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Where There's a Will

by Mary Roberts Rinehart · English · Gutenberg #330 · 369,603 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Where There's a Will

Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart


        
Release date: March 15, 2006 [eBook #330]
                Most recently updated: July 6, 2006

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/330

Credits: Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHERE THERE'S A WILL ***




Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger





WHERE THERE'S A WILL

By Mary Roberts Rinehart



     CONTENTS

     I       I HAVE A WARNING
     II      MISS PATTY ARRIVES
     III     A WILL
     IV      AND A WAY
     V       WANTED--AN OWNER
     VI      THE CONSPIRACY
     VII     MR. PIERCE ACQUIRES A WIFE
     VII     AND MR. MOODY INDIGESTION
     IX      DOLLY, HOW COULD YOU
     X       ANOTHER COMPLICATION
     XI      MISS PATTY'S PRINCE
     XII     WE GET A DOCTOR
     XIII    THE PRINCE--PRINCIPALLY
     XIV     PIERCE DISAPPROVES
     XV      THE PRINCE, WITH APOLOGIES
     XVI     STOP, THIEF!
     XVII    A BUNCH OF LETTERS
     XVIII   MISS COBB'S BURGLAR
     XIX     NO MARRIAGE IN HEAVEN
     XX      EVERY DOG HAS HIS DAY
     XXI     THE MUTINY
     XXII    HOME TO ROOST
     XXIII   BACK TO NATURE
     XIV     LIKE DUCKS TO WATER
     XXV     THE FIRST FRUITS
     XXVI    OVER THE FENCE IS OUT
     XXVII   A CUPBOARD FULL OF RYE
     XXVIII  LOVE, LOVE, LOVE
     XXIX    A BIG NIGHT TO-NIGHT
     XXX     LET GOOD DIGESTION




WHERE THERE'S A WILL





CHAPTER I

I HAVE A WARNING

When it was all over Mr. Sam came out to the spring-house to say good-by
to me before he and Mrs. Sam left. I hated to see him go, after all we
had been through together, and I suppose he saw it in my face, for he
came over close and stood looking down at me, and smiling. "You saved
us, Minnie," he said, "and I needn't tell you we're grateful; but do
you know what I think?" he asked, pointing his long forefinger at me.
"I think you've enjoyed it even when you were suffering most. Red-haired
women are born to intrigue, as the sparks fly upward."

"Enjoyed it!" I snapped. "I'm an old woman before my time, Mr. Sam. What
with trailing back and forward through the snow to the shelter-house,
and not getting to bed at all some nights, and my heart going by fits
and starts, as you may say, and half the time my spinal marrow fairly
chilled--not to mention putting on my overshoes every morning from force
of habit and having to take them off again, I'm about all in."

"It's been the making of you, Minnie," he said, eying me, with his hands
in his pockets. "Look at your cheeks! Look at your disposition! I don't
believe you'd stab anybody in the back now!"

(Which was a joke, of course; I never stabbed anybody in the back.)

He sauntered over and dropped a quarter into the slot-machine by the
door, but the thing was frozen up and refused to work. I've seen the
time when Mr. Sam would have kicked it, but he merely looked at it and
then at me.

"Turned virtuous, like everything else around the place. Not that I
don't approve of virtue, Minnie, but I haven't got used to putting my
foot on the brass rail of the bar and ordering a nut sundae. Hook
the money out with a hairpin, Minnie, and buy some shredded wheat in
remembrance of me."

He opened the door and a blast of February wind rattled the
window-frames. Mr. Sam threw out his chest under his sweater and waved
me another good-by.

"Well, I'm off, Minnie," he said. "Take care of yourself and don't sit
too tight on the job; learn to rise a bit in the saddle."

"Good-by, Mr. Sam!" I called, putting down Miss Patty's doily and
following him to the door; "good-by; better have something before you
start to keep you warm."

He turned at the corner of the path and grinned back at me.

"All right," he called. "I'll go down to the bar and get a lettuce
sandwich!"

Then he was gone, and happy as I was, I knew I would miss him terribly.
I got a wire hairpin and went over to the slot-machine, but when I had
finally dug out the money I could hardly see it for tears.

It began when the old doctor died. I suppose you have heard of Hope
Sanatorium and the mineral spring that made it famous. Perhaps you
have seen the blotter we got out, with a flash-light interior of the
spring-house on it, and me handing the old doctor a glass of mineral
water, and wearing the embroidered linen waist that Miss Patty Jennings
gave me that winter. The blotters were a great success. Below the
picture it said, "Yours for health," and in the body of the blotter,
in red lettering, "Your system absorbs the health-giving drugs in Hope
Springs water as this blotter soaks up ink."

The "Yours for health" was my idea.

I have been spring-house girl at Hope Springs Sanatorium for fourteen
years. My father had the position before me, but he took rheumatism, and
as the old doctor said, it was bad business policy to spend thousands
of dollars in advertising that Hope Springs water cured rheumatism, and
then have father creaking like a rusty hinge every time he bent over to
fill a glass with it.

Father gave me one piece of advice the day he turned the spring-house
over to me.

"It's a difficult situation, my girl," he said. "Lots of people think
it's simply a matter of filling a glass with water and handing it over
the railing. Why, I tell you a barkeeper's a high-priced man mostly, and
his job's a snap to this. I'd like to know how a barkeeper would make
out if his customers came back only once a year and he had to remember
whether they wanted their drinks cold or hot or 'chill off'. And another
thing: if a chap comes in with a tale of woe, does the barkeeper have
to ask him what he's doing for it, and listen while he tells how much
weight he lost in a blanket sweat? No, sir; he pushes him a bottle and
lets it go at that."

Father passed away the following winter. He'd been a little bit
delirious, and his last words were: "Yes, sir; hot, with a pinch of
salt, sir?" Poor father! The spring had been his career, you may
say, and I like to think that perhaps even now he is sitting by some
everlasting spring measuring out water with a golden goblet instead of
the old tin dipper. I said that to Mr. Sam once, and he said he felt
quite sure that I was right, and that where father was the water would
be appreciated. He had heard of father.

Well, for the first year or so I nearly went crazy. Then I found things
were coming my way. I've got the kind of mind that never forgets a name
or face and can combine them properly, which isn't common. And when
folks came back I could call them at once. It would do your heart good
to see some politician, coming up to rest his stomach from the free
bar in the state house at the capital, enter the spring-house where
everybody is playing cards and drinking water and not caring a rap
whether he's the man that cleans the windows or the secretary of the
navy. If he's been there before, in sixty seconds I have his name on my
tongue and a glass of water in his hand, and have asked him about
the rheumatism in his right knee and how the children are. And in ten
minutes he's sitting in a bridge game and trotting to the spring to have
his glass refilled during his dummy hand, as if he'd grown up in
the place. The old doctor used to say my memory was an asset to the
sanatorium.

He depended on me a good bit--the old doctor did--and that winter he was
pretty feeble. (He was only seventy, but he'd got in the habit of making
it eighty to show that the mineral water kept him young. Finally he got
to BEING eighty, from thinking it, and he died of senility in the end.)

He was in the habit of coming to the spring-house every day to get his
morning glass of water and read the papers. For a good many years it had
been his custom to sit there, in the winter by the wood fire and in the
summer just inside the open door, and to read off the headings aloud
while I cleaned around the spring and polished glasses.

"I see the president is going fishing, Minnie," he'd say, or "Airbrake
is up to 133; I wish I'd bought it that time I dreamed about it. It was
you who persuaded me not to, Minnie."

And all that winter, with the papers full of rumors that Miss
Patty Jennings was going to marry a prince, we'd followed it by the
spring-house fire, the old doctor and I, getting angry at the Austrian
emperor for opposing it when we knew how much too good Miss Patty was
for any foreigner, and then getting nervous and fussed when we read that
the prince's mother was in favor of the match and it might go through.
Miss Patty and her father came every winter to Hope Springs and I
couldn't have been more anxious about it if she had been my own sister.

Well, as I say, it all began the very day the old doctor died. He
stamped out to the spring-house with the morning paper about nine
o'clock, and the wedding seemed to be all off. The paper said the
emperor had definitely refused his consent and had sent the prince, who
was his cousin, for a Japanese cruise, while the Jennings family was
going to Mexico in their private car. The old doctor was indignant, and
I remember how he tramped up and down the spring-house, muttering that
the girl had had a lucky escape, and what did the emperor expect if
beauty and youth and wealth weren't enough. But he calmed down, and soon
he was reading that the papers were predicting an early spring, and he
said we'd better begin to increase our sulphur percentage in the water.

I hadn't noticed anything strange in his manner, although we'd all
noticed how feeble he was growing, but when he got up to go back to
the sanatorium and I reached him his cane, it seemed to me he avoided
looking at me. He went to the door and then turned and spoke to me over
his shoulder.

"By the way," he remarked, "Mr. Richard will be along in a day or so,
Minnie. You'd better break it to Mrs. Wiggins."

Since the summer before we'd had to break Mr. Dick's coming to Mrs.
Wiggins the housekeeper, owing to his finding her false front where it
had blown out of a window, having been hung up to dry, and his wearing
it to luncheon as whiskers. Mr. Dick was the old doctor's grandson.

"Humph!" I said, and he turned around and looked square at me.

"He's a good boy at heart, Minnie," he said. "We've had our troubles
with him, you and I, but everything has been quiet lately."

When I didn't say anything he looked discouraged, but he had a fine way
of keeping on until he gained his point, had the old doctor.

"It HAS been quiet, hasn't it?" he demanded.

"I don't know," I said; "I have been deaf since the last explosion!" And
I went down the steps to the spring. I heard the tap of his cane as he
came across the floor, and I knew he was angry.

"Confound you, Minnie," he exclaimed, "if I could get along without you
I'd discharge you this minute."

"And if I paid any attention to your discharging me I'd have been gone
a dozen times in the last year," I retorted. "I'm not objecting to Mr.
Dick coming here, am I? Only don't expect me to burst into song about
it. Shut the door behind you when you go out."

But he didn't go at once. He stood watching me polish glasses and get
the card-tables ready, and I knew he still had something on his mind.

"Minnie," he said at last, "you're a shrewd young woman--maybe more head
than heart, but that's well enough. And with your temper under control,
you're a CAPABLE young woman."

"What has Mr. Dick been up to now?" I asked, growing suspicious.

"Nothing. But I'm an old man, Minnie, a very old man."

"Stuff and nonsense," I exclaimed, alarmed. "You're only seventy. That's
what comes of saying in the advertising that you are eighty--to show
what the springs have done for you. It's enough to make a man die of
senility to have ten years tacked to his age."

"And if," he went on, "if anything happens to me, Minnie, I'm counting
on you to do what you can for the old place. You've been here a good
many years, Minnie."

"Fourteen years I have been ladling out water at this spring," I said,
trying to keep my lips from trembling. "I wouldn't be at home any place
else, unless it would be in an aquarium. But don't ask me to stay here
and help Mr. Dick sell the old place for a summer hotel. For that's what
he'll do."

"He won't sell it," declared the old doctor grimly. "All I want is for
you to promise to stay."

"Oh, I'll stay," I said. "I won't promise to be agreeable, but I'll
stay. Somebody'll have to look after the spring; I reckon Mr. Dick
thinks it comes out of the earth just as we sell it, with the whole
pharmacopoeia in it."

Well, it made the old doctor happier, and I'm not sorry I promised, but
I've got a joint on my right foot that throbs when it is going to rain
or I am going to have bad luck, and it gave a jump then. I might have
known there was trouble ahead.






CHAPTER II

MISS PATTY ARRIVES

It was pretty quiet in the spring-house that day after the old doctor
left. It had started to snow and only the regulars came out. What with
the old doctor talking about dying, and Miss Patty Jennings gone to
Mexico, when I'd been looking forward to her and her cantankerous old
father coming to Hope Springs for February, as they mostly did, I was
depressed all day. I got to the point where Mr. Moody feeding nickels
into the slot-machine with one hand and eating zwieback with the other
made me nervous. After a while he went to sleep over it, and when he
had slipped a nickel in his mouth and tried to put the zwieback in the
machine he muttered something and went up to the house.

I was glad to be alone. I drew a chair in front of the fire and wondered
what I would do if the old doctor died, and what a fool I'd been not to
be a school-teacher, which is what I studied for.

I was thinking to myself bitterly that all that my experience in the
spring fitted me for was to be a mermaid, when I heard something running
down the path, and it turned out to be Tillie, the diet cook.

She slammed the door behind her and threw the Finleyville evening paper
at me.

"There!" she said, "I've won a cake of toilet soap from Bath-house Mike.
The emperor's consented."

"Nonsense!" I snapped, and snatched the paper. Tillie was right; the
emperor HAD! I sat down and read it through, and there was Miss Patty's
picture in an oval and the prince's in another, with a turned-up
mustache and his hand on the handle of his sword, and between them both
was the Austrian emperor. Tillie came and looked over my shoulder.

"I'm not keen on the mustache," she said, "but the sword's
beautiful--and, oh, Minnie, isn't he aristocratic? Look at his nose!"

But I'm not one to make up my mind in a hurry, and I'd heard enough talk
about foreign marriages in the years I'd been dipping out mineral water
to make me a skeptic, so to speak.

"I'm not so sure," I said slowly. "You can't tell anything by that kind
of a picture. If he was even standing beside a chair I could get a line
on him. He may be only four feet high."

"Then Miss Jennings wouldn't love him," declared Tillie. "How do you
reckon he makes his mustache point up like that?"

"What's love got to do with it?" I demanded. "Don't be a fool, Tillie.
It takes more than two people's pictures in a newspaper with a red heart
around them and an overweight cupid above to make a love-match. Love's a
word that's used to cover a good many sins and to excuse them all."

"She isn't that kind," said Tillie. "She's--she's as sweet as she's
beautiful, and you're as excited as I am, Minnie Waters, and if you're
not, what have you got the drinking glass she used last winter put on
the top shelf out of reach for?" She went to the door and slammed it
open. "Thank heaven I'm not a dried-up old maid," she called back over
her shoulder, "and when you're through hugging that paper you can send
it up to the house."

Well, I sat there and thought it over, Miss Patty, or Miss Patricia,
being, so to speak, a friend of mine. They'd come to the Springs every
winter for years. Many a time she'd slipped away from her governess and
come down to the spring-house for a chat with me, and we'd make pop-corn
together by my open fire, and talk about love and clothes, and even the
tariff, Miss Patty being for protection, which was natural, seeing that
was the way her father made his money, and I for free trade, especially
in the winter when my tips fall off considerable.

And when she was younger she would sit back from the fire, with the
corn-popper on her lap and her cheeks as red as cranberries, and say: "I
DON'T know why I tell you all these things, Minnie, but Aunt Honoria's
funny, and I can't talk to Dorothy; she's too young, you know. Well, HE
said--" only every winter it was a different "he."

In my wash-stand drawer I'd kept all the clippings about her coming out
and the winter she spent in Washington and was supposed to be engaged to
the president's son, and the magazine article that told how Mr. Jennings
had got his money by robbing widows and orphans, and showed the little
frame house where Miss Patty was born--as if she's had anything to do
with it. And so now I was cutting out the picture of her and the prince
and the article underneath which told how many castles she'd have, and I
don't mind saying I was sniffling a little bit, for I couldn't get used
to the idea. And suddenly the door closed softly and there was a rustle
behind me. When I turned it was Miss Patty herself. She saw the clipping
immediately, and stopped just inside the door.

"YOU, TOO," she said. "And we've come all this distance to get away from
just that."

"Well, I shan't talk about it," I replied, not holding out my hand, for
with her, so to speak, next door to being a princess--but she leaned
right over and kissed me. I could hardly believe it.

"Why won't you talk about it?" she insisted, catching me by the
shoulders and holding me off. "Minnie, your eyes are as red as your
hair!"

"I don't approve of it," I said. "You might as well know it now as
later, Miss Patty. I don't believe in mixed marriages. I had a cousin
that married a Jew, and what with him making the children promise to be
good on the Talmud and her trying to raise them with the Bible, the poor
things is that mixed up that it's pitiful."

She got a little red at that, but she sat down and took up the clipping.

