Tish Marches On (16 page)

Lelia sat on the ground and stared at it furiously.

“The fools!” she said. “The blithering idiots! They did it on purpose.”

She refused to explain further, and as evening was now falling rapidly our problem had become acute.

With her injured ankle, Lelia could not climb the tree, and at last Tish suggested that Aggie, being the lightest among us, should go up and bring down the bag. I shall never forget poor Aggie’s face.

“Clibe that tree?” she asked. “What do you thik I ab? A skyrocket?”

In the end, however, she agreed—although none too willingly—and at last we succeeded in hoisting her to a lower limb. For some time we could hear her moving upward, until she was far above us; and then suddenly we heard the stealthy sounds of movement all about us, and realized that we were surrounded!

How shall I relate what followed? The shocking sight of Mr. Bellamy, red-faced and raging, catching our unfortunate Lelia and deliberately turning her over and—I hesitate to relate this—spanking her violently; my own fingers closing without intention on both barrels of the shotgun, and an explosion which threw me flat and knocked out a pivot tooth, followed by a yelp from a state trooper; and as I went down, a brief vision of Tish pushing at the sheriff as he tried to lay hands on her; and his sudden disappearance into the timber chute—those are the pictures which rise in my mind as I write this, and bitter indeed they are.

Somewhere above us in a tree were Aggie and the bag, but I could see neither of them; nor in that long walk and, later, ride to the county jail did either Tish or I mention them. We were handcuffed, and to this crowning indignity Tish made no protest.

“If it is a crime,” she said, “to bring young lives together, then I am indeed a criminal!”

We saw nothing more of the sheriff, although we learned later that, the chute ending in the river, he had had a most unpleasant experience. But one thing puzzled us both. This was their insistence that we had hidden the bag from the plane, and that it contained a huge sum of money. Not, indeed, until after Charlie Sands had come and gone the next day had we the slightest comprehension of what they meant. Then I looked out to see him standing beyond the bars of our cell.

“Well,” he said, “I guess you are beyond help this time.”

“I don’t even know what you are talking about,” said Tish. “If I have tried to help a pair of young lovers, that is entirely my affair. I have committed no felony.”

“Maybe not in this state,” he said coldly, “but in some parts of this great and glorious Union shooting at a sheriff and then filling him full of splinters is not regarded with any favor.”

“He slipped,” said Tish calmly.

“He says you pushed him,” Charlie Sands retorted. “I’ve been in to see him, and he has two constables and a deputy working over him with tweezers.”

It was some time before he could induce her to tell him the story, and when she had finished he simply held on to the bars and stared at her.

“I see,” he said rather feebly. “Of course, it’s quite simple. The cruel parents and the sweet young thing to be saved. And Eddie and Theodore. And Aggie still in a tree with a bag dropped from a plane. What could be more natural? I say,” he added, “you haven’t a spot of blackberry cordial about, have you? I feel rather queer.”

He went away soon after that, and I believe that Aggie was rescued later that day by some fire department or other which carried up a long ladder. They found the bag also, and it contained fifty thousand dollars in small bills, and no clothing whatever.

It was the ransom money for Edith Lee, and Lelia had been Edith Lee all the time! Moreover, although we did not know it then, she had merely invented all the attempts to kidnap her, in order to get money so she could go into motion pictures; and Mr. Bellamy and the man with the pipe had been not her jailers, but guards to protect her.

It was late that evening that Mr. Bellamy came to the cell to see us and was admitted. He sat down as though he was very tired and for some time merely examined his hands, which appeared to be badly scratched.

“Someday,” he said at last, “some good strong man is going to take that redhead and beat Hollywood out of her. Then he’ll probably marry her and live happily ever after. But I am not the man. Theodore might have done it; I don’t know. But not Eddie. I never cared for Eddie. With a mind like hers, she should have done better with Eddie. In my opinion Eddie was a washout.”

“Was?” said Tish in a dreadful voice. “Has anything happened to him?”

