The Grub-And-Stakers Move a Mountain
Page 19
Thereupon Sergeant MacVicar proceeded to charge Burton Ford, alias Benjamin Frankland, as thoroughly as any prisoner has ever been charged. Dittany typed her shorthand notes in triplicate and passed the transcriptions around for everybody to read and sign, which everybody did in due order. The prisoner was led to the patrol wagon. En route he most injudiciously took a swipe at Osbert Monk. Mr. Monk was thus forced in self-defense, as everybody clamored to testify, to land a right to Ford’s jaw that left Bob and Ray gazing back at him in awe and reverence even as they dragged their captive’ away.
Mrs. MacVicar, who had been unable to suppress a beam of wifely adoration as she watched her husband so nobly acquit himself in his official duty, recovered her wonted dignity and thanked Dittany for a lovely evening. She again congratulated Samantha on her triumph at the polls, expressed proper sentiments anent public servants and their responsibilities to the citizenry they represented, and took her leave.
Gradually the guests drifted off, Minerva Oakes being comforted by Zilla Trott on the loss of yet another boarder and yet another betrayal of her hospitality and being told for the cat’s sake never to rent that room again until the applicant had been screened by some method other than Minerva’s own totally unreliable intuition. Samantha and Joshua stayed until the last, shaking every hand offered with true political finesse. Then they both kissed Dittany and went home.
“Good heavens,” Dittany remarked to Ethel, “we’re alone. How strange!”
Then she heard a diffident cough from the pantry.
“Er—Dittany?”
“Osbert! I thought you’d gone off with Arethusa.”
“I—er—came back. I thought I’d just like to—er—visualize how those two cookie crocks might look. Side by side, that is. I mean, close together. I mean”—Osbert hitched up his clothesline, took a few deep breaths, and clasped Dittany to his manly bosom—“like this.”
“Osbert,” Dittany murmured into his shirt front, “about this house. Would you really like to live here?”
“Is there a better place?”
“You’re quite sure you wouldn’t want to change anything?”
“Only the name on the mailbox,” he cried with a romantic fervor even Sir Percy would have been hard put to emulate. “Oh, Dittany!”
First timidly, then boldly, his lips explored the little dimple at the corner of her mouth. “Did anybody ever tell you your cheek is like the bloom on the yucca or Spanish bayonet?”
From somewhere far, far away a voice could have been heard to remark, “Well, stap my garters!”
Dittany and Osbert heeded not the voice. Arethusa could go stap her own garters. They had far more interesting things to do.
In Aprille with his shoures soote, Hazel got to frost little pink and white cakes. In May, Gram Henbit’s wedding dress was shaken out of its blue tissue paper` wrappings and a very jittery young author bought himself a new belt. In June, the Munson boys were hired to paint a house. And thus (as Chaucer and Miss MacWilliams might have wound up the tale) with alle blisse and melodye, hath Osbert Monk y-wedded Dittany.
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copyright © 1981 by Alisa Craig
cover design by Mauricio Díaz
978-1-4532-7760-7
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