"He's much better looking than that, Minnie," she said soberly, "and
he's a good Catholic. But if that's the way you feel we'll not talk
about it. I've had enough trouble at home as it is."

"I guess from that your father isn't crazy about it," I remarked,
getting her a glass of spring water. The papers had been full of how Mr.
Jennings had forbidden the prince the house when he had been in America
the summer before.

"Certainly he's crazy about it--almost insane!" she said, and smiled at
me in her old way over the top of the glass. Then she put down the glass
and came over to me. "Minnie, Minnie," she said, "if you only knew how
I've wanted to get away from the newspapers and the gossips and come to
this smelly little spring-house and talk things over with a red-haired,
sharp-tongued, mean-dispositioned spring-house girl--!"

And with that I began to blubber, and she came into my arms like a baby.

"You're all I've got," I declared, over and over, "and you're going to
live in a country where they harness women with dogs, and you'll never
hear an English word from morning to night."

"Stuff!" She gave me a little shake. "He speaks as good English as I
do. And now we're going to stop talking about him--you're worse than the
newspapers." She took off her things and going into my closet began to
rummage for the pop-corn. "Oh, how glad I am to get away," she sang
out to me. "We're supposed to have gone to Mexico; even Dorothy doesn't
know. Where's the pop-corner or the corn-popper or whatever you call
it?"

She was as happy to have escaped the reporters and the people she knew
as a child, and she sat down on the floor in front of the fire and began
to shell the corn into the popper, as if she'd done it only the day
before.

"I guess you're safe enough here," I said. "It's always slack in
January--only a few chronics and the Saturday-to-Monday husbands, except
a drummer now and then who drives up from Finleyville. It's too early
for drooping society buds, and the chronic livers don't get around until
late March, after the banquet season closes. It will be pretty quiet for
a while."

And at that minute the door was flung open, and Bath-house Mike
staggered in.

"The old doctor!" he gasped. "He's dead, Miss Minnie--died just now in
the hot room in the bathhouse! One minute he was givin' me the divil for
something or other, and the next--I thought he was asleep."

Something that had been heavy in my breast all afternoon suddenly seemed
to burst and made me feel faint all over. But I didn't lose my head.

"Does anybody know yet?" I asked quickly. He shook his head.

"Then he didn't die in the bath-house, Mike," I said firmly. "He died
in his bed, and you know it. If it gets out that he died in the hot room
I'll have the coroner on you."

Miss Patty was standing by the railing of the spring. I got my shawl and
started out after Mike, and she followed.

"If the guests ever get hold of this they'll stampede. Start any
excitement in a sanatorium," I said, "and one and all they'll dip their
thermometers in hot water and swear they've got fever!"

And we hurried to the house together.





CHAPTER III

A WILL

Well, we got the poor old doctor moved back to his room, and had one of
the chambermaids find him there, and I wired to Mrs. Van Alstyne, who
was Mr. Dicky Carter's sister, and who was on her honeymoon in South
Carolina. The Van Alstynes came back at once, in very bad tempers, and
we had the funeral from the preacher's house in Finleyville so as not to
harrow up the sanatorium people any more than necessary. Even as it was
a few left, but about twenty of the chronics stayed, and it looked as if
we might be able to keep going.

Miss Patty sent to town for a black veil for me, and even went to the
funeral. It helped to take my mind off my troubles to think who it was
that was holding my hand and comforting me, and when, toward the end
of the service, she got out her handkerchief and wiped her eyes I was
almost overcome, she being, so to speak, in the very shadow of a throne.

After it was all over the relatives gathered in the sun parlor of the
sanatorium to hear the will--Mr. Van Alstyne and his wife and about
twenty more who had come up from the city for the funeral and stayed
over--on the house.

Well, the old doctor left me the buttons for his full dress waistcoat
and his favorite copy of Gray's Anatomy. I couldn't exactly set up
housekeeping with my share of the estate, but when the lawyer read that
part of the will aloud and a grin went around the room I flounced out of
my chair.

"Maybe you think I'm disappointed," I said, looking hard at the family,
who weren't making any particular pretense at grief, and at the house
people standing around the door. "Maybe you think it's funny to see an
unmarried woman get a set of waistcoat buttons and a medical book. Well,
that set of buttons was the set he bought in London on his wedding trip,
and the book's the one he read himself to sleep with every night for
twenty years. I'm proud to get them."

Mr. Van Alstyne touched me on the arm.

"Everybody knows how loyal you've been, Minnie," he assured me. "Now sit
down like a good girl and listen to the rest of the will."

"While I'm up I might as well get something else off my mind," I said.
"I know what's in that will, but I hadn't anything to do with it, Mr.
Van Alstyne. He took advantage of my being laid up with influenza last
spring."

They thought that was funny, but a few minutes later they weren't so
cheerful. You see the sanatorium was a mighty fine piece of property,
with a deer park and golf links. We'd had plenty of offers to sell it
for a summer hotel, but we'd both been dead against it. That was one of
the reasons for the will.

The whole estate was left to Dicky Carter, who hadn't been able to come,
owing to his being laid up with an attack of mumps. The family sat up
and nodded at one another, or held up its hands, but when they heard
there was a condition they breathed easier.

Beginning with one week after the reading of the will--and not a day
later--Mr. Dick was to take charge of the sanatorium and to stay there
for two months without a day off. If at the end of that time the place
was being successfully conducted and could show that it hadn't lost
money, the entire property became his for keeps. If he failed it was to
be sold and the money given to charity.

You would have to know Richard Carter to understand the excitement the
will caused. Most of us, I reckon, like the sort of person we've never
dared to be ourselves. The old doctor had gone to bed at ten o'clock all
his life and got up at seven, and so he had a sneaking fondness for the
one particular grandson who often didn't go to bed at all. Twice to
my knowledge when he was in his teens did Dicky Carter run away from
school, and twice his grandfather kept him for a week hidden in the
shelter-house on the golf links. Naturally when Mr. Van Alstyne and I
had to hide him again, which is further on in the story, he went to the
old shelter-house like a dog to its kennel, only this time--but that's
ahead, too.

Well, the family went back to town in a buzz of indignation, and I
carried my waistcoat buttons and my Anatomy out to the spring-house
and had a good cry. There was a man named Thoburn who was crazy for the
property as a summer hotel, and every time I shut my eyes I could see
"Thoburn House" over the veranda and children sailing paper boats in the
mineral spring.

Sure enough, the next afternoon Mr. Thoburn drove out from Finleyville
with a suit case, and before he'd taken off his overcoat he came out to
the spring-house.

"Hello, Minnie," he exclaimed. "Does the old man's ghost come back to
dope the spring, or do you do it?"

"I don't know what you are talking about, Mr. Thoburn," I retorted
sharply. "If you don't know that this spring has its origin in--"

"In Schmidt's drug store down in Finleyville!" he finished for me. "Oh,
I know all about that spring, Minnie! Don't forget that my father's
cows used to drink that water and liked it. I leave it to you," he said,
sniffing, "if a self-respecting cow wouldn't die of thirst before she
drank that stuff as it is now."

I'd been filling him a glass--it being a matter of habit with me--and he
took it to the window and held it to the light.

"You're getting careless, Minnie," he said, squinting at it. "Some of
those drugs ought to be dissolved first in hot water. There's a lump of
lithia there that has Schmidt's pharmacy label on it."

"Where?" I demanded, and started for it. He laughed at that, and putting
the glass down, he came over and stood smiling at me.

"As ingenuous as a child," he said in his mocking way, "a nice, little
red-haired child! Minnie, how old is this young Carter?"

"Twenty-three."

"An--er--earnest youth? Willing to buckle down to work and make the old
place go? Ready to pat the old ladies on the shoulder and squeeze the
young ones' hands?"

"He's young," I said, "but if you're counting on his being a fool--"

"Not at all," he broke in hastily. "If he hasn't too much character
he'll probably succeed. I hope he isn't a fool. If he isn't, oh, friend
Minnie, he'll stand the atmosphere of this Garden of Souls for about a
week, and then he'll kill some of them and escape. Where is he now?"

"He's been sick," I said. "Mumps!"

"Mumps! Oh, my aunt!" he exclaimed, and fell to laughing. He was still
laughing when he got to the door.

"Mumps!" he repeated, with his hand on the knob. "Minnie, the old place
will be under the hammer in three weeks, and if you know what's good for
you, you'll sign in under the new management while there's a vacancy.
You've been the whole show here for so long that it will be hard for you
to line up in the back row of the chorus."

"If I were you," I said, looking him straight in the eye, "I wouldn't
pick out any new carpets yet, Mr. Thoburn. I promised the old doctor I'd
help Mr. Dick, and I will."

"So you're actually going to fight it out," he said, grinning. "Well,
the odds are in your favor. You are two to my one."

"I think it's pretty even," I retorted. "We will be hindered, so to
speak, by having certain principles of honor and honesty. You have no
handicap."

He tried to think of a retort, and not finding one he slammed out of the
spring-house in a rage.

Mr. Van Alstyne and his wife came in that same day, just before dinner,
and we played three-handed bridge for half an hour. As I've said, they'd
been on their honeymoon, and they were both sulky at having to stay at
the Springs. It was particularly hard on Mrs. Van Alstyne, because, with
seven trunks of trousseau with her, she had to put on black. But she
used to shut herself up in her room in the evenings and deck out for Mr.
Sam in her best things. We found it out one evening when Mrs. Biggs set
fire to her bureau cover with her alcohol curling-iron heater, and Mrs.
Sam, who had been going around in a black crepe dress all day, rushed
out in pink satin with crystal trimming, and slippers with cut-glass
heels.

After the first rubber Mrs. Van Alstyne threw her cards on the floor and
said another day like this would finish her.

"Surely Dick is able to come now," she said, like a peevish child.
"Didn't he say the swelling was all gone?"

"Do you expect me to pick up those cards?" Mr. Sam asked angrily,
looking at her.

Mrs. Sam yawned and looked up at him.

"Of course I do," she answered. "If it wasn't for you I'd not have
stayed a moment after the funeral. Isn't it bad enough to have seven
trunks full of clothes I've never worn, and to have to put on poky old
black, without keeping me here in this old ladies' home?"

Mr. Sam looked at the cards and then at her.

"I'm not going to pick them up," he declared. "And as to our staying
here, don't you realize that if we don't your precious brother will
never show up here at all, or stay if he does come? And don't you also
realize that this is probably the only chance he'll ever have in the
world to become financially independent of us?"

"You needn't be brutal," she said sharply. "And it isn't so bad for
you here as it is for me. You spend every waking minute admiring Miss
Jennings, while I--there isn't a man in the place who'll talk anything
but his joints or his stomach."

She got up and went to the window, and Mr. Sam followed her. Nobody
pays any attention to me in the spring-house; I'm a part of it, like the
brass rail around the spring, or the clock.

"I'm not admiring Miss Jennings," he corrected, "I'm sympathizing, dear.
She looks too nice a girl to have been stung by the title bee, that's
all."

She turned her back to him, but he pretended to tuck the hair at the
back of her neck up under her comb, and she let him do it. As I stooped
to gather up the cards he kissed the tip of her ear.

"Listen," he said, "there's a scream of a play down at Finleyville
to-night called Sweet Peas. Senator Biggs and the bishop went down last
night, and they say it's the worst in twenty years. Put on a black veil
and let's slip away and see it."

I think she agreed to do it, but that night after dinner, Amanda King,
who has charge of the news stand, told me the sheriff had closed the
opera-house and that the leading woman was sick at the hotel.

"They say she looked funny last night," Amanda finished, "and I guess
she's got the mumps."

Mumps!

My joint gave a throb at that minute.





CHAPTER IV

AND A WAY

Mr. Sam wasn't taking any chances, for the next day he went to the city
himself to bring Mr. Dick up. Everything was quiet that day and the day
after, except that on the second day I had a difference of opinion with
the house doctor and he left.

The story of the will had got out, of course, and the guests were
waiting to see Mr. Dick come and take charge. I got a good bit of gossip
from Miss Cobb, who had had her hair cut short after a fever and used to
come out early in the morning and curl it all over her head, heating the
curler on the fire log. I never smell burnt hair that I don't think
of Miss Cobb trying to do the back of her neck. She was one of our
regulars, and every winter for ten years she'd read me the letters she
had got from an insurance agent who'd run away with a married woman the
day before the wedding. She kept them in a bundle, tied with lavender
ribbon.

It was on the third day, I think, that Miss Cobb told me that Miss Patty
and her father had had a quarrel the day before. She got it from one of
the chambermaids. Mr. Jennings was a liver case and not pleasant at any
time, but he had been worse than usual. Annie, the chambermaid, told
Miss Cobb that the trouble was about settlements, and that the more Miss
Patty tried to tell him it was the European custom the worse he got.
Miss Patty hadn't come down to breakfast that day, and Mr. Moody and
Senator Biggs made a wager in the Turkish bath--according to Miss
Cobb--Mr. Moody betting the wedding wouldn't come off at all.

"Of course," Miss Cobb said, wetting her finger and trying the iron to
see if it was hot, "of course, Minnie, they're not married yet, and if
Father Jennings gets ugly and makes any sort of scandal it's all off. A
scandal just now would be fatal. These royalties are very touchy about
other people's reputations."

Well, I heard that often enough in the next few days.

Mr. Sam hadn't come back by the morning of the sixth day, but he wired
his wife the day before that Mr. Dick was on the way. But we met every
train with a sleigh, and he didn't come. I was uneasy, knowing Mr. Dick,
and Mrs. Sam was worried, too.

By that time everybody was waiting and watching, and on the early train
on the sixth day came the lawyer, a Mr. Stitt. Mr. Thoburn was going
around with a sort of greasy smile, and if I could have poisoned him
safely I'd have done it.

It had been snowing hard for a day or so, and at eleven o'clock that day
I saw Miss Cobb and Mrs. Biggs coming down the path to the spring-house,
Mrs. Biggs with her crocheting-bag hanging to the handle of her
umbrella. I opened the door, but they wouldn't come in.

"We won't track up your clean floor, Minnie," Mrs. Biggs said--she was a
little woman, almost fifty, who'd gone through life convinced she'd only
lived so long by the care she took of herself--"but I thought I'd better
come and speak to you. Please don't irritate Mr. Biggs to-day. He's been
reading that article of Upton Sinclair's about fasting, and hasn't had a
bite to eat since noon yesterday."

I noticed then that she looked pale. She was a nervous creature,
although she could drink more spring water than any human being I ever
saw, except one man, and he was a German.

Well, I promised to be careful. I've seen them fast before, and when a
fat man starts to live on his own fat, like a bear, he gets about the
same disposition.

Mrs. Biggs started back, but Miss Cobb waited a moment at the foot of
the steps.

"Mr. Van Alstyne is back," she said, "but he came alone."

"Alone!" I repeated, staring at her in a sort of daze.

"Alone," she said solemnly, "and I heard him ask for Mr. Carter. It
seems he started for here yesterday."

But I'd had time to get myself in hand, and if I had a chill up my
spine she never knew it. As she started after Mrs. Biggs I saw Mr. Sam
hurrying down the path toward the spring-house, and I knew my joint
hadn't throbbed for nothing.

Mr. Sam came in and slammed the door behind him.

"What's this about Mr. Dick not being here?" he shouted.

"Well, he isn't. That's all there is to it, Mr. Van Alstyne," I said
calmly. I am always calm when other people get excited. For that reason
some people think my red hair is a false alarm, but they soon find out.

"But he MUST be here," said Mr. Van Alstyne. "I put him on the train
myself yesterday, and waited until it started to be sure he was off."

"The only way to get Mr. Richard anywhere you want him to go," I said
dryly, "is to have him nailed in a crate and labeled."

"Damned young scamp!" said Mr. Van Alstyne, although I have a sign in
the spring-house, "Profanity not allowed."

"EXACTLY what was he doing when you last laid eyes on him?" I asked.

"He was on the train--"

"Was he alone?"

"Yes."

"Sitting?"

"No, standing. What the deuce, Minnie--"

"Waving out the window to you?"

"Of course not!" exclaimed Mr. Van Alstyne testily. "He was raising the
window for a girl in the next seat."

"Precisely!" I said. "Would you know the girl well enough to trace her?"

