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.�
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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?”
“I’ll tell you that,” he said sternly, “when you tell me something else.” He then stooped and picked up a one-hundred-dollar bill which was lying on the grass. “Where did this come from?”
“Well, well!” said Lily May. “You are lucky, aren’t you?”
“Don’t look at me like that,” said Charlie Sands. “Where did this come from?”
“They grow around here,” said Lily May cheerfully. “Not everywhere, but here and there, you know. Like four-leaf clovers.”
“It didn’t by any chance drop from my Aunt Tish’s workbag?”
“Well, you might call up and inquire,” she suggested, and sauntered off to the house.
She spent an hour and a quarter getting dressed that evening, and when the Swallow and Christopher came back, Christopher almost crazy, she was sitting on the veranda doing her finger nails.
Hannah was laying the table inside, and she says she greeted him with “Hello, old egg! And how are things?”
And that fool of a boy just got down on his knees and put his head in her lap and his arms around her; and when he looked up he said, “You little devil! I’ve a good notion to turn you over my knee and spank you.”
As Aggie says, it was queer love-making, and there is no use trying to understand the younger generation.
“Under no circumstances,” she says, “would Mr. Wiggins have threatened me with that. But then,” she adds, “Mr. Wiggins would never have put on those dreadful clothes and pretended to be something he wasn’t either. Times have changed, Lizzie.”
For it turned out, that very night, that Christopher was Billy Field.
Never, so long as I live, shall I forget that evening around Aggie’s bed, when Tish told her story. The bootleggers had tied her up at once, and even Lily May also. But Lily May was so quiet and chastened that they had weakened, after a while, and had let her loose.
“And then what did you do?” asked Charlie Sands.
“I amused them,” she said, not looking at Tish.
“I think,” Tish said in a terrible voice, “the less said of that the better.”
But it appears—for one must be frank—that Lily May saw that Tish was working with her ropes, and so she began to tell them stories. They must have been very queer ones, for Tish has never reverted to the subject.
“I told them the flapper story,” she said to Charlie Sands, “and that new Ford one, and the April-fool joke.”
Charlie Sands seemed to understand, for he nodded.
“Pretty fair,” he said.
But it seems they relaxed after that, and then she got them started on mixing different kinds of drinks. She would say, Did you ever try this and that, with a drop of something else floated on the top? And she would taste the things they brought, and they would take the rest.
“It was Bill who went under first. He went asleep standing up,” she said. And the captain next. But by that time Tish had freed herself, and she knocked Joe out with a piece of chain that was handy. And then their troubles were over, for they only had to drag them down below and lock them up. But they had been banging at the door all day, and Tish had had to make them keep quiet. She had the captain’s revolver by that time, and now and again she fired a bullet into the door frame, and they would hush up for an hour or so. Then they would start again.
Our dear Tish finished her narrative and then rose.
“And now,” she said brightly, “it is time for bed. I have done my duty, and shall sleep with a clear conscience.”
“Are you so sure of that?” said Charlie Sands, and fixed her with a cold eye.
“Why not?” Tish asked tartly.
“One reason might be—piracy on the high seas.”
“Piracy!” said Tish furiously. “I capture three rum runners, and you call it piracy?”
“Then there’s no matter of money to be discussed.”
“Certainly not,” said Tish.
“Of seventeen hundred and forty-one dollars,” he insisted. “At the present moment concealed in your bedroom.”
“That money belongs to the church.”
“I see. But the amount interests me. I can understand the seventeen hundred, and even the forty. But why the one?”
“Two months at eight hundred and seventy dollars and fifty cents per month,” Tish said, staring at him defiantly. “Even an idiot could figure that.”
“And you took it from those bootleggers?”
“I’d earned it for them.”
“By force and duress?”
“Nothing of the sort. The man was asleep.”
“Hijacking,” he said softly. “Ye gods and little fishes! Hijacking for the church!”
He seemed a trifle dazed, although Tish carefully explained her position to him.
“I see it all,” he said. “It sounds all right, but there must be a catch in it somewhere. I don’t quite grasp it, that’s all.”
After a time, however, he got up and went to the door, still thinking, and called Christopher.
“Come in, you young imposter,” he said, “and tell us how much you’ve had out of the summer.”
“I couldn’t quite make it,” said Christopher sadly. “Five hundred for the boat and two hundred revenue salary. That’s all.”
“Certainly it’s not all, Billy Field!” said Lily May. “I have three hundred from Smith, haven’t I? That makes the thousand.”
But Charlie Sands was holding his head.
“It sounds all right,” he said. “The parish house gets a kitchen, and Field gets Lily May. Personally I think my Aunt Tish ought to get thirty years, but still—” He groaned. “Rum running, assault and battery, piracy, straight larceny and hijacking!” he said.
“And everybody’s happy! There’s a profound immorality somewhere,” he added, looking around at us. “But where?”
He got up feebly. “I’m getting too old for much of this,” he said. “Get me a stiff dose of blackberry cordial, somebody. And, Field, slip around to old MacDonald’s and get a bit of something to float on the top.”
THE TREASURE HUNT
I
HAD WE NOT BEEN so anxious about our dear Tish last summer, I dare say it would never have happened. But even Charlie Sands noticed when he came to our cottage at Lake Penzance for the week-end that she was distinctly not her old self.
“I don’t like it,” he said. “She’s lost her pep, or something. I’ve been here two days and she hasn’t even had a row with Hannah, and I must say that fuss with old Carpenter yesterday really wasn’t up to her standard at all.”
Old Carpenter is a fisherman, and Tish having discovered that our motor boat went better in reverse than forward, he had miscalculated our direction and we had upset him.
As it happened, that very evening Tish herself confirmed Charlie’s fears by asking about Aggie’s Cousin Sarah Brown’s Chelsea teapot.
“I think,” she said, “that a woman of my age should have a hobby; one that will arouse interest at the minimum of physical exertion. And the collection of old china—”
“Oh, Tish!” Aggie wailed, and burst into tears.
“I mean it,” said Tish, “I have reached that period of my life which comes to every woman, when adventure no longer lurks around the next corner. By this I do not refer necessarily to amorous affairs, but to dramatic incidents. I think more than I did of what I eat. I take a nap every day. I am getting old.”
“Never!” said Aggie valiantly.
“No? When I need my glasses nowadays to see the telephone directory!”
“But they’re printing the names smaller, Tish.”
“Yes, and I dare say my arm is getting shorter also,” she returned with a sad smile. She pursued the subject no further, however, but went on knitting the bedroom slippers which are her yearly contribution to the Old Ladies’ Home, leaving Charlie Sands to gaze at her thoughtfully as he sipped his blackberry cordial.
Tish Plays the Game Page 10