“My dear lady,” he said, “Eddie has passed into limbo again, as has Theodore. They lived their short but eventful lives wholly in her mind, and if Providence is good to me I shall go back to Washington and hand in my resignation. Anyone who could fall for a girl like that isn’t safe to be let loose.”

He then got up and gave a sort of groan. “The right man,” he said heavily, “could make something of her. But I’ve got my fingers crossed.”

Well, it turned out that he was actually a G-man or something of the sort, and when the Lee girl made up her story about kidnapers and her people hid her in the country he had been sent to watch her. But he never had believed that story, and I must say for her that when they got Aggie and the bag she told the truth for once, and we were released that night.

We went at once to the farm, to find our poor Aggie with her cold much worse and using language she had never used before.

“It was all right for you,” she said bitterly. “You were id a dice warb cell. But I was id a tree, with a policemad udder be, tryig to look like a dabbed bird! If you thik that’s fuddy, go ad try it.”

She was very resentful, as the policeman had not moved from her vicinity all night; and once she had had to sneeze, and he whipped out his revolver. After that, every now and then she had had to make a noise like a bird, for he was evidently suspicious. The worst trouble she had, however, was with a squirrel. It got used to her after a time, she said, and was evidently nesting, as little by little it bit off most of her new switch and carried it away.

Nothing would induce her to stay at the farm after that, and so we spent the remainder of the spring and summer in the city. But that fall we had a great surprise. We received an invitation to Lelia’s—or I should say Edith Lee’s—wedding; she was marrying the Bellamy man, after all!

We went to the church, and I must say she made a beautiful bride. Under her veil her hair did not seem as red as usual, but she had not entirely changed; for, coming down the aisle just beside our pew, Mr. Bellamy stepped on her dress and she said something under her breath.

He never stopped smiling, but all of us saw him give her arm quite a dreadful pinch, and Charlie Sands, who was sitting with us, leaned over and spoke to Tish.

“Don’t worry about them,” he said. “She’s under control. Everything’s under control from now on.” …

Well, that is the story. I have felt it necessary to tell it in detail, as one of the smart-aleck national magazines has recently referred to our dear Tish as “whilom kidnaper, Letitia Carberry.” This is most unfair, as it was Edith Lee herself—pretending to be Lelia Vaughn—who, while professing to get in touch with an Eddie who did not exist, called her anxious parents by telephone and said that she had been kidnaped. It was her idea about the sheet and the ransom money also; and I have always regarded it as outrageous that the sheriff sent us a bill for a new suit of clothes and for medical attention, including the removal of certain splinters from his person.

We have all recovered, save, perhaps, Aggie. She has been subject to nightmares ever since, and her nerves are not what they were. Once or twice at night I have found her standing up in her bed, clutching a bedpost and uttering a sort of feeble peep-peep, as though she were a bird.

But, as I have intimated, the whole affair has left Tish with a definite complex as to red lanterns. As a result, only a few days ago she drove past one at night, to discover too late that she had driven onto a large hoist which was carrying building materials to the upper stories of a new structure that was being erected.

It did not pause until it had reached the sixteenth floor, and as work ceased at that time, we were left there all night.

I shall never forget the expressions of the men on the ground when we were lowered there the next morning and drove away. But I shall also always remember Charlie Sands’ face when he brought in the evening paper.

“I am not a betting man,” he said, “but if you will tell me you were not the three women who spent last night in a car on top of the steel work of the new Standard Building, I will not only go to church next Sunday, I will put ten dollars on the plate.”

There was nothing to do but to tell him, and over a glass of blackberry cordial he regarded us, one after the other.

“I shall go to church anyhow,” he said solemnly.

I
T WAS LAST MARCH
that Tish, on her way home from church, picked up the Florida picture section of the morning paper and there saw a picture of an enormous fish. It was leaping out of the water, and a tired-looking man in a boat the size of the fish had a death grip on a rod, and had torn one sleeve out of his shirt.

Tish put down the paper thoughtfully.

“It is a curious thing,” she observed, “how little we know of the depths of the sea. We sail over it; ever and anon we bathe in it. But what does it contain? What goes on in its awful depths?”