"That's ridiculous, you know," he said trying to be polite. "Out of a
thousand and one things that may have detained him--"

"Only one thing ever detains Mr. Dick, and that always detains him," I
said solemnly. "That's a girl. You're a newcomer in the family, Mr. Van
Alstyne; you don't remember the time he went down here to the station to
see his Aunt Agnes off to the city, and we found him three weeks later
in Oklahoma trying to marry a widow with five children."

Mr. Van Alstyne dropped into a chair, and through force of habit I gave
him a glass of spring water.

"This was a pretty girl, too," he said dismally.

I sat down on the other side of the fireplace, and it seemed to me that
father's crayon enlargement over the mantel shook its head at me.

After a minute Mr. Van Alstyne drank the water and got up.

"I'll have to tell my wife," he said. "Who's running the place, anyhow?
You?"

"Not--exactly," I explained, "but, of course, when anything comes up
they consult me. The housekeeper is a fool, and now that the house
doctor's gone--"

"Gone! Who's looking after the patients?"

"Well, most of them have been here before," I explained, "and I know
their treatment--the kind of baths and all that."

"Oh, YOU know the treatment!" he said, eying me. "And why did the house
doctor go?"

"He ordered Mr. Moody to take his spring water hot. Mr. Moody's spring
water has been ordered cold for eleven years, and I refused to change.
It was between the doctor and me, Mr. Van Alstyne."

"Oh, of course," he said, "if it was a matter of principle--" He
stopped, and then something seemed to strike him. "I say," he said;
"about the doctor--that's all right, you know; lots of doctors and all
that. But for heaven's sake, Minnie, don't discharge the cook."

Now that was queer, for it had been running in my head all morning that
in the slack season it would be cheaper to get a good woman instead of
the chef and let Tillie, the diet cook, make the pastry.

Mr. Sam picked up his hat and looked at his watch.

"Eleven thirty," he said, "and no sign of that puppy yet. I guess it's
up to the police."

"If there was only something to do," I said, with a lump in my throat,
"but to have to sit and do nothing while the old place dies it's--it's
awful, Mr. Van Alstyne."

"We're not dead yet," he replied from the door, "and maybe we'll need
you before the day's over. If anybody can sail the old bark to shore,
you can do it, Minnie. You've been steering it for years. The old doctor
was no navigator, and you and I know it."

It was blowing a blizzard by that time, and Miss Patty was the only one
who came out to the spring-house until after three o'clock. She shook
the snow off her furs and stood by the fire, looking at me and not
saying anything for fully a minute.

"Well," she said finally, "aren't you ashamed of yourself?"

"Why?" I asked, and swallowed hard.

"To be in all this trouble and not let me know. I've just this minute
heard about it. Can't we get the police?"

"Mr. Van Alstyne is trying," I said, "but I don't hope much. Like as not
Mr. Dick will turn up tomorrow and say his calendar was a day slow."

I gave her a glass of water, and I noticed when she took it how pale she
was. But she held it up and smiled over it at me.

"Here's to everything turning out better than we expect!" she said, and
made a face as she drank the water. I thought that she was thinking of
her own troubles as well as mine, for she put down the glass and stood
looking at her engagement ring, a square red ruby in an old-fashioned
setting. It was a very large ruby, but I've seen showier rings.

"There isn't anything wrong, Miss Patty, is there?" I asked, and she
dropped her hand and looked at me.

"Oh, no," she said. "That is, nothing much, Minnie. Father is--I think
he's rather ridiculous about some things, but I dare say he'll come
around. I don't mind his fussing with me, but--if it should get in the
papers, Minnie! A breath of unpleasant notoriety now would be fatal!"

"I don't see why," I said sharply. "The royal families of Europe have a
good bit of unpleasant notoriety themselves occasionally. I should think
they'd fall over themselves to get some good red American blood. Blue
blood's bad blood; you can ask any doctor."

But she only smiled.

"You're like father, Minnie," she said. "You'll never understand."

"I'm not sure I want to," I snapped, and fell to polishing glasses.

The storm stopped a little at three and most of the guests waded down
through the snow for bridge and spring water. By that time the afternoon
train was in, and no Mr. Dick. Mr. Sam was keeping the lawyer, Mr.
Stitt, in the billiard room, and by four o'clock they'd had everything
that was in the bar and were inventing new combinations of their own.
And Mrs. Sam had gone to bed with a nervous headache.

Senator Biggs brought the mail down to the spring-house at four, but
there was nothing for me except a note from Mr. Sam, rather shaky, which
said he'd no word yet and that Mr. Stitt had mixed all the cordials in
the bar in a beer glass and had had to go to bed.

At half past four Mr. Thoburn came out for a minute. He said there was
only one other train from town that night and the chances were it would
be snowed up at the junction.

"Better get on the band wagon before the parade's gone past," he said in
an undertone. But I went into my pantry and shut the door with a slam,
and when I came out he was gone.

I nearly went crazy that afternoon. I put salt in Miss Cobb's glass when
she always drank the water plain. Once I put the broom in the fire and
started to sweep the porch with a fire log Luckily they were busy with
their letters and it went unnoticed, the smell of burning straw not
rising, so to speak, above the sulphur in the spring.

Senator Biggs went from one table to another telling how well he felt
since he stopped eating, and trying to coax the other men to starve with
him.

It's funny how a man with a theory about his stomach isn't happy until
he has made some other fellow swallow it.

"Well," he said, standing in front of the fire with a glass of water in
his hand, "it's worth while to feel like this. My head's as clear as
a bell. I don't care to eat; I don't want to eat. The 'fast' is the
solution."

"Two stages to that solution, Senator," said the bishop; "first,
resolution; last, dissolution."

Then they all began at once. If you have ever heard twenty people airing
their theories on diet you know all about it. One shouts for Horace
Fletcher, and another one swears by the scraped-beef treatment, and
somebody else never touches a thing but raw eggs and milk, and pretty
soon there is a riot of calories and carbohydrates. It always ends the
same way: the man with the loudest voice wins, and the defeated ones
limp over to the spring and tell their theories to me. They know I'm
being paid to listen.

On this particular afternoon the bishop stopped the riot by rising and
holding up his hand. "Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "let us not be
rancorous. If each of us has a theory, and that theory works out to his
satisfaction, then--why are we all here?"

"Merely to tell one another the good news!" Mr. Jennings said sourly
from his corner.

Honest, it was funny. If some folks were healthy they'd be lonesome.

But when things had got quiet--except Mr. Moody dropping nickels into
the slot-machine--I happened to look over at Miss Patty, and I saw there
was something wrong. She had a letter open in her lap not one of the
blue ones with the black and gold seal that every one in the house knew
came from the prince but a white one, and she was staring at it as if
she'd seen a ghost.





CHAPTER V

WANTED--AN OWNER

I have never reproached Miss Patty, but if she had only given me the
letter to read or had told me the whole truth instead of a part of it,
I would have understood, and things would all have been different. It is
all very well for her to say that I looked worried enough already, and
that anyhow it was a family affair. I SHOULD HAVE BEEN TOLD.

All she did was to come up to me as I stood in the spring, with her face
perfectly white, and ask me if my Dicky Carter was the Richard Carter
who stayed at the Grosvenor in town.

"He doesn't stay anywhere," I said, with my feet getting cold, "but
that's where he has apartments. What has he been doing now?"

"You're expecting him on the evening train, aren't you?" she asked.
"Don't stare like that: my father's watching."

"He ought to be on the evening train," I said. I wasn't going to say I
expected him. I didn't.

"Listen, Minnie," she said, "you'll have to send him away again the
moment he comes. He must not go into the house."

I stood looking at her, with my mouth open.

"Not go into the house," I repeated, "with everybody waiting for him for
the last six days, and Mr. Stitt here to turn things over to him!"

She stood tapping her foot, with her pretty brows knitted.

"The wretch!" she cried, "the hateful creature as if things weren't bad
enough! I suppose he'll have to come, Minnie, but I must see him before
he sees any one else."

Just then the bishop brought his glass over to the spring.

"Hot this time, Minnie," he said. "Do you know, I'm getting the
mineral-water habit, Patty! I'm afraid plain water will have no
attraction for me after this."

He put his hand over hers on the rail. They were old friends, the bishop
and the Jenningses.

"Well, how goes it to-day with the father?" he said in a low tone, and
smiling.

Miss Patty shrugged her shoulders. "Worse, if possible."

"I thought so," he said cheerfully. "If state of mind is any criterion
I should think he has had a relapse. A little salt, Minnie." Miss Patty
stood watching him while he tasted it.

"Bishop," she said suddenly, "will you do something for me?"

"I always have, Patty." He was very fond of Miss Patty, was the bishop.

"Then--to-night, not later than eight o'clock, get father to play
cribbage, will you? And keep him in the card-room until nine."

"Another escapade!" he said, pretending to be very serious. "Patty,
Patty, you'll be the death of me yet. Is thy servant a dog, that he
should do this thing?"

"Certainly NOT," said Miss Patty. "Just a dear, slightly bald, but still
very distinguished slave!"

The bishop picked up her left hand and looked at the ring and from that
to her face.

"There will be plenty of slaves to kiss this little hand, where you are
going, my child," he said. "Sometimes I wish that some nice red-blooded
boy here at home--but I dare say it will turn out surprisingly well as
it is."

"Bishop, Bishop!" Mrs. Moody called. "How naughty of you, and with your
bridge hand waiting to be held!"

He carried his glass back to the table, stopping for a moment beside Mr.
Jennings.

"If Patty becomes any more beautiful," he said, "I shall be in favor of
having her wear a mask. How are we young men to protect ourselves?"

"Pretty is as pretty does!" declared Mr. Jennings from behind his
newspaper, and Miss Patty went out with her chin up.

Well, I knew Mr. Dick had been up to some mischief; I had suspected it
all along. But Miss Patty went to bed, and old Mrs. Hutchins, who's a
sort of lady's-maid-companion of hers, said she mustn't be disturbed. I
was pretty nearly sick myself. And when Mr. Sam came out at five o'clock
and said he'd been in the long-distance telephone booth for an hour
and had called everybody who had ever known Mr. Dick, and that he had
dropped right off the earth, I just about gave up. He had got some
detectives, he said, and there was some sort of a story about his having
kept right on the train to Salem, Ohio, but if he had they'd lost the
trail there, and anyhow, with the railroad service tied up by the storm
there wasn't much chance of his getting to Finleyville in time.

Luckily Mr. Stitt was in bed with a mustard leaf over his stomach and
ice on his head, and didn't know whether it was night or morning. But
Thoburn was going around with a watch in his hand, and Mr. Sam was for
killing him and burying the body in the snow.

At half past five I just about gave up. I was sitting in front of the
fire wondering why I'd taken influenza the spring before from getting my
feet wet in a shower, when I had been standing in a mineral spring for
so many years that it's a wonder I'm not web-footed. It was when I had
influenza that the old doctor made the will, you remember. Maybe I was
crying, I don't recall.

It was dark outside, and nothing inside but firelight. Suddenly I seemed
to feel somebody looking at the back of my neck and I turned around.
There was a man standing outside one of the windows, staring in.

My first thought, of course, was that it was Mr. Dick, but just as the
face vanished I saw that it wasn't. It was older by three or four years
than Mr. Dick's and a bit fuller.

I'm not nervous. I've had to hold my own against chronic grouches too
long to have nerves, so I went to the door and looked out. The man
came around the corner just then and I could see him plainly in the
firelight. He was covered with snow, and he wore a sweater and no
overcoat, but he looked like a gentleman.

"I beg your pardon for spying," he said, "but the fire looked so snug!
I've been trying to get to the hotel over there, but in the dark I've
lost the path."

"That's not a hotel," I snapped, for that touched me on the raw. "That's
Hope Springs Sanatorium, and this is one of the Springs."

"Oh, Hope Springs, internal instead of eternal!" he said. "That's
awfully bad, isn't it? To tell you the truth, I think I'd better come in
and get some; I'm short on hope just now."

I thought that was likely enough, for although his voice was cheerful
and his eyes smiled, there was a drawn look around his mouth, and he
hadn't shaved that day. I wish I had had as much experience in learning
what's right with folks as I have had in learning what's wrong with
them.

"You'd better come in and get warm, anyhow," I told him, "only don't
spring any more gags. I've been 'Hebe' for fourteen years and I've
served all the fancy drinks you can name over the brass railing of that
spring. Nowadays, when a fellow gets smart and asks for a Mamie Taylor,
I charge him a Mamie Taylor price."

He shut the door behind him and came over to the fire.

"I'm pretty well frozen," he said. "Don't be astonished if I melt before
your eyes; I've been walking for hours."

Now that I had a better chance to see him I'd sized up that drawn look
around his mouth.

"Missed your luncheon, I suppose," I said, poking the fire log. He
grinned rather sheepishly.

"Well, I haven't had any, and I've certainly missed it," he said.

"Fasting's healthy, you know."

I thought of Senator Biggs, who carried enough fat to nourish him for
months, and then I looked at my visitor, who hadn't an ounce of extra
flesh on him.

"Nothing's healthy that isn't natural," I declared. "If you'd care for
a dish of buttered and salted pop-corn, there's some on the mantel. It's
pretty salty; the idea is to make folks thirsty so they'll enjoy the
mineral water."

"Think of raising a real thirst only to drown it with spring water!" he
said. But he got the pop corn and he ate it all. If he hadn't had any
luncheon he hadn't had much breakfast. The queer part was--he was a
gentleman; his clothes were the right sort, but he had on patent leather
shoes in all that snow and an automobile cap.

I put away the glasses while he ate. Pretty soon he looked up and the
drawn lines were gone. He wasn't like Mr. Dick, but he was the same
type, only taller and heavier built.

"And so it isn't a hotel," he remarked. "Well, I'm sorry. The
caravansary in the village is not to my liking, and I had thought of
engaging a suite up here. My secretary usually attends to these things,
but--don't take away all the glasses, Heb--I beg your pardon--but the
thirst is coming."

He filled the glass himself and then he came up and stood in front of
me, with the glass held up in the air.

"To the best woman I have met in many days," he said, not mocking but
serious. "I was about to lie down and let the little birds cover me
with leaves." Then he glanced at the empty dish and smiled. "To buttered
pop-corn! Long may it wave!" he said, and emptied the glass.

Well, I found a couple of apples in my pantry and brought them out, and
after he ate them he told me what had happened to him. He had been a
little of everything since he left college he was about twenty-five had
crossed the Atlantic in a catboat and gone with somebody or other into
some part of Africa--they got lost and had to eat each other or lizards,
or something like that--and then he went to the Philippines, and got
stuck there and had to sell books to get home. He had a little money,
"enough for a grub-stake," he said, and all his folks were dead. Then
a college friend of his wrote a rural play called Sweet Peas--"Great
title, don't you think?" he asked--and he put up all the money. It would
have been a hit, he said, but the kid in the play--the one that unites
its parents in the last act just before he dies of tuberculosis--the kid
took the mumps and looked as if, instead of fading away, he was going to
blow up. Everybody was so afraid of him that they let him die alone for
three nights in the middle of the stage. Then the leading woman took the
mumps, and the sheriff took everything else.

"You city folks seem to know so much," I said, "and yet you bring a
country play to the country! Why don't you bring out a play with women
in low-necked gowns, and champagne suppers, and a scandal or two? They
packed Pike's Opera-House three years ago with a play called Why Women
Sin."

Well, of course, the thing failed, and he lost every dollar he'd put
into it, which was all he had, including what he had in his pockets.

"They seized my trunks," he explained, "and I sold my fur-lined overcoat
for eight dollars, which took one of the girls back home. It's hard for
the women. A fellow can always get some sort of a job--I was coming up
here to see if they needed an extra clerk or a waiter, or chauffeur,
or anything that meant a roof and something to eat--but I suppose they
don't need a jack-of-all-trades."

"No," I answered, "but I'll tell you what I think they're going to need.
And that's an owner!"





CHAPTER VI

THE CONSPIRACY

I'm not making any excuses. I did it for the best. In any sort of crisis
there are always folks who stand around and wring their hands and say,
"What shall we do?" And then if it's a fire and somebody has had enough
sense to send for the engines, they say: "Just look at what the water
did!" Although as far as I can see I'm the only one that suffered any
damage.

