. "Give me a good life preserver, with a bottle of blackberry cordial fastened to it, and the sea has no terrors for me."

  She said the proper way to do, in case the ship was torpedoed, was to go up on an upper deck, and let the vessel sink under one.

  "Then without haste," she explained, "as the water rises about one, strike out calmly. The life-belt supports one, but swim gently for the exercise. It will prevent chilling. With a waterproof bag of crackers, and mild weather, one could go on comfortably for a day or two."

  I still remember the despairing face Aggie turned to me. It was December then, and very cold.

  However, she said nothing more until January. Early in that month Charlie Sands came to Tish's to Sunday dinner, and we were all there. The subject came up then.

  It was about the time Tish took up vegetarianism, I remember that, because the only way she could induce Charlie Sands to come to dinner was to promise to have two chops for him. Personally I am not a vegetarian. I am not and never will be. I took a firm stand except when at Tish's home. But Aggie followed Tish's lead, of
course, and I believe lived up to it as far as possible, although it is quite true that, stopping in one day unexpectedly to secure a new crochet pattern, I smelled broiling steak. But Aggie explained that she merely intended to use the juice from a small portion, having had one of her weak spells, the balance to go to the janitor's dog.

  However, this is a digression.

  "Europe!" said Charlie Sands. "Forget it! What in the name of the gastric juice is this I'm eating?"

  It was a mixture of bran, raisins, and chopped nuts, as I recall it, moistened with water and pressed into a compact form. It was Tish's own invention. She called it "Bran-Nut," and was talking of making it in large quantities for sale.

  Charlie Sands gave it up with a feeble gesture. "I'm sorry, Aunt Letitia," he said at last; "I'm a strong man ordinarily, but by the time I've got it masticated I'm too weak to swallow it. If--if one could have a stream of water playing on it while working, it would facilitate things."

  "The Ostermaiers," said Aggie, "are going West."

  "Good for the Ostermaiers," said Charlie Sands. "Great idea. See America first. 'My Country Tish of Thee,' etc. Why don't you three try it?"

  Tish relinquished Europe slowly.

  "One would think," Charlie Sands said, "that you were a German being asked to give up Belgium."

  "What part of the West?" she demanded. "It's all civilized, isn't it?"

  "The Rocky Mountains," said Charlie Sands, "will never be civilized."

  Tish broke off a piece of Bran-Nut, and when she thought no one was looking poured a little tea over it. There was a gleam in her eye that Aggie and I have learned to know.

  "Mountains!" she said. "That ought to be good for Aggie's hay fever."

  "I'd rather live with hay fever," Aggie put in sharply, "than cure it by falling over a precipice."

  "You'll have to take a chance on that, of course," Charlie Sands said. "I'm not sure it will be safe, but I am sure it will be interesting."

  Oh, he knew Tish well enough. Tell her a thing was dangerous, and no power could restrain her.

  I do not mind saying that I was not keen about the thing. I had my fortune told years ago, and the palmist said that if a certain line had had a bend in it I should have been hanged. But since it did not, to be careful of high places.

  "It's a sporting chance," said Charlie Sands, although I was prodding him under the table. "With some good horses and a bag of this--er--concentrated food, you would have the time of your young lives."

  This was figurative. We are all of us round fifty.

  "The--the Bran-Nut," he said, "would serve for both food and ammunition. I can see you riding along, now and then dropping a piece of it on the head of some unlucky mountain goat, and watching it topple over into eternity. I can see--"

  "Riding!" said Aggie. "Then I'm not going. I have never been on a horse and I never intend to be."

  "Don't be a fool," Tish snapped. "If you've never been on a horse, it's time and to spare you got on one."

  Hannah had been clearing the table with her lips shut tight. Hannah is an old and privileged servant and has a most unfortunate habit of speaking her mind. So now she stopped beside Tish.

  "You take my advice and go, Miss Tish," she said. "If you ride a horse round some and get an appetite, you'll go down on your knees and apologize to your Maker for the stuff we've been eating the last four weeks." She turned to Charlie Sands, and positively her chin was quivering. "I'm a healthy woman," she said, "and I work hard and need good nourishing food. When it's come to a point where I eat the cat's meat and let it go hungry," she said, "it's time either I lost my appetite or Miss Tish went away."

  Well, Tish dismissed Hannah haughtily from the room, and the conversation went on. None of us had been far West, although Tish has a sister-in-law in, Toledo, Ohio. But owing to a quarrel over a pair of andirons that had been in the family for a time, she had never visited her.

  "You'll like it, all of you," Charlie Sands said as we waited for the baked apples. "Once get started with a good horse between your knees, and--"

  "I hope," Tish interrupted him, "that you do not think we are going to ride astride!"

  "I'm darned sure of it."

  That was Charlie Sands's way of talking. He does not mean to be rude, and he is really a young man of splendid character. But, as Tish says, contact with the world, although it has not spoiled him, has roughened his speech.

  "You see," he explained, "there are places out there where the horses have to climb like goats. It's only fair to them to distribute your weight equally. A side saddle is likely to turn and drop you a mile or two down a crack."