“I don’t know, and what’s more, I don’t care,” said Aggie positively. “So far as I’m concerned any old thing can go on.”

Tish was not listening. It is characteristic of her that her logical mind, once seizing on a subject, pursues it relentlessly.

“Again,” she went on, “what do we know of the southern portion of our country? Of the old historic South? Nothing. Nothing at all.”

“True,” said Aggie, “and plenty goes on there too, I understand. If you’re leading up to Florida, Tish Carberry—”

But Tish had taken up the paper and was again gazing at the fish.

“‘Diamond-button tarpon,’” she read, “‘making its fourteenth leap.’ Unless that’s a double negative picture, that is a real fish, Lizzie. That man got a diamond button for getting it.”

“A diamond button!” Aggie said. “What good did a diamond button do him? What he needed was a bottle of liniment and a new shirt. And who wants one diamond button anyhow? If it was a dozen, or even a half dozen, it would mean something.”

Tish explained to her that it was a decoration, to be worn like the ribbon of the Croix de Guerre, but Aggie was unconvinced. Unlike Tish, who is rather radical in temperament, Aggie is a conservative, in addition to suffering badly from hay fever.

“I’m not going south,” she said flatly. “It may mean a diamond button to you, but it only means hay fever to me.”

It was quite clear to me, however, that Tish had already made up her mind to go south. She cut out the picture and placed it in her reticule, and before she left she gave Aggie a little talk on the advantages of sea air on the mucous passages of the nose, and also on the cry of the human skin for the rays of the sun.

“We wear too many clothes,” she said. “There are four million pores in the human body, and what do we do with them? Clothe them!”

But Aggie was still mutinous.

“My pores are my own private business,” she observed sulkily. And when Tish went on to speak of hours to be spent in the actinic rays of the sun on some sequestered beach, she said acidly that the sun gave her prickly heat, and that personally she preferred hay fever.

“I can
blow
my nose,” she added tartly.

Nor was she impressed when, a day or so later, Tish sent us a quantity of literature issued by the railroads and steamship companies. These showed beautiful islands with palm trees and oranges on them, and a great many people with practically nothing on them at all. I can still see our poor Aggie staring at those pictures, ignorant of what was to come, and declaring emphatically that only her Maker had ever seen her like that or ever would.

But in the end the literature had its effect, and we began to plan to go south.

It was at this time that Charlie Sands paid Tish a visit, and in view of his bitterness since, I consider it well to set down that conversation.

He was very low-spirited at the beginning. He said that there was to be a new managing editor appointed on his paper, and that if the boss knew his business he, Charlie Sands, would get the job.

“I’ve been working my fool head off,” he said. “I’ve even been taking Clara out, and if you knew Clara—!”

“Clara?”

“The daughter,” he explained. “I’ve been taking her to night clubs all night, and working all day. She likes to go.” Here he groaned. “Go! If you’d fasten a pedometer to that girl you’d find she travels about thirty miles every night around a dance floor. Believe me, when and if I land this job I’m going to bed for a week.”

Here he yawned, and said that that was enough of Clara; he never had liked her, and now he was fed up and running over, and bankrupt into the bargain.

“I’ve got so that when I hear her voice on the telephone I dig in and get the good old wallet,” he said.

Over a glass or two of blackberry cordial, however, he relaxed and grew more cheerful. It was then that Tish spoke of the Florida plan.

“It
sounds
all right,” he said thoughtfully. “I can’t see a hole in it at the moment. But in the light of past experience I feel that there is a hole, and that you’ll get into it. There always has been, and you always have.”

“Nonsense!” said Tish. “A simple vacation, with a bit of fishing!”

“You couldn’t be induced to do a bit of liquor running from the West Indies?”

As Tish belongs to practically all the dry organizations in the country she met this with silence, and he poured himself another glass of cordial.

“Well,” he said, “happy days, and wire me if you get into trouble.”

Who could have foretold that when trouble did come, as it did, it would be impossible to wire him? Or to wire anybody?

He was feeling very cheerful when he left, and said that the boss was going to Florida too.