If Mr. Thoburn had not been there, sitting by to see the old sanatorium
die so it could sprout wings and fly as a summer hotel, I'd never have
thought of it. But I was in despair.

I got up and opened the door, but the Snow came in in a cloud, and the
path was half a foot deep again. It shows on what little threads big
things hang, for when I saw the storm I gave up the idea of bringing Mr.
Sam down to see the young man, and the breath of fresh air in my face
brought me to my senses.

But the angel of providence appeared in the shape of Mike, the bath man,
coming down through the snow in a tearing rage. The instant I saw Mike I
knew it was settled.

"Am I or am I not to give Mr. Moody a needle shower?" he shouted, almost
beside himself. And I saw he had his overcoat over his bath costume,
which is a Turkish towel.

"A needle shower followed by a salt rub," said I. "He's been having them
for eleven years. What's the matter?"

"That fool of a young doctor," shouted Mike, "he told him before he left
that if he'd been taking them for eleven years and wasn't any better
it was time to stop. Ain't business bad enough--only four people in the
house takin' baths regular--without his buttin' in!"

"Where's Mr. Moody?"

"In the bath. I've locked up his clothes."

"You give him a needle shower and a salt rub," I ordered, "and if he
makes a fuss just send for me. And, Mike," I said, as he started out,
"ask Mr. Van Alstyne to come out here immediately."

That's the way it was all the time. Everybody brought their troubles to
me, and I guess I thought I was a little tin god on wheels and the place
couldn't get along without me. But it did; it does. We all think we'll
leave a big hole behind us when we go, but it's just like taking your
thumb out of a bowl of soup. There isn't even a dent.

Mr. Van Alstyne came out on the run, and when he saw Mr. Pierce by the
fire--that was his name, Alan Pierce--he stopped and stared. Then he
said:

"You infernal young scamp!" And with that Mr. Pierce jumped up,
surprised and pretty mad, and Mr. Van Alstyne saw his mistake.

"I'm sure I beg your pardon!" he said. "The fact is, I was expecting
somebody else, and in the firelight--"

"You surprised me, that's all," said Mr. Pierce. "Under the
circumstances, I'm glad I'm not the other chap."

"You may be," assured Mr. Sam grimly. "You're not unlike him, by the
way. A little taller and heavier, but--"

Now it's all very well for Mr. Sam to say I originated the idea and all
that, but as truly as I am writing this, as I watched his face I saw the
same thought come into it. He looked Mr. Pierce up and down, and then he
stared into the fire and puckered his mouth to whistle, but he didn't.
And finally he glanced at me, but I was looking into the fire, too.

"Just come, haven't you?" he asked. "How did you get up the hill?"

"Walked," said Mr. Pierce, smiling. "It took some digging, too. But
I didn't come for my health, unless you think three meals a day are
necessary for health."

Mr. Sam turned and stared at him. "By Jove! you don't mean it!"

"I wish I didn't," Mr. Pierce replied. "One of the hardest things
I've had to remember for the last ten hours was that for two years I
voluntarily ate only two meals a day. A man's a fool to do a thing like
that! It's reckless."

Mr. Sam got up and began to walk the floor, his hands in his pockets. He
tried to get my eye, but still I looked in the fire.

"All traffic's held up, Minnie," he said. "The eight o'clock train is
stalled beyond the junction, in a drift. I've wired the conductor, and
Carter isn't on it."

"Well?" said I.

"If we could only get past to-day," Mr. Sam went on; "if Thoburn would
only choke to death, or--if there was somebody around who looked like
Dick. I dare say, by to-morrow--" He looked at Mr. Pierce, who smiled
and looked at him.

"And I resemble Dick!" said Mr. Pierce. "Well, if he's a moral and
upright young man--"

"He isn't!" Mr. Sam broke in savagely. And then and there he sat down
and told Mr. Pierce the trouble we were in, and what sort of cheerful
idiot Dicky Carter was, and how everybody liked him, but wished he would
grow up before the family good name was gone, and that now he had a
chance to make good and be self-supporting, and he wasn't around, and
if Mr. Sam ever got his hands on him he'd choke a little sense down his
throat.

And then Mr. Pierce told about the play and the mumps, and how he was
stranded. When Mr. Sam asked him outright if he'd take Mr. Dick's place
overnight he agreed at once.

"I haven't anything to lose," he said, "and anyhow I've been on a diet
of Sweet Peas so long that a sanatorium is about what I need."

"It's like this," explained Mr. Sam, "Old Stitt is pretty thoroughly
jingled--excuse me, Minnie, but it's the fact. I'll take you to his
room, with the lights low, and all you'll need to do is to shake hands
with him. He's going on the early train to-morrow. Then you needn't mix
around much with the guests until to-morrow, and by that time I hope to
have Dick within thrashing distance."

Just as they'd got it arranged that Mr. Pierce was to put on Mr. Sam's
overcoat and walk down to the village so that he could come up in a
sleigh, as if he had driven over from Yorkton--he was only to walk
across the hall in front of the office, with his collar up, just enough
to show himself and then go to his room with a chill--just as it was all
arranged, Mr. Sam thought of something.

"The house people are waiting for Dick," he said to me, "and about forty
women are crocheting in the lobby, so they'll be sure to see him. Won't
some of them know it isn't Dick?"

I thought pretty fast.

"He hasn't been around much lately," I said. "Nobody would know except
Mrs. Wiggins. She'll never forget him; the last time he was here he put
on her false front like a beard and wore it down to dinner."

"Then it's all off," he groaned. "She's got as many eyes as a potato."

"And about as much sense," said I. "Fiddlesticks! She's not so good we
can't replace her, and what's the use of swallowing a camel and then
sticking at a housekeeper?"

"You can't get her out of the house in an hour," he objected, but in a
weak voice.

"I can!" I said firmly.

(I did. Inside of an hour she went to the clerk, Mr. Slocum, and handed
in her resignation. She was a touchy person, but I did NOT say all that
was quoted. I did NOT say the kitchen was filthy; I only said it took
away my appetite to look in at the door. But she left, which is the
point.)

Well, I stood in the doorway and watched them disappear in the darkness,
and I felt better than I had all day. It's great to be able to DO
something, even if that something is wrong. But as I put on my shawl
and turned out the lights, I suddenly remembered. Miss Patty would be
waiting in the lobby for Mr. Dick, and she would not be crocheting!





CHAPTER VII.

MR. PIERCE ACQUIRES A WIFE

Whoever has charge of the spring-house at Hope Springs takes the news
stand in the evening. That's an old rule. The news stand includes
tobacco and a circulating library, and is close to the office, and if I
missed any human nature at the spring I got it there. If you can't tell
all about a man by the way he asks for mineral water and drinks it, by
the time you've supplied his literature and his tobacco and heard him
grumbling over his bill at the office, you've got a line on him and a
hook in it.

After I ate my supper I relieved Amanda King, who runs the news stand in
the daytime, when she isn't laid off with the toothache.

Mr. Sam was right. All the women had on their puffs, and they were
sitting in a half-circle on each side of the door. Mrs. Sam was there,
looking frightened and anxious, and standing near the card-room door was
Miss Patty. She was all in white, with two red spots on her cheeks, and
I thought if her prince could have seen her then he would pretty nearly
have eaten her up. Mr. Thoburn was there, of course, pretending to read
the paper, but every now and then he looked at his watch, and once
he got up and paced off the lobby, putting down the length in his
note-book. I didn't need a mind-reader to tell me he was figuring the
cost of a new hardwood floor and four new rugs.

Mr. Sam came to the news stand, and he was so nervous he could hardly
light a cigarette.

"I've had a message from one of the detectives," he said. "They've
traced him to Salem, Ohio, but they lost him there. If we can only hold
on this evening--! Look at that first-night audience!"

"Mr. Pierce is due in three minutes," I told him. "I hope you told him
to kiss his sister."

"Nothing of the sort," he objected. "Why should he kiss her? Mrs. Van
Alstyne is afraid of the whole thing: she won't stand for that."

"I guess she could endure it," I remarked dryly.

"It's astonishing how much of that sort of thing a woman can bear."

He looked at me and grinned.

"By gad," he said, "I wouldn't be as sophisticated as you are for a good
deal. Isn't that the sleigh?"

Everybody had heard it. The women sat up and craned forward to look at
the door: Mrs. Sam was sitting forward clutching the arms of her chair.
She was in white, having laid off her black for that evening, with a red
rose pinned on her so Mr. Pierce would know her. Miss Patty heard the
sleigh-bells also, and she turned and came toward the door. Her mouth
was set hard, and she was twisting the ruby ring as she always did when
she was nervous. And at the same moment Mr. Sam and I both saw it; she
was in white, too, and she had a red rose tucked in her belt!

Mr. Sam muttered something and rushed at her, but he was too late. Just
as he got to her the door opened and in came Mr. Pierce, with Mr. Sam's
fur coat turned up around his ears and Mr. Sam's fur cap drawn well down
on his head. He stood for an instant blinking in the light, and Mrs.
Van Alstyne got up nervously. He never even saw her. His eyes lighted on
Miss Patty's face and stayed there. Mr. Sam was there, but what could
he do? Mr. Pierce walked over to Miss Patty, took her hand, said, "Hello
there!" and KISSED HER. It was awful.

Most women will do anything to save a scene, and that helped us, for
she never turned a hair. But when Mr. Sam got him by the arm and led him
toward the stairs, she turned so that the old cats sitting around
could not see her and her face was scarlet. She went over to the wood
fire--our lobby is a sort of big room with chairs and tables and palms,
and an open fire in winter--and sat down. I don't think she knew herself
whether she was most astonished or angry.

Mrs. Biggs gave a nasty little laugh.

"Your brother didn't see you," she said to Mrs. Van Alstyne. "I dare say
a sister doesn't count much when a future princess is around!"

Mrs. Van Alstyne was still staring up the staircase, but she came to
herself at that. She had some grit in her, if she did look like a French
doll.

"My brother and Miss Jennings are very old friends," she remarked
quietly. I believe that was what she thought, too. I don't think she had
seen the other red rose, and what was she to think but that Mr. Pierce
had known Miss Jennings somewhere? She was dazed, Mrs. Sam was. But she
carried off the situation anyhow, and gave us time to breathe. We needed
it.

"If I were his highness," said Miss Cobb, spreading the Irish lace
collar she was making over her knee and squinting at it, "I should wish
my fiancee to be more er--dignified. Those old Austrian families
are very haughty. They would not understand our American habit of
osculation."

I was pretty mad at that, for anybody could have seen Miss Patty didn't
kiss him.

"If by osculation you mean kissing, Miss Cobb," I said, going over
to her, "I guess you don't remember the Austrian count who was a head
waiter here. If there was anything in the way of osculation that that
member of an old Austrian family didn't know, I've got to find it out.
He could kiss all around any American I ever saw!"

I went back to my news stand. I was shaking so my knees would hardly
hold me. All I could think of was that they had swallowed Mr. Pierce,
bait and hook, and that for a time we were saved, although in the
electric light Mr. Pierce was a good bit less like Dicky Carter than he
had seemed to be in the spring-house by the fire.

Well, "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."

Everybody went to bed early. Mr. Thoburn came over and bought a cigar on
his way up-stairs, and he was as gloomy as he had been cheerful before.

"Well," I said, "I guess you won't put a dancing floor in the
dining-room just yet, Mr. Thoburn."

"I'm not in a hurry," he snapped. "It's only January, and I don't want
the place until May. I'll get it when I'm ready for it. I had a good
look at young Carter, and he's got too square a jaw to run a successful
neurasthenics' home."

I went to the pantry myself at ten o'clock and fixed a tray of supper
for Mr. Pierce. He would need all his strength the next day, and a man
can't travel far on buttered pop-corn. I found some chicken and got a
bottle of the old doctor's wine--I had kept the key of his wine-cellar
since he died--and carried the tray up to Mr. Pierce's sitting-room. He
had the old doctor's suite.

The door was open an inch or so, and as I was about to knock I heard a
girl's voice. It was Miss Patty!

"How can you deny it?" she was saying angrily. "I dare say you will even
deny that you ever saw this letter before!"

There was a minute's pause while I suppose he looked at the letter.

"I never did!" he said solemnly.

There had been a queer sound all along, but now I made it out. Some one
else was in the room, sniveling and crying.

"My poor lamb!" it whimpered. And I knew it was Mrs. Hutchins, Miss
Patty's old nurse.

"Perhaps," said Miss Patty, "you also deny that you were in Ohio the day
before yesterday."

"I was in Ohio, but I positively assert--"

"I'll send for the police, that's what I'll do!" Mrs. Hutchins said,
with a burst of rage, and her chair creaked. "How can I ever tell your
father?"

"You'll do nothing of the sort," said Miss Patty. "Do you want the whole
story in the papers? Isn't it awful enough as it is? Mr. Carter, I have
asked my question twice now and I am waiting for an answer."

"But I don't know the answer!" he said miserably. "I--I assure you, I'm
absolutely in the dark. I don't know what's in the letter. I--I haven't
always done what I should, I dare say, but my conduct in the state
of Ohio during the last few weeks has been without stain--unless I've
forgotten--but if it had been anything very heinous, I'd remember, don't
you think?"

Somebody crossed the room, and a paper rustled.

"Read that!" said Miss Patty's voice. And then silence for a minute.

"Good lord!" exclaimed Mr. Pierce.

"Do you deny that?"

"Absolutely!" he said firmly. "I--I have never even heard of the
Reverend Dwight Johnstone--"

There was a scream from Mrs. Hutchins, and a creak as she fell into her
chair again.

"Your father!" she said, over and over. "What can we say to your
father?"

"And that is all you will say?" demanded Miss Patty scornfully. "'You
don't know;' 'there's a mistake;' 'you never saw the letter before!' Oh,
if I were only a man!"

"I'll tell you what we'll do," Mr. Pierce said, with something like
hope in his voice. "We'll send for Mr. Van Alstyne! That's the thing, of
course. I'll send for--er--Jim."

Mr. Van Alstyne's name is Sam, but nobody noticed.

"Mr. Van Alstyne!" repeated Miss Patty in a dazed way.

I guessed it was about time to make a diversion, so I knocked and walked
in with the tray, and they all glared at me. Mrs. Hutchins was collapsed
in a chair, holding a wet handkerchief to her eyes, and one side of
her cap was loose and hanging down. Miss Patty was standing by a table,
white and angry, and Mr. Pierce was about a yard from her, with the
letter in his hands. But he was looking at her.

"I've brought your supper, Mr. Carter," I began. Then I stopped and
stared at Miss Patty and Mrs. Hutchins. "Oh," I said.

"Thank you," said Mr. Pierce, very uncomfortable. "Just put it down
anywhere."

I stalked across the room and put it on the table. Then I turned and
looked at Mrs. Hutchins.

"I'm sorry," I said, "but it's one of the rules of this house that
guests don't come to these rooms. They're strictly private. It isn't MY
rule, ladies, but if you will step down to the parlor--"

Mrs. Hutchins' face turned purple. She got up in a hurry.

"I'm here with Miss Jennings on a purely personal matter," she said
furiously. "How dare you turn us out?"

"Nonsense, Minnie!" said Miss Patty. "I'll go when I'm ready."

"Rule of the house," I remarked, and going over to the door I stood
holding it open. There wasn't any such rule, but I had to get them out;
they had Mr. Pierce driven into a corner and yelling for help.

"There is no such rule and you know it, Minnie!" Miss Patty said
angrily. "Come, Nana! We're not learning anything, and there's nothing
to be done until morning, anyhow. My head's whirling."

Mrs. Hutchins went out first.

"The first thing I'D do if I owned this place, I'd get rid of that
red-haired girl," she snapped to Mr. Pierce. "If you want to know
why there are fewer guests here every year, I'll tell you. SHE'S the
reason!" Then she flounced out with her head up.

(That was pure piffle. The real reason, as every thinking person knows,
is Christian Science. It's cheaper and more handy. And now that it isn't
heresy to say it, the spring being floored over, I reckon that most
mineral springs cure by suggestion. Also, of course, if a man's drinking
four gallons of lithia water a day, he's so saturated that if he does
throw in anything alcoholic or indigestible, it's too busy swimming for
its life to do any harm.)