  Aggie went rather white and sneezed violently.

  But Tish looked thoughtful. "It sounds reasonable," she said. "I've felt for along time that I'd be glad to discard skirts. Skirts," she said, "are badge of servitude, survivals of the harem, reminders of a time when nothing was expected of women but parasitic leisure."

  I tried to tell her that she was wrong about the skirts. Miss MacGillicuddy, our missionary in India, had certainly said that the women in harems wore bloomers. But Tish left the room abruptly, returning shortly after with a volume of the encyclopædia, and looked up the Rocky Mountains.

  I remember it said that the highest ranges were, as compared with the size and shape of the earth, only as the corrugations on the skin of an orange. Either the man who wrote that had never seen an orange or he had never seen the Rocky Mountains. Orange, indeed! If he had said the upper end of a pineapple it would have been more like it. I wish the man who wrote it would go to Glacier Park. I am not a vindictive woman, but I know one or two places where I would like to place him and make him swallow that orange. I'd like to see him on a horse, on the brink of a cañon a mile deep, and have his horse reach over the edge for a stray plant or two, or standing in a cloud up to his waist, so that, as Aggie so plaintively observed, "The lower half of one is in a snowstorm while the upper part is getting sunburned."

  For we went. Oh, yes, we went. It is not the encyclopædia's fault that we came back. But now that we are home, and nothing wrong except a touch of lumbago that Tish got from sleeping on the ground, and, of course, Aggie's unfortunate experience with her teeth, I look back on our various adventures with pleasure. I even contemplate a return next year, although Aggie says she will die first. But even that is not to be taken as final. The last time I went to see her, she had bought a revolver from the janitor and was taking lessons in loading it.

  The Ostermaiers went also. Not with us, however. The congregation made up a purse for the purpose, and Tish and Aggie and I went further, and purchased a cigar-case for Mr. Ostermaier and a quantity of cigars. Smoking is the good man's only weakness.

  I must say, however, that it is absurd to hear Mrs. Ostermaier boasting of the trip. To hear her talk, one would think they had done the whole thing, instead of sitting in an automobile and looking up at the mountains. I shall never forget the day they were in a car passing along a road, and we crossed unexpectedly ahead of them and went on straight up the side of a mountain.

  Tish had a sombrero on the side of her head, and was resting herself in the saddle by having her right leg thrown negligently over the horse's neck. With the left foot she was kicking our pack-horse, a creature so scarred with brands that Tish had named her Jane, after a cousin of hers who had had so many operations that Tish says she is now entirely unfurnished.

  Mr. Ostermaier's face was terrible, and only two days ago Mrs. Ostermaier came over to ask about putting an extra width in the skirt to her last winter's suit. But it is my belief that she came to save Tish's soul, and nothing else.

  "I'm so glad wide skirts have come in," she said. "They're so modest, aren't they, Miss Tish?"

  "Not in a wind," Tish said, eying her coldly.

  "I do think, dear Miss Tish," she went on with her eyes down, "that to--to go about in riding-breeches before a young man is--well, it is hardly discreet, is it?"

  I saw Tish glancing about the room. S
he was pretty angry, and I knew perfectly well what she wanted. I put my knitting-bag over Charlie Sands's tobacco-pouch.

  Tish had learned to roll cigarettes out in Glacier Park. Not that she smoked them, of course, but she said she might as well know how. There was no knowing when it would come in handy. And when she wishes to calm herself she reaches instinctively for what Bill used to call, strangely, "the makings."

  "If," she said, her eye still roving,--"if it was any treat to a twenty-four-year-old cowpuncher to see three elderly women in riding-breeches, Mrs. Ostermaier,--and it's kind of you to think so,--why, I'm not selfish."

  Mrs. Ostermaier's face was terrible. She gathered up her skirt and rose. "I shall not tell Mr. Ostermaier what you have just said," she observed with her mouth set hard. "We owe you a great deal, especially the return of my earrings. But I must request, Miss Tish, that you do not voice such sentiments in the Sunday school."

  Tish watched her out. Then she sat down and rolled eleven cigarettes for Charlie Sands, one after the other. At last she spoke.

  "I'm not sure," she said tartly, "that if I had it to do over again I'd do it. That woman's not a Christian. I was thinking," she went on, "of giving them a part of the reward to go to Asbury Park with. But she'd have to wear blinders on the bathing-beach, so I'll not do it."

  However, I am ahead of my recital.

  For a few days Tish said nothing more, but one Sunday morning, walking home from church, she turned to me suddenly and said:--

  "Lizzie, you're fat."

  "I'm as the Lord made me," I replied with some spirit.

  "Fiddlesticks!" said Tish. "You're as your own sloth and overindulgence has made you. Don't blame the Good Man for it."

  Now, I am a peaceful woman, and Tish is as my own sister, and indeed even more so. But I was roused to anger by her speech.

  "I've been fleshy all my life," I said. "I'm no lazier than most, and I'm a dratted sight more agreeable than some I know, on account of having the ends of my nerves padded."