Mr. Pierce took a quick step toward Miss Patty and looked down at her.

"About--what happened down-stairs to-night," he stammered, with the
unhappiest face I ever saw on a man, "I--I've been ready to knock my
fool head off ever since. It was a mistake--a--"

"My letter, please," said Miss Patty coolly, looking back at him without
a blink.

"Please don't look like that!" he begged. "I came in suddenly out of the
darkness, and you--"

"My letter, please!" she said again, raising her eyebrows.

He gave up trying then. He held out the letter and she took it and went
out with her head up and scorn in the very way she trailed her skirt
over the door-sill. But I'm no fool; it didn't need the way he touched
the door-knob where she had been holding it, when he closed the door
after her, to tell me what ailed him.

He was crazy about her from the minute he saw her, and he hadn't a
change of linen or a cent to his name. And she, as you might say, on the
ragged edge of royalty, with queens and princes sending her stomachers
and tiaras until she'd hardly need clothes! Well, a cat may look at a
king.

He went over to the fireplace, where I was putting his coffee to keep it
hot, and looked down at me.

"I've a suspicion, Minnie," he said, "that, to use a vulgar expression,
I've bitten off more than I can chew in this little undertaking, and
that I'm in imminent danger of choking to death. Do you know anybody, a
friend of Miss er--Jennings, named Dorothy?"

"She's got a younger sister of that name," I said, with a sort of chill
going over me. "She's in boarding-school now."

"Oh, no, she's not!" he remarked, picking up the coffee-pot. "It seems
that I met her on the train somewhere or other the day before yesterday,
and ran off with her and married her!"

I sat back on the rug speechless.

"You should have warned me, Minnie," he went on, growing more cheerful
over his chicken and coffee. "I came up here to-night, the proud
possessor of a bunch of keys, a patent folding cork-screw and a pocket,
automobile road map. Inside two hours I have a sanatorium and a wife.
At this rate, Minnie, before morning I may reasonably hope to have a
family."

I sat where I was on the floor and stared into the fire. Don't tell me
the way of the wicked is hard; the wicked get all the fun there is
out of life, and as far as I can see, it's the respectable "in at ten
o'clock and up at seven" part of the wicked's family that has all the
trouble and does the worrying.

"If we could only keep it hidden for a few days!" I said. "But, of
course, the papers will get it, and just now, with columns every day
about Miss Patty's clothes--"

"Her what?"

"And all the princes of the blood sending presents, and the king not
favoring it very much--"

"What are you talking about?"

"About Miss Jennings' wedding. Don't you read the newspaper?"

He hadn't really known who she was up to that minute. He put down the
tray and got up.

"I--I hadn't connected her with the--the newspaper Miss Jennings,"
he said, and lighted a cigarette over the lamp. Something in his face
startled me, I must say.

"You're not going to give up now?" I asked. I got up and put my hand on
his arm, and I think he was shaking. "If you do, I'll--I'll go out and
drown myself, head down, in the spring."

He had been going to run away--I saw it then--but he put a hand over
mine. Then he looked at the door where Miss Patty had gone out and gave
himself a shake.

"I'll stay," he said. "We'll fight it out on this line if it takes all
summer, Minnie." He stood looking into the fire, and although I'm not
fond of men, knowing, as I have explained, a great deal about their
stomachs and livers and very little about their hearts, there was
something about Mr. Pierce that made me want to go up and pat him on the
head like a little boy. "After all," he said, "what's blue blood to good
red blood?"

Which was almost what the bishop had said!





CHAPTER VIII

AND MR. MOODY INDIGESTION

Mr. Moody took indigestion that night--not but that he always had it,
but this was worse--and Mrs. Moody came to my room about two o'clock and
knocked at the door.

"You'd better come," she said. "There's no doctor, and he's awful bad.
Blames you, too; he says you made him take a salt rub."

"My land," I snapped, trying to find my bedroom slippers, "I didn't make
him take clam chowder for supper, and that's what's the matter with him.
He's going on a strained rice diet, that's what he's going to do. I've
got to have my sleep."

She was waiting in the hall in her kimono, and holding a candle. Anybody
could see she'd been crying. As she often said to me, of course she was
grateful that Mr. Moody didn't drink--no one knew his virtues better
than she did. But her sister married a man who went on a terrible bat
twice a year, and all the rest of the time he was humble and affable
trying to make up for it. And sometimes she thought if Mr. Moody would
only take a little whisky when he had these attacks--! I'd rather be
the wife of a cheerful drunkard any time than have to live with a
cantankerous saint. Miss Cobb and I had had many a fight over it, but at
that time there wasn't much likelihood of either of us being called on
to choose.

Well, we went down to Mr. Moody's room, and he was sitting up in bed
with his knees drawn up to his chin and a hot-water bottle held to him.

"Look at your work, woman," he said to me when I opened the door.

"I'm dying!"

"You look sick," I said, going over to the bed. It never does to cross
them when they get to the water-bottle stage. "The pharmacy clerk's gone
to a dance over at Trimble's, but I guess I can find you some whisky."

"Do have some whisky, George," begged Mrs. Moody, remembering her
brother-in-law.

"I never touch the stuff and you both know it," he snarled. He had a
fresh pain just then and stopped, clutching up the bottle. "Besides," he
finished, when it was over, "I haven't got any whisky."

Well, to make a long story short, we got him to agree to some whisky
from the pharmacy, with a drop of peppermint in it, if he could wash it
down with spring water so it wouldn't do him any harm.

"There isn't any spring water in the house," I said, losing my temper a
little, "and I'm not going out there in my bedroom slippers, Mr.
Moody. I don't see why your eating what you shouldn't needs to give me
pneumonia."

Mrs. Moody was standing beside the bed, and I saw her double chin
begin to work. If you have ever seen a fat woman, in a short red kimono
holding a candle by, a bed, and crying, you know how helpless she looks.

"Don't go, Minnie," she sniffled. "It would be too awful. If you are
afraid you could take the poker."

"I'm not going!" I declared firmly. "It's--it's dratted idiocy, that's
all. Plain water would do well enough. There's a lot of people think
whisky is poison with water, anyhow. Where's the pitcher?"

Oh, yes, I went. I put on some stockings of Mrs. Moody's and a petticoat
and a shawl and started. It was when I was in the pharmacy looking for
the peppermint that I first noticed my joint again. A joint like that's
a blessing or a curse, the way you look at it.

I found the peppermint and some whisky and put them on the stairs. Then
I took my pitcher and lantern and started for the spring-house. It was
still snowing, and part of the time Mrs. Moody's stockings were up to
their knees. The wind was blowing hard, and when I rounded the corner
of the house my lantern went out. I stood there in the storm, with the
shawl flapping, thanking heaven I was a single woman, and about ready
to go back and tell Mr. Moody what I thought of him when I looked toward
the spring-house.

At first I thought it was afire, then I saw that the light was coming
from the windows. Somebody was inside, with a big fire and all the
lights going.

I'd had tramps sleep all night in the spring-house before, and once they
left a card by the spring: "Water, water everywhere and not a drop to
drink!" So I started out through the snow on a half run. By the bridge
over Hope Springs Creek I slipped and fell, and I heard the pitcher
smash to bits on the ice below. But as soon as I could move I went on
again. That spring-house had been my home for a good many years, and the
tramp didn't live who could spend the night there if I knew it.

I realized then that I should have taken the poker. I went over
cautiously to one of the windows, wading in deep snow to get there--and
if you have ever done that in a pair of bedroom slippers you can realize
the state of my mind--and looked in.

There were three chairs drawn up in a row in front of the fire, with
my bearskin hearth-rug on them to make a couch, and my shepherd's plaid
shawl folded at one end for a pillow. And stretched on that with her
long sealskin coat laid over her was Dorothy Jennings, Miss Patty's
younger sister! She was alone, as far as I could see, and she was
leaning on her elbow with her cheek in her hand, staring at the fire.
Just then the door into the pantry opened and out came Mr. Dick himself.

"Were you calling, honey?" he said, coming over and looking down at her.

"You were such a long time!" says she, glancing up under her lashes at
him. "I--I was lonely!"

"Bless you," says Mr. Dick, stooping over her. "What did I ever do
without you?"

I could have told her a few things he did, but by that time it was
coming over me pretty strong that here was the real Dicky Carter and
that I had an extra one on my hands. The minute I looked at this one I
knew that nobody but a blind man would mistake one for the other, and
Mr. Thoburn wasn't blind. I tell you I stood out in that snow-bank and
perspired!

When I looked again Mr. Dick was on his knees by the row of chairs, and
Miss Dorothy--Mrs. Dicky, of course--was running her fingers through his
hair.

"Minnie used to keep apples and things in the pantry," he said, "but she
must be growing stingy in her old age; there's not a bite there."

"I'm not so very hungry when I have you!" cooed Mrs. Dicky.

"But you can't eat me." He brought her hand down from his hair--I may be
stingy in my old age, but I've learned a few things, and one is that a
man feels like a fool with his hair rumpled, and I can tell the degree
of a woman's experience by the way she lets his top hair alone--and
pretended to bite it, her hand, of course. "Although I could eat you,"
he said. "I'd like to take a bite out of your throat right there."

Well, it was no place for me unless they knew I was around. I waded
around to the door and walked in, and there was a grand upsetting of the
sealskin coat and my shepherd's plaid shawl. Mr. Dick jumped to his feet
and Mrs. Dick sat bolt upright and stared at me over the backs of the
chairs.

"Minnie!" cried Mr. Dick. "As I'm a married man, it's Minnie herself;
Minnie, the guardian angel! The spirit of the place! Dorothy, don't you
remember Minnie?"

She came toward me with her hand out. She was a pretty little thing, not
so beautiful as Miss Patty, but with a nice way about her.

"I'm awfully glad to see you again," she said. "Of course I
remember--why you are hardly dressed at all! You must be frozen!"

I went over to the fire and emptied my bedroom slippers of snow. Then I
sat down and looked at them both.

"Frozen!" repeated I; "I'm in a hot sweat. If you two children meant to
come, why in creation didn't you come in time?"

"We did," replied Mr. Dick, promptly. "We crawled under the wire fence
into the deer park at five minutes to twelve. The will said 'Be on the
ground,' and I was--flat on the ground!"

"We've had the police," I said, drearily enough. "I wouldn't live
through another day like yesterday for a hundred dollars."

"We were held up by the snow," he explained. "We got a sleigh to come
over in, but we walked up the hill and came here. I don't mind saying
that my wife's people don't know about this yet, and we're going to lay
low until we've cooked up some sort of a scheme to tell them." Then he
came over and put his hand on my shoulder.

"Poor old Minnie!" he said; "honest, I'm sorry. I've been a hard child
to raise, haven't I? But that's all over, Minnie. I've got an incentive
now, and it's 'steady, old boy,' for me from now. You and I will run the
place and run it right."

"I don't want to!" I retorted, holding my bedroom slippers to steam
before the fire. "I'm going to buy out Timmon's candy store and live a
quiet life, Mr. Dick. This place is making me old."

"Nonsense! We're going to work together, and we'll make this the busiest
spot in seven counties. Dorothy and I have got it all planned out and
we've got some corking good ideas." He put his hands in his pockets and
strutted up and down. "It's the day of advertising, you know, Minnie,"
he said. "You've got to have the goods, and then you've got to
let people know you've got the goods. What would you say to a
shooting-gallery in the basement, under the reading-room?"

"Fine!" I said, with sarcasm, turning my slippers. "If things got
too quiet that would wake them up a bit, and we could have a balloon
ascension on Saturdays!"

"Not an ascension," said he, with my bitterness going right over his
head. "Nothing sensational, Minnie. That's the way with women; they're
always theatrical. But what's the matter with a captive balloon, and
letting fresh-air cranks sleep in a big basket bed--say, at five hundred
feet? Or a thousand--a thousand would be better. The air's purer."

"With a net below," says I, "in case they should turn over and fall out
of bed! It's funny nobody ever thought of it before!"

"Isn't it?" exclaimed Mrs. Dick. "And we've all sorts of ideas.
Dick--Mr. Carter has learned of a brand new cocktail for the men--"

"A lulu!" he broke in.

"And I'm going around to read to the old ladies and hold their hands--"

"You'll have to chloroform them first," I put in. "Perhaps it would be
better to give the women the cocktail and hold the men's hands."

"Oh, if you're going to be funny!" Mr. Dick said savagely, "we'll not
tell you any more. I've been counting on you, Minnie. You've been here
so long. You know," he said to his wife, "when I was a little shaver I
thought Minnie had webbed-feet--she was always on the bank, like a duck.
You ARE a duck, Minnie," he says to me; "a nice red-headed duck! Now
don't be quirky and spoil everything."

I couldn't be light-hearted to save my life.

"Your sister's been wild all day," I told Mrs. Dick. "She got your
letter to-day--yesterday--but I don't think she's told your father yet."

"What!" she screeched, and caught at the mantelpiece to hold herself.
"Not Pat!" she said, horrified, "and father! Here!"

Well, I listened while they told me. They hadn't had the faintest idea
that Mr. Jennings and Miss Patty were there at the sanatorium. The girl
had been making a round of visits in the Christmas holidays, and instead
of going back to school she'd sent a forged excuse and got a month
off--she hadn't had any letters, of course. The plan had been not
to tell anybody but her sister until Mr. Dick had made good at the
sanatorium.

"The idea was this, Minnie," said Mr. Dick. "Old--I mean Mr. Jennings
is--is not well; he has a chronic indisposition--"

"Disposition, I call it," put in Mr. Jennings' daughter.

"And he's apt to regard my running away with Dorothy when I haven't a
penny as more of an embezzlement than an elopement."

"Fiddle!" exclaimed Mrs. Dick. "I asked you to marry me, and now they're
here and have to spoil it all."

The thought of her father and his disposition suddenly overpowered her
and she put her yellow head on the back of a chair and began to cry.

"I--I can't tell him!" she sobbed. "I wrote to Pat,--why doesn't Pat
tell him? I'm going back to school."

"You'll do nothing of the sort. You're a married woman now, and where
I go you go. My country is your country, and my sanatorium is your
sanatorium." He was in a great rage.

But she got up and began trying to pull on her fur coat, and her jaw was
set. She looked like her father for a minute.

"Where are you going?" he asked, looking scared.

"Anywhere. I'll go down to the station and take the first train, it
doesn't matter where to." She picked up her muff, but he went over and
stood against the door.

"Not a step without me!" he declared. "I'll go with you, of course; you
know that. I'm not afraid of your father: I'd as soon as not go in and
wake him now and tell him the whole thing--that you've married a chap
who isn't worth the butter on his bread, who can't buy you kid gloves--"

"But you will, as soon as the sanatorium succeeds!" she put in bravely.
She put down her muff. "Don't tell him to-night, anyhow. Maybe Pat will
think of some way to break it to him. She can do a lot with father."

"I hope she can think of some way to break another Richard Carter to the
people in the house," I said tartly.

"Another Richard Carter!" they said together, and then I told them about
how we had waited and got desperate, and how we'd brought in Mr. Pierce
at the last minute and that he was asleep now at the house. They roared.
To save my life I couldn't see that it was funny. But when I came to the
part about Thoburn being there, and his having had a good look at Mr.
Pierce, and that he was waiting around with his jaws open to snap up
the place when it fell under the hammer, Mr. Dick stopped laughing and
looked serious.

"Lord deliver us from our friends!" he said. "Between you and Sam,
you've got things in a lovely mess, Minnie. What are you going to do
about it now?"

"It's possible we can get by Thoburn," I said. "You can slip in
to-night, we can get Mr. Pierce out--Lord knows he'll be glad to go--and
Miss Dorothy can go back to school. Then, later, when you've got things
running and are making good--"

"I'm not going back to school," she declared, "but I'll go away; I'll
not stand in your way, Dicky." She took two steps toward the door and
waited for him to stop her.

"Nonsense, Minnie," he exclaimed angrily and put his arm around her, "I
won't be separated from my wife. You got me into this scrape, and--"

"I didn't marry you!" I retorted. "And I'm not responsible for your
father-in-law's disposition."

"You'll have to help us out," he finished.

"What shall I do? Murder Mr. Jennings?" I asked bitterly. "If you expect
me to suggest that you both go to the house, and your wife can hide in
your rooms--"

"Why not?" asked Mr. Dick.

Well, I sat down again and explained patiently that it would get out
among the servants and cause a scandal, and that even if it didn't I
wasn't going to have any more deception: I had enough already. And after
a while they saw it as I did, and agreed to wait and see Miss Patty
before they decided. They wanted to have her wakened at once, but I
refused, although I agreed to bring her out first thing in the morning.

"But you can't stay here," I said. "There'll be Miss Cobb at nine
o'clock, and the man comes to light the fire at eight."

"We could go to the old shelter-house on the golf links," suggested Mr.
Dick, looking me square in the eye. (I took the hint, and Mrs. Dicky
never knew he had been hidden there before.)

"Nobody ever goes near it in winter." So I put on my slippers again and
we started through the snow across the golf links, Mr. Dick carrying a
bundle of firewood, and I leading the way with my lantern. Twice I went
into a drift to my waist, and once a rabbit bunted into me head on, and
would have scared me into a chill if I hadn't been shaking already. The
two behind me were cheerful enough. Mr. Dick pointed out the general
direction of the deer park which hides the shelter-house from the
sanatorium, and if you'll believe it, with snow so thick I had to scrape
it off the lantern every minute or so, those children planned to give
something called A Midsummer Night's Dream in the deer park among the
trees in the spring, to entertain the patients.

"I wish to heaven I'd wake up and find all THIS a dream," I called back
over my shoulder. But they were busy with costumes and getting some
folks they knew from town to take the different parts and they never
even heard me. The last few yards they snowballed each other and me. I
tell you I felt a hundred years old.

We got into the shelter-house by my crawling through a window, and when
we had lighted the fire and hung up the lantern, it didn't seem so
bad. The place had been closed since summer, and it seemed colder than
outside, but those two did the barn dance then and there. There were two
rooms, and Mr. Dick had always used the back one to hide in. It's a good
thing Mrs. Dick was not a suspicious person. Many a woman would have
wondered when she saw him lift a board in the floor and take out a
rusty tin basin, a cake of soap, a moldy towel, a can of sardines, a
tooth-brush and a rubber carriage robe to lay over the rafters under the
hole in the roof. But it's been my experience that the first few days
of married life women are blind because they want to be and after that
because they have to be.

It was about four when I left them, sitting on a soap box in front of
the fire toasting sardines on the end of Mr. Dick's walking-stick. Mrs.
Dick made me put on her sealskin coat, and I took the lantern, leaving
them in the firelight. They'd gone back to the captive balloon idea and
were wondering if they couldn't get it copyrighted!

I took a short cut home, crawling through the barbed-wire fence and
going through the deer park. I was too tired and cold to think. I
stumbled down the hill to the house, and just before I got to the corner
I heard voices, and the shuffling of feet through the snow. The next
instant a lantern came around the corner of the house. Mr. Thoburn was
carrying it, and behind him were the bishop, Mike the bath man, and Mr.
Pierce.

"It's like that man Moody," the bishop was saying angrily, "to send the
girl--"

"Piffle!" snarled Mr. Thoburn. "If ever a woman was able to take care
of herself--" And then they saw me, and they all stopped and stared.

"Good gracious, girl!" said the bishop, with his dressing-gown blowing
out straight behind him in the wind. "We thought you'd been buried in a
drift!"

"I don't see why!" I retorted defiantly. "Can't I go out to my own
spring-house without having a posse after me to bring me back?"

"Ordinarily," said Mr. Thoburn, with his snaky eyes on me, "I think
I may say that you might go almost anywhere without my turning out to
recover you. But Mrs. Moody is having hysterics."

Mrs. Moody! I'd forgotten the Moodys!

"She is convinced that you have drowned yourself, head down, in the
spring," Mr. Pierce said in his pleasant way. "You've been gone two
hours, you know."

He took my arm and turned me toward the house. I was dazed.

"In answer to your urgent inquiry," Mr. Thoburn called after me,
disagreeably, "Mr. Moody has not died. He is asleep. But, by the way,
where's the spring water?"

I didn't answer him; I couldn't. We went into the house; Mrs. Moody and
Miss Cobb were sitting on the stairs. Mrs. Moody had been crying, and
Miss Cobb was feeding her the whisky I had left, with a teaspoon. She
had had a half tumblerful already and was quite maudlin. She ran to me
and put her arms around me.

"I thought I was a murderess!" she cried. "Oh, the thought! Blood on my
soul! Why, Minnie Waters, wherever did you get that sealskin coat!"





CHAPTER IX

DOLLY, HOW COULD YOU?

I lay down across my bed at six o'clock that morning, but I was too
tired and worried to sleep, so at seven I got up and dressed.

I was frightened when I saw myself in the glass. My eyes looked like
burnt holes in a blanket. I put on two pairs of stockings and heavy
shoes, for I knew I was going to do the Eskimo act again that day and
goodness knows how many days more, and then I went down and knocked
at the door of Miss Patty's room. She hadn't been sleeping either. She
called to me in an undertone to come in, and she was lying propped up
with pillows, with something pink around her shoulders and the night
lamp burning beside the bed. She had a book in her hand, but all over
the covers and on the table at her elbow were letters in the blue
foreign envelopes with the red and black and gold seal.

I walked over to the foot of the bed.

"They're here," I said.

She sat up, and some letters slid to the floor.

"THEY'RE here!" she repeated. "Do you mean Dorothy?"

"She and her husband. They came last night at five minutes to twelve.
Their train was held up by the blizzard and they won't come in until
they see you. They're hiding in the shelter-house on the golf links."

I think she thought I was crazy: I looked it. She hopped out of bed and
closed the door into her sitting-room--Mrs. Hutchins' room opened off
it--and then she came over and put her hand on my arm.

"Will you sit down and try to tell me just what you mean?" she said.
"How can my sister and her--her wretch of a husband have come last night
at midnight when I saw Mr. Carter myself not later than ten o'clock?"

Well, I had to tell her then about who Mr. Pierce was and why I had
to get him, and she understood almost at once. She was the most
understanding girl I ever met. She saw at once what Mr. Sam wouldn't
have known in a thousand years--that I wanted to save the old place not
to keep my position--but because I'd been there so long, and my father
before me, and had helped to make it what it was and all that. And
she stood there in her nightgown--she who was almost a princess--and
listened to me, and patted me on the shoulder when I broke down, telling
her about Thoburn and the summer hotel.

"But here I am," I finished, "telling you about my troubles and
forgetting what I came for. You'll have to go out to the shelter-house,
Miss Patty. And I guess you're expected to fix it up with your father."

She stopped unfastening her long braids of hair.

"Certainly I'll go to the shelter-house," she said, "and I'll shake a
little sense into Dorothy Jennings--the abominable little idiot! But
they needn't think I'm going to help them with father; I wouldn't if I
could, and I can't. He won't speak to me. I'm in disgrace, Minnie." She
gave her hair a shake, twisted it into a rope and then a knot, and
stuck a pin in it. It was lovely: I wish Miss Cobb could have seen her.
"You've known father for years, Minnie: have you ever known him to be
so--so--"

"Devilish" was the word she meant, but I finished for her.

"Unreasonable?" I said. "Well, once before when you were a little girl,
he put his cane through a window in the spring-house, because he thought
it needed air. The spring-house, of course, not the cane."

"Exactly," she said, looking around the room, "and now he's putting a
cane through every plan I have made. Do you see my heavy boots?"

"It's like this," I remarked, bringing the boots from outside the door,
"if he's swallowed the prince and is choking on the settlement question
he might as well get over it. All those foreigners expect pay for taking
a wife. Didn't the chef here want to marry Tillie, the diet cook, and
didn't he want her to turn over the three hundred dollars she had in the
bank, and her real estate, which was a sixth interest in a cemetery lot?
But Tillie stuck it out and he wouldn't take her without."

"It isn't quite the same, Minnie," she said, sitting down on the floor
to put on her stockings.

"The principle's the same," I retorted, "and if you ask me--"

"I haven't," she said disagreeably, "and when you begin to argue,
Minnie, you make my head ache."

"I have had a heartache for a week," I snapped, "let alone heartburn,
and I'll be glad when the Jennings family is safely married and I can
sleep at night."

I was hurt. I went out and shut the door behind me, but I stopped in the
hall and went back.

"I forgot to say," I began, and stopped. She was still sitting on the
floor, trying to put her heavy boots on, and crying all over them.

"Stop that instantly," I said, and jerked her shoes from her. "Get into
a chair and let me put them on. And if you will wait a jiffy I'll bring
you a cup of coffee. I'm not even a Christian in the morning until I've
had my coffee."

"You haven't had it yet, have you?" she asked, and we laughed together,
rather shaky. But as I buttoned her shoes I saw her eyes going toward
the blue letters on the bed.

"Oh, Minnie," she said, "if you only knew how peculiar they are in
Europe! They'll never allow a sanatorium in the family!"

"I guess a good many would be the better for having one close," I said.

Well, I left her to get dressed and went to the kitchens. Tillie was
there getting the beef tea ready for the day, but none of the rest was
around. They knew the housekeeper was gone, but I guess they'd forgotten
that I was still on hand. I put a kettle against the electric bell that
rings in the chef's room so it would keep on ringing and went on into
the diet kitchen.

"Tillie," I said, "can you trust me?"

She looked up from her beef.

"Whether I can or not, I always have," she answered.

"Well, can I trust you? That's more to the point."

She put down her knife and came over to me, with her hands on her hips.

"I don't know what you're up to, Minnie," she said, "and I don't know
that I care. But if you've forgotten the time I went to the city and
brought you sulphur and the Lord only knows what for your old spring
when you'd run short and were laid up with influenza--"

"Hush!" I exclaimed. "You needn't shout it. Tillie, I don't want you
to ask me any questions, but I want four raw eggs in a basket, a pot of
coffee and cream, some fruit if you can get it when the chef unlocks the
refrigerator room, and bread and butter. They can make their own toast."

"They?" she said, with her mouth open.

But I didn't explain any more. I had found Tillie about a year before,
frying sausages at the railroad station, and made her diet cook at
the sanatorium. Mrs. Wiggins hadn't wanted her, but, as I told the old
doctor at the time, we needed somebody in the kitchen to keep an eye on
things for us. It was through Tillie that we discovered that the help
were having egg-nog twice a day, with eggs as scarce as hens' teeth, and
the pharmacy clerk putting in a requisition for more whisky every week.

Well, I scribbled a note to Mr. Van Alstyne, telling what had happened,
and put it under his door, and then I met Miss Patty in the hall by the
billiard room and I gave her some coffee from the basket, in the sun
parlor. It was still dark, although it was nearly eight o'clock, and
nobody saw us go out together. Just as we left I heard the chef in the
kitchen bawling out that he'd murder whoever put the kettle against the
bell, and Tillie saying it must have dropped off the hook and landed
there.

We went to the spring-house first, to avoid suspicion, and then across
back of the deer park to the shelter-house. It was still snowing, but
not so much, and the tracks we had made early in the morning were still
there, mine off to one side alone, and the others close together and
side by side. There was a whole history in those snow tracks, mine alone
and kind of offish, and the others cuddling together. It made me lonely
to look at them.

I remember wishing I'd taught school, as I was educated to; woman wasn't
made to live alone, and most school-teachers get married.

Miss Patty did not say much. She was holding her chin high and looking
rather angry and determined. At the spring-house I gave her the basket
and took an armful of fire-wood myself. I knew Mr. Dick would never
think of it until the fire was out.

They were both asleep in the shelter-house. He was propped up against
the wall on a box, with the rubber carriage robe around him, and she was
lying by the fire, with Mrs. Moody's shawl over her and her muff under
her head. Miss Patty stood in the doorway for an instant. Then she
walked over and, leaning down, shook her sister by the arm.

"Dorothy!" she said. "Wake up, you wretched child!" And shook her again.

Mrs. Dicky groaned and yawned, and opened her eyes one at a time.

But when she saw it was Miss Patty she sat up at once, looking dazed and
frightened.

"You needn't pinch me, Pat!" she said, and at that Mr. Dick wakened and
jumped up, with the carriage robe still around him.

"Oh, Dolly, Dolly!" said Miss Patty suddenly, dropping on her knees
beside Mrs. Dicky, "what a bad little girl you are! What a thing for you
to do! Think of father and Aunt Honoria!"

"I shan't," retorted Mrs. Dicky decidedly. "I'm not going to spoil my
honeymoon like that. For heaven's sake, Pat, don't cry. I'm not dead.
Dick, this is my sister, Patricia."

Miss Pat looked at him, but she didn't bow. She gave him one look, from
his head to his heels.

"Dolly, how COULD you!" she said, and got up.

It wasn't very comfortable for Mr. Dick, but he took it much better than
I expected. He went over and gave his wife a hand to help her up, and
still holding hers, he turned to Miss Patty.

"You are perfectly right," he said, "I don't see how she could myself.
The more you know of me the more you'll wonder. But she did; we're up
against that."

He grinned at Miss Patty, and after a minute Miss Patty smiled back. But
it wasn't much of a smile. I was unpacking the breakfast, putting the
coffee-pot on the fire and getting ready to cook the eggs and make
toast. But I was watching, too. Suddenly Mrs. Dick made a dive for Miss
Patty and threw her arms around her.

"You darling!" she cried. "I'm so glad to see you again--Pat, you'll
tell father, won't you? He'll take it from you. If I tell him he'll have
apoplexy or something."

But Miss Patty set her pretty mouth--both those girls have their
father's mouth--and held her sister out at arm's length and looked at
her.

"Listen," she said. "Do you know what you have done to me? Do you know
that when father knows this he's going to annul the marriage or have Mr.
Carter arrested for kidnaping or abduction?--whatever it is." Mrs. Dick
puckered her face to cry, and Mr. Dick took a step forward, but Miss
Patty waved him off. "You know father as well as I do, Dolly. You know
what he is, and lately he's been awful. He's not well--it's his liver
again--and he won't listen to anything. Why, the Austrian ambassador
came up here, all this distance, to talk about the etiquette of the--of
my wedding, something about precedence, and he wouldn't even see him."

"He can't annul it," said Mr. Dick angrily. "I'm of age. And I can
support my wife, too, or will be able--soon."

"Dolly's not of age," said Miss Patty wearily. "I've sat up all night
figuring it out. He's going to annul the marriage, or he'll make a
scandal anyhow, and that's just as bad. Dolly,"--she turned to her
sister imploringly--"Dolly, I can't have a scandal now. You know how
Oskar's people have taken this, anyhow; they've given in, because he
insisted, but they don't want me, and if there's a lot of notoriety now
the emperor will send him to Africa or some place, and--"

"I wish they would!" Mrs. Carter burst out suddenly. "I hate the whole
thing. They only tolerate you--us--for our money. You needn't look at
me like that; Oskar may be all right, but his mother and sisters are
hateful--simply hateful!"

"I'll not be with them."

"No, but they'll be with you." Mrs. Dicky walked over to the window and
looked out, dabbing her eyes. "You've been everything to me, Pat, and
I'm so happy now--I'd rather be here on a soap box with Dick than on
a throne or a dais or whatever you'll have to sit on over there, with
Oskar. I want to be happy--and you won't. Look at Alice Thorne and her
duke!"

"If you really want me to be happy," Miss Patty said, going over to her,
"you'll go back to school until the wedding is over."

"I won't leave Dicky." She swung around and gave Mr. Dick an adoring
glance, and Miss Patty looked discouraged.

"Take him with you," she said. "Isn't there some place near where he
could stay, and telephone you now and then?"

"Telephone!" said Mrs. Dick scornfully.

"Can't leave," Mr. Dick objected. "Got to be on the property."

Miss Patty shrugged her shoulders and turned to go. "You're both
perfectly hopeless," she said. "I'll go and tell father, Dorothy, but
you know what will happen. You'll be back in school at Greenwich by
to-night, and your--husband will probably be under arrest." She opened
the door, but I dropped the toast I was making and ran after her.

"If he is arrested," I said, "they'll have to keep him on the place. He
can't leave."

She didn't say anything; she lifted her hand and looked at the ruby
ring, and then she glanced back into the room where Mr. Dick and his
wife were whispering together, and turned up her coat collar.

"I'm going," she said, and stepped into the snow. But they called her
back in a hurry.

"Look here, Miss--Miss Patricia," Mr. Dick said, "why can't we stay
here, where we are? It's very comfortable--that is, it's livable.
There's plenty of fresh air, anyhow, and everybody's shouting for fresh
air nowadays. They've got somebody to take my place in the house."

"And father needn't know a thing--you can fix that," broke in Mrs. Dick.
"And after your wedding he will be in a better humor; he'll know it's
over and not up to him any more."

Miss Patty came back to the shelter-house again and sat down on the soap
box.

"We MIGHT carry it off," she said. "If I could only go back to town!
But father is in one of his tantrums, and he won't go, or let me go.
The idea!--with Aunt Honoria on the long-distance wire every day, having
hysterics, and my clothes waiting to be tried on and everything. I'm
desperate."

"And all sorts of things being arranged for you!" put in Mrs. Dick
enviously. "And the family jewels being reset in Vienna for you and all
that! It would be great--if you only didn't have to take Oskar with the
jewels!"

Miss Patty frowned.

"You are not going to marry him," she said, with a glance at Mr. Dick,
who, with his coat off, was lying flat on the floor, one arm down in the
hole where the things had been hidden, trying to hook up a can of baked
beans. "If it doesn't turn out well, you and father have certainly done
your part in the way of warning. It's just as Aunt Honoria said; the
family will make a tremendous row beforehand, but afterward, when it all
turns out well, they'll take the credit."

Mr. Dick was busy with the beans and I was turning the eggs. Mrs. Dick
went over to her sister and put her arm around her.

"That's right, Patty," she said, "you're more like mother than I am.
I'm a Jennings all over--except that, heavens be praised, I've got the
Sherwood liver. I guess I'm common plebeian, like dad, too. I'm plebeian
enough, anyhow, to think there's been a lot too much about marriage
settlements and the consent of the emperor in all this, and not enough
about love."

I could have patted Mrs. Dicky on the back for that, and I almost upset
the eggs into the fire. I'm an advocate of marrying for love every time,
although a title and a bunch of family jewels thrown in wouldn't worry
me.

"Do you want me to protest that the man who has asked me to marry him
cares about me?" Miss Patty replied in an angry undertone. "Couldn't
he have married a thousand other girls! Hadn't a marriage been arranged
between him and the cousin--"

"I know all that," Mrs. Dicky said, and her voice sounded older than
Miss Patty's, and motherly. "But--are you in love with him, Pat?"

"Certainly," Miss Patty said indignantly. "Don't be silly, Dolly."

At that instant Mr. Dick found the beans, and got up shouting that we'd
have a meal fit for a prince--if princes ate anything so every day as
baked beans. I put the eggs on a platter and poured the coffee, and we
all sat around the soap box and ate. I wished that Miss Cobb could have
seen me there--how they insisted on my having a second egg, and was my
coffee cold, and wasn't I too close to the fire? It was Minnie here and
Minnie there, and me next to Miss Patty on the floor, and she, as you
may say, right next to royalty. I wished it could have been in the
spring-house, with father's crayon enlargement looking down on us.

Everybody felt better for the meal, and we were sitting there laughing
and talking and very cheerful when Mr. Van Alstyne opened the door and
looked in. His face was stern, but when he saw us, with Miss Patty on
her knees toasting a piece of bread and Mr. Dicky passing the tin basin
as a finger-bowl, he stopped scowling and looked amused.

"They're here, Sallie," he called to his wife, and they both came in,
covered with snow, and we had coffee and eggs all over again.

Well, they stayed for an hour, and Mr. Sam talked himself black in the
face and couldn't get anywhere. For the Dickys refused to be separated,
and Mrs. Dick wouldn't tell her father, and Miss Patty wouldn't do it
for her, and the minute Mr. Sam made a suggestion that sounded rational
Mrs. Dick would cry and say she didn't care to live, anyhow, and she
wished she had died of ptomaine poisoning the time she ate the bad
oysters at school.

So finally Mr. Sam gave up and said he washed his hands of the whole
affair, and that he was going to make another start on his wedding
journey, and if they wanted to be a pair of fools it wasn't up to
him--only for heaven's sake not to cry about it. And then he wiped
Mrs. Dicky's eyes and kissed her, she being, as he explained, his
sister-in-law now and much too pretty for him to scold.

And when the Dickys found they were not going to be separated we had
more coffee all around and everybody grew more cheerful.

Oh, we were very cheerful! I look back now and think how cheerful we
were, and I shudder. It was strange that we hadn't been warned by Mr.
Pierce's square jaw, but we were not. We sat around the fire and ate and
laughed, and Mr. Dick arranged that Mr. Pierce should come out to him
every evening for orders about the place if he accepted, and everybody
felt he would--and I was to come at the same time and bring a basket of
provisions for the next day. Of course, the instant Mr. Jennings left
the young couple could go into the sanatorium as guests under another
name and be comfortable. And as soon as the time limit was up, and the
place was still running smoothly, they could declare the truth, claim
the sanatorium, having fulfilled the conditions of the will, and confess
to Mr. Jennings--over the long-distance wire.

Well, it promised well, I must say. Mr. Stitt left on the ten train that
morning, looking lemon-colored and mottled. He insisted that he wasn't
able to go, but Mr. Sam gave him a headache powder and put him on the
train, anyhow.

Yes, as I say, it promised well. But we made two mistakes: we didn't
count on Mr. Thoburn, and we didn't know Mr. Pierce. And who could have
imagined that Mike the bath man would do as he did?





CHAPTER X

ANOTHER COMPLICATION

After luncheon, when everybody at Hope Springs takes a nap, we had
another meeting at the shelter-house, this time with Mr. Pierce. He had
spent the morning tramping over the hills with a gun and keeping out
of the way of people, and what with three square meals, a good night's
sleep and the exercise, he was looking a lot better. Seen in daylight,
he had very dark hair and blue-gray eyes and a very square chin,
although it had a sort of dimple in it. I used to wonder which won out,
the dimple or the chin, but I wasn't long in finding out.

Well, he looked dazed when I took him to the shelter-house and he saw
Mr. Dick and Mrs. Dick and the Mr. Sams and Miss Patty. They gave him a
lawn-mower to sit on, and Mr. Sam explained the situation.

"I know it's asking a good bit, Mr. Pierce," he said, "and personally
I can see only one way out of all this. Carter ought to go in and take
charge, and his--er--wife ought to go back to school. But they won't
have it, and--er--there are other reasons." He glanced at Miss Patty.

Mr. Pierce also glanced at Miss Patty. He'd been glancing at her at
intervals of two seconds ever since she came in, and being a woman and
having a point to gain, Miss Patty seemed to have forgotten the night
before, and was very nice to him. Once she smiled directly at him, and
whatever he was saying died in his throat of the shock. When she turned
her head away he stared at the back of her neck, and when she looked at
the fire he gazed at her profile, and always with that puzzled look,
as if he hadn't yet come to believe that she was the newspaper Miss
Jennings.

After everything had been explained to him, including Mr. Jennings'
liver and disposition, she turned to him and said:

"We are in your hands, you see, Mr. Pierce. Are you going to help us?"
And when she asked him that, it was plain to me that he was only sorry
he couldn't die helping.

"If everybody agrees to it," he said, looking at her, "and you all think
it's feasible and I can carry it off, I'm perfectly willing to try."

"Oh, it's feasible," Mr. Dick said in a relieved voice, getting up and
beginning to strut up and down the room. "It isn't as though I'm beyond
call. You can come out here and consult me if you get stuck. And then
there's Minnie; she knows a good bit about the old place."

Mr. Sam looked at me and winked.

"Of course," said Mr. Dick, "I expect to retain control, you understand
that, I suppose, Pierce? You can come out every day for instructions. I
dare say sanatoriums are hardly your line."

Mr. Pierce was looking at Miss Patty and she knew it. When a woman looks
as unconscious as she did it isn't natural.

"Eh--oh, well no, hardly," he said, coming to himself; "I've tried
everything else, I believe. It can't be worse than carrying a bunch of
sweet peas from garden to garden."

Mr. Dick stopped walking and turned suddenly to stare at Mr. Pierce.

"Sweet--what?" he said.

Everybody else was talking, and I was the only one who saw him change
color.

"Sweet peas," said Mr. Pierce. "And that reminds me--I'd like to make
one condition, Mr. Carter. I feel in a measure responsible for the
company; most of them have gone back to New York, but the leading woman
is sick at the hotel in Finleyville. I'd like to bring her here for two
weeks to recuperate. I assure you, I have no interest in her, but I'm
sorry for her; she's had the mumps."

"Mumps!" everybody said together, and Mr. Sam looked at his
brother-in-law.

"Kid in the play got 'em, and they spread around," Mr. Pierce explained.
"Nasty disease."

"Why, you've just had them, too, Dicky!" said his wife. They all turned
to look at him, and I must say his expression was curious.

Luckily, I had the wit to knock over the breakfast basket, which was
still there, and when we'd gathered up the broken china, Mr. Dick had
got himself in hand.

"I'm sorry, old man," he said to Mr. Pierce, "but I'm not in favor of
bringing Miss--the person you speak of--up to the sanatorium just now.
Mumps, you know--very contagious, and all that."

"She's over that part," Mr. Pierce said; "she only needs to rest."

"Certainly--let her come," said Mrs. Dicky. "If they're as contagious as
all that, you haven't been afraid of MY getting them."

"I--I'm not in favor of it," Mr. Dick insisted, looking obstinate.
"The minute you bring an actress here you've got the whole place by the
ears."

"Fiddlesticks!" said his sister. "Because any actress could set YOU by
the ears--"

Mrs. Dick sat up suddenly.

"Certainly, if she isn't well bring her up," said Miss Patty.
"Only--won't she know your name is not Carter?"

"She's discretion itself," Mr. Pierce said. "Her salary hasn't been
paid for a month, and as I'm responsible, I'd be glad to see her looked
after."

"I don't want her here. I'll--I'll pay her board at the hotel," Mr. Dick
began, "only for heaven's sake, don't--"

He stopped, for every one was staring.

"Why in the world would you do that?" Miss Patty asked. "Don't be
ridiculous. That's the only condition Mr. Pierce has made."

Mr. Dick stalked to the window and looked out, his hands in his pockets.
I couldn't help being reminded of the time he had run away from school,
when his grandfather found him in the shelter-house and gave him his
choice of going back at once or reading medicine with him.

"Oh, bring her up! Bring her up!" he said without looking around. "If
Pierce won't stay unless he can play the friend in need, all right. But
don't come after me if the whole blamed sanatorium swells up with mumps
and faints at the sight of a pickle."

That was Wednesday.

Things at the sanatorium were about the same on the surface. The women
crocheted and wondered what the next house doctor would be like, and the
men gambled at the slot-machines and played billiards and grumbled at
the food and the management, and when they weren't drinking spring water
they were in the bar washing away the taste of it. They took twenty
minutes on the verandas every day for exercise and kept the house
temperature at eighty. Senator Biggs was still fasting and Mrs. Biggs
took to spending all day in the spring-house and turning pale every time
she heard his voice. It was that day, I think, that I found the magazine
with Upton Sinclair's article on fasting stuck fast in a snow-drift, as
if it had been thrown violently.

Wednesday afternoon Miss Julia Summers came with three lap robes, a
white lace veil and a French poodle in a sleigh and went to bed in one
of the best rooms, and that night we started to move out furniture to
the shelter-house.

By working almost all night we got the shelter-house fairly furnished,
although we made a trail through the snow that looked like a fever
chart. Toward daylight Mr. Sam dropped a wash-bowl on my toe and I went
to bed with an arnica compress.

I limped out in time to be on hand before Miss Cobb got there, but what
with a chilblain on my heel and hardly any sleep for two nights--not to
mention my toe--I wasn't any too pleasant.

"It's my opinion you're overeating, Minnie," Miss Cobb said. "You're
skin's a sight!"

"You needn't look at it," I retorted.

She burned the back of her neck just then and it was three minutes
before she could speak. When she could she was considerably milder.

"Just give it a twist or two, Minnie, won't you?" she said, holding out
the curler. "I haven't been able to sleep on the back of my head for
three weeks."

Well, I curled her hair for her and she told me about Miss Summers being
still shut in her room, and how she'd offered Mike an extra dollar to
give the white poodle a Turkish bath--it being under the weather as to
health--and how Mike had soaked the little beast for an hour in a tub
of water, forgetting the sulphur, and it had come out a sort of mustard
color, and how Miss Summers had had hysterics when she saw it.

"Mike dipped him in bluing to bleach him again, or rather 'her'--it's
name is Arabella--" Miss Cobb said, "but all it did was to make it
mottled like an Easter egg. Everybody is charmed. There were no dogs
allowed while the old doctor lived. Things were different."

"Yes, things were different," I assented, limping over to heat the
curler. "How--how does Mr. Carter get along?"

Miss Cobb put down her hand-mirror and sniffed.

"Well," she said, "goodness knows I'm no trouble maker, but somebody
ought to tell that young man a few things. He's forever looking at
the thermometer and opening windows. I declare, if I hadn't brought my
woolen tights along I'd have frozen to death at breakfast. Everybody's
complaining."

I put that away in my mind to speak about. It was only by nailing the
windows shut and putting strips of cotton batting around the cracks that
we'd ever been able to keep people there in the winter. I had my first
misgiving then. Heaven knows I didn't realize what it was going to be.

Well, by the evening of that day things were going fairly well. Tillie
brought out a basket every morning to me at the spring-house,
fairly bursting with curiosity, and Mr. Sam got some canned stuff in
Finleyville and took it after dark to the shelter-house. But after the
second day Mrs. Dicky got tired holding a frying-pan over the fire and I
had to carry out at least one hot meal a day.

They got their own breakfast in a chafing-dish, or rather he got it and
carried it to her. And she'd sit on the edge of her cot, with her feet
on the soap box--the floor was drafty--wrapped in a pink satin negligee
with bands of brown fur on it, looking sweet and perfectly happy, and
let him feed her boiled egg with a spoon. I took them some books--my
Gray's Anatomy, and Jane Eyre and Molly Bawn, by The Duchess, and the
newspapers, of course. They were full of talk about the wedding, and the
suite the prince was bringing over with him, and every now and then a
notice would say that Miss Dorothy Jennings, the bride's young sister,
who was still in school and was not coming out until next year, would be
her sister's maid of honor. And when they came to that, they would hug
each other--or me, if I happened to be close--and act like a pair of
children, which they were. Generally it would end up by his asking
her if she wasn't sorry she wasn't back at Greenwich studying French
conjugations and having a dance without any men on Friday nights, and
she would say "Wretch!" and kiss him, and I'd go out and slam the door.

But there was something on Mr. Dick's mind. I hadn't known him for
fourteen years for nothing. And the night Mr. Sam and I carried out the
canned salmon and corn and tomatoes he walked back with me to the edge
of the deer park, Mr. Sam having gone ahead.

"Now," I said, when we were out of ear-shot, "spit it out. I've been
expecting it."

"Listen, Minnie," he answered, "is Ju--is Miss Summers still confined to
her room?"

"No," I replied coldly. "Ju--Miss Summers was down to-night to dinner."

"Then she's seen Pierce," he said, "and he's told her the whole story
and by to-morrow--"

"What?" I demanded, clutching his arm. "You wretched boy, don't tell me
after all I've done."

"Oh, confound it, Minnie," he exclaimed, "it's as much your fault as
mine. Couldn't you have found somebody else, instead of getting, of all
things on earth, somebody from the Sweet Peas Company?"

"I see," I said slowly. "Then it WASN'T coincidence about the mumps!"

"Confounded kid had them," he said with bitterness. "Minnie,
something's got to be done, and done soon. If you want the plain truth,
Miss--er--Summers and I used to be friends--and--well, she's suing
me for breach of promise. Now for heaven's sake, Minnie, don't make a
fuss--"

But my knees wouldn't hold me. I dropped down in a snow-drift and
covered my face.



CHAPTER XI

MISS PATTY'S PRINCE

I dragged myself back to the spring-house and dropped in front of the
fire. What with worry and no sleep and now this new complication I was
dead as yesterday's newspaper. I sat there on the floor with my hands
around my knees, thinking what to do next, and as I sat there, the
crayon enlargement of father on the spring-house wall began to shake its
head from side to side, and then I saw it hold out its hand and point a
finger at me.

"Cut and run, Minnie," it said. "Get out from under! Go and buy Timmon's
candy store before the smash--the smash--!"

When I opened my eyes Mr. Pierce was sitting on the other side of the
chimney and staring at the fire. He had a pipe between his teeth, but
he wasn't smoking, and he had something of the same look about his mouth
he'd had the first day I saw him.

"Well?" he said, when he saw I was awake.

"I guess I was sleeping." I sat up and pushed in my hairpins and yawned.
I was tireder than ever. "I'm clean worn out."

"Of course you're tired," he declared angrily. "You're not a horse, and
you haven't been to bed for two nights."

"Care killed the cat," I said. "I don't mind losing sleep, but it's like
walking in a swamp, Mr. Pierce. First I put a toe in--that was when I
asked you to stay over night. Then I went a step farther, lured on, as
you may say, by Miss Patty waving a crown or whatever it is she wants,
just beyond my nose. And to-night I've got a--well, to-night I'm in to
the neck and yelling for a quick death."

He leaned over to where I sat before the fire and twisted my head toward
him.

"To-night--what?" he demanded.

But that minute I made up my mind not to tell him. He might think the
situation was too much for him and leave, or he might decide he ought to
tell Miss Summers where Dick was. There was no love lost between him and
Mr. Carter.

"To-night--I'm just tired and cranky," I said, "so--is Miss Summers
settled yet?"

He nodded, as if he wasn't thinking of Miss Summers.

"What did you tell her?"

"Haven't seen her," he said. "Sent her a note that I was understudying a
man named Carter and to mind to pick up her cues."

"It's a common enough name," I said, but he had lighted his pipe again
and had dropped forward, one elbow on his knee, his hand holding the
bowl of his pipe, and staring into the fire. He looked up when I closed
and locked the pantry door.

"I've just been thinking," he remarked, "here we are--a group of
people--all struggling like mad for one thing, but with different
motives. Mine are plain enough and mercenary enough, although a certain
red-haired girl with a fine loyalty to an old doctor and a sanatorium
is carrying me along with her enthusiasm. And Van Alstyne's motives
are clear enough--and selfish. Carter is merely trying to save his own
skin--but a girl like Miss Pat--Miss Jennings!"

"There's nothing uncertain about what she wants, or wrong either," I
retorted. "She's right enough. The family can't stand a scandal just now
with her wedding so close."

He smiled and got up, emptying his pipe.

"Nevertheless, oh, Minnie, of the glowing hair and heart," he said,
"Miss Jennings has disappointed me. You see, I believe in marrying for
love."

"Love!" I was disgusted. "Don't talk to me about love! Love is the sort
of thing that makes two silly idiots run away and get married and live
in a shelter-house, upsetting everybody's plans, while their betters
have to worry themselves sick and carry them victuals."

He got up and began to walk up and down the spring-house, scowling at
the floor.

"Of course," he agreed, "he may be a decent sort, and she may really
want him."

"Of course she does!" I said. He stopped short. "I've been wanting a
set of red puffs for three years, and I can hardly walk past Mrs. Yost's
window down in the village. They've got some that match my hair and I
fairly yearn for them. But if I got 'em I dare say I'd put them in a box
and go after wanting something else. It's the same way with Miss Patty.
She'll get her prince, and because it isn't real love, but only the same
as me with the puffs, she'll go after wanting something else. Only she
can't put him away in a box. She'll have to put him on and wear him for
better, for worse."

"Lord help her!" he said solemnly, and went over to the window and stood
there looking out.

I went over beside him. From the window we could see the three rows of
yellow lights that marked the house, and somebody with a lantern was
going down the path toward the stables. Mr. Pierce leaned forward, his
hands at the top of the window-sash, and put his forehead against the
glass.

"Why is it that a lighted window in a snow-storm always makes a fellow
homesick?" he said in his half-mocking way. "If he hasn't got a home it
makes him want one."

"Well, why don't you get one?" I asked.

"On nothing a year?" he said. "Not even prospects! And set up
housekeeping in the shelter-house with my good friend Minnie carrying
us food and wearing herself to a shadow, not to mention bringing trashy
books to my bride."

"She isn't that kind," I broke in, and got red. I'd been thinking of
Miss Patty. But he went over to the table and picked up his glass of
spring water, only to set it down untasted.

"No, she's not that kind!" he agreed, and never noticed the slip.

"You know, Minnie, women aren't all alike, but they're not all
different. An English writer has them classified to a T--there's the
mother woman--that's you. You're always mothering somebody with that
maternal spirit of yours. It's a pity it's vicarious."

I didn't say anything, not knowing just what he meant. But I've looked
it up since and I guess he was about right.

"And there's the mistress woman--Mrs. Dicky, for example, or--" he saw
Miss Cobb's curler on the mantel and picked it up--"or even Miss Cobb,"
he said. "Coquetry and selfishness without maternal instinct. How
much of Miss Cobb's virtue is training and environment, Minnie, not to
mention lack of temptation, and how much was born in her?"

"She's a preacher's daughter," I remarked. I could understand about Mrs.
Dicky, but I thought he was wrong about Miss Cobb.

"Exactly," he said. "And the third kind of woman is the mistress-mother
kind, and they're the salt of the earth, Minnie." He began to walk up
and down by the spring with his hands in his pockets and a far-away look
in his eyes. "The man who marries that kind of woman is headed straight
for paradise."

"That's the way!" I snapped. "You men have women divided into classes
and catalogued like horses on sale."

"Aren't they on sale?" he demanded, stopping. "Isn't it money, or
liberty, or--or a title, usually?" I knew he was thinking of Miss Patty
again.

"As for the men," I continued, "I guess you can class the married ones
in two classes, providers and non-providers. They're all selfish and
they haven't enough virtue to make a fuss about."

"I'd be a shining light in the non-provider class," he said, and picking
up his old cap he opened the door. Miss Patty herself was coming up the
path.

She was flushed from the cold air and from hurrying, and I don't know
that I ever saw her look prettier. When she came into the light we could
both see that she was dressed for dinner. Her fur coat was open at
the neck, and she had only a lace scarf over her head. (She was
a disbeliever in colds, anyhow, and all winter long she slept with the
windows open and the steam-heat off!)

"I'm so glad you're still here, Minnie!" she exclaimed, breathing fast.
"You haven't taken the dinner out to the shelter-house yet, have you?"

"Not yet," I replied. "Tillie hasn't brought the basket. The chef's been
fussing about the stuff we're using in the diet kitchen the last few
days, and I wouldn't be surprised if he's shut off all extras."

But I guess her sister and Mr. Dick could have starved to death just
then without her noticing. She was all excitement, for all she's mostly
so cool.

"I have a note here for my sister," she said, getting it out of her
pocket. "I know we all impose on you, Minnie, but--will you take it for
me? I'd go, but I'm in slippers, and, anyhow, I'd need a lantern, and
that would be reckless, wouldn't it?"

"In slippers!" Mr. Pierce interrupted. "It's only five degrees above
zero! Of all the foolhardy--!"

Miss Patty did not seem to hear him. She gave the letter to me and
followed me out on the step.

"You're a saint, Minnie," she said, leaning over and squeezing my arm,
"and because you're going back and forth in the cold so much, I want you
to have this--to keep."

She stooped and picked up from the snow beside the steps something soft
and furry and threw it around my neck, and the next instant I knew
she was giving me her chinchilla set, muff and all. I was so pleased I
cried, and all the way over to the shelter-house I sniveled and danced
with joy at the same time. There's nothing like chinchilla to tone down
red hair.

Well, I took the note out to the shelter-house, and rapped. Mr. Dick let
me in, and it struck me he wasn't as cheerful as usual. He reached out
and took the muff.

"Oh," he said, "I thought that was the supper."

"It's coming," I said, looking past him for Mrs. Dicky. Usually when
I went there she was drawing Mr. Dick's profile on a bit of paper or
teaching him how to manicure his nails, but that night she was lying on
the cot and she didn't look up.

"Sleeping?" I asked in a whisper.

"Grumping!" Mr. Dick answered. He went over and stood looking down at
her with his hands in his pockets and his hair ruffled as if he'd been
running his fingers through it. She never moved a shoulder.

"Dorothy," he said. "Here's Minnie."

She pretended not to hear.

"Dorothy!" he repeated. "I wish you wouldn't be such a g--Confound it,
Dolly, be reasonable. Do you want to make me look like a fool?"

She turned her face enough to uncover one eye.

"It wouldn't be difficult," she answered, staring at him with the one
eye. It was red from crying.

"Now listen, Dolly." He got down on one knee beside the cot and tried to
take her hand, but she jerked it away. "I've tried wearing my hair that
way, and it--it isn't becoming, to say the least. I don't mind having it
wet and brushed back in a pompadour, if you insist, but I certainly do
balk at the ribbon."

"You've only got to wear the ribbon an hour or so, until it dries." She
brought her hand forward an inch or so and he took it and kissed it. It
should have been slapped.

"I'll tell you what I'll do," he said. "You can fix it any way you
please, when it's too late for old Sam or Pierce to drop in, and I'll
wear the confounded ribbon all night. Won't that do?"

But she had seen the note and sat up and held out her hand for it. She
was wearing one of Miss Patty's dresses and it hung on her--not that
Miss Patty was large, but she had a beautiful figure, and Mrs. Dicky, of
course, was still growing and not properly filled out.

"Dick!" she said suddenly, "what do you think? Oskar is here! Pat's in
the wildest excitement. He's in town, and Aunt Honoria has telephoned
to know what to do! Listen: he is incog., of course, and registered as
Oskar von Inwald. He did an awfully clever thing--came in through Canada
while the papers thought he was in St. Moritz."

"For heaven's sake," replied Mr. Dick, "tell her not to ask him here. I
shouldn't know how to talk to him."

"He speaks lovely English," declared Mrs. Dick, still reading.

"I know all that," he said, walking around nervously, "but if he's going
to be my brother-in-law, I suppose I don't get down on my knees and
knock my head on the floor. What do I say to him? Your Highness? Oh,
I've known a lord or two, but that's different. You call them anything
you like and lend them money."

"I dare say you can with Oskar, too." Mrs. Dicky put the note down and
sighed. "Well, he's coming. Pat says dad won't go back to town until
he's had twenty-one baths, and he's only had eleven and she's got to
stay with him. And you needn't worry about what to call Oskar. He's not
to know we're here."

I was worried on my way back to the spring-house--not that the prince
would make much difference, as far as I could see things being about as
bad as they could be. But some of the people were talking of leaving,
and since we had to have a prince it seemed a pity he wasn't coming
with all his retinue and titles. It would have been a good ten thousand
dollars' worth of advertising for the place, and goodness knows we
needed it.

When I got back to the spring-house Miss Patty and Mr. Pierce were still
there. He was in front of the fire, with his back to it, and she was
near the door.

"Of course it isn't my affair," he was saying. "You are perfectly--"
Then I opened the door and he stopped. I went on into the pantry to take
off my overshoes, and as I closed the door he continued. "I didn't mean
to say what I have. I meant to explain about the other night--I had a
right to do that. But you forced the issue."

"I was compelled to tell you he was coming," she said angrily. "I felt
I should. You have been good enough to take Mr. Carter's place here and
save me from an embarrassing situation--"

"I had no philanthropic motives," he insisted stubbornly. "I did it,
as you must know, for three meals a day and a roof over my head. If you
wish me to be entirely frank, I disapprove of the whole thing."

I heard the swish of her dress as she left the door and went toward him.

"What would you have had me do?" she asked.

"Take those two children to your father. What if there was a row?
Why should there be such a lot made of it, anyhow? They're young, but
they'll get older. It isn't a crime for two people to--er--love each
other, is it? And if you think a scandal or two in your family--granting
your father would make a scandal--is going to put another patch on the
ragged reputations of the royal family of--"

"How dare you!" she cried furiously. "How DARE you!"

I heard her cross the room and fling the door open and a second later it
slammed. When I came out of the pantry Mr. Pierce was sitting in his old
position, elbow on knee, holding his pipe and staring at the bowl.





CHAPTER XII

WE GET A DOCTOR

I had my hands full the next day. We'd had another snow-storm during
the night and the trains were blocked again. About ten o'clock we got
a telegram from the new doctor we'd been expecting, that he'd fallen
on the ice on his way to the train and broken his arm, and at eleven a
delegation from the guests waited on Mr. Pierce and told him they'd have
to have a house physician at once.

Senator Biggs was the spokesman. He said that, personally, he couldn't
remain another day without one; that he should be under a physician's
care every moment of his fast, and that if no doctor came that day
he'd be in favor of all the guests showing their displeasure by leaving
together.

"Either that," Thoburn said from the edge of the crowd, "or call it a
hotel at once and be done with it. A sanatorium without a doctor is like
an omelet without eggs!"

"Hamlet without ham," somebody said.

"We're doing the best we can," Mr. Pierce explained. "We--we expect a
doctor to-day."

"When?" from Mr. Jennings, who had come on a cane and was watching Mr.
Pierce like a hawk.

"This afternoon, probably. As there is no one here very ill--"

But at that they almost fell on him and tore him to pieces. I had to
step in front of him myself and say we'd have somebody there by two
o'clock if we had to rob a hospital to get him. And Mr. Sam cried,
"Three cheers for Minnie, the beautiful spring-house girl!" and led off.

There's no doubt about it--a man ought to be born to the sanatorium
business. A real strong and healthy man has no business trying to run
a health resort, and I saw Mr. Pierce wasn't making the hit that I'd
expected him to.

He was too healthy. You only needed to look at him to know that he took
a cold plunge every morning, and liked to walk ten miles a day, and
could digest anything and go to sleep the minute his head touched the
pillow. And he had no tact. When Mrs. Biggs went to him and explained
that the vacuum cleaner must not be used in her room--that it exhausted
the air or something, and she could hardly breathe after it--he only
looked bewildered and then drew a diagram to show her it was impossible
that it could exhaust the air. The old doctor knew how: he'd have
ordered an oxygen tank opened in the room after the cleaner was used and
she'd have gone away happy.

Of course Mr. Pierce was most polite. He'd listen to their
complaints--and they were always complaining, that's part of the
regime--with a puzzled face, trying to understand, but he couldn't.
He hadn't a nerve in his body. Once, when one of the dining-room girls
dropped a tray of dishes and half the women went to bed with headache
from the nervous shock, he never even looked up, but went on with his
dinner, and the only comment he made afterward was to tell the head
waitress to see that Annie didn't have to pay breakage--that the
trays were too heavy for a woman, anyhow. As Miss Cobb said, he was
impossible.

Well, as if I didn't have my hands full with getting meals to the
shelter-house, and trying to find a house doctor, and wondering how long
it would be before "Julia" came face to face with Dick Carter somewhere
or other, and trying to keep one eye on Thoburn while I kept Mr. Pierce
straight with the other--that day, during luncheon, Mike the bath man
came out to the spring-house and made a howl about his wages. He'd been
looking surly for two days.

"What about your wages?" I snapped. "Aren't you getting what you've
always had?"

"No tips!" he said sulkily. "Only a few taking baths--only one daily,
and that's that man Jennings. There's no use talking, Miss Minnie, I've
got to have a double percentage on that man or you'll have to muzzle
him. He--he's dangerous."

"If I give you the double percentage, will you stay?"

"I don't know but that I'd rather have the muzzle, Miss Minnie," he
answered slowly, "but--I'll stay. It won't be for long."

Which left me thinking. I'd seen Thoburn talking to Mike more than once
lately, and he'd been going around with an air of assurance that didn't
make me any too cheerful. Evenings, when I'd relieved Amanda King at the
news stand, I'd seen Thoburn examining the woodwork of the windows, and
only the night before, happening on the veranda unexpectedly, I found
Mike and him measuring it with a tape line. As I say, Mike's visit left
me thinking.

The usual crowd came out that afternoon and drank water and sat around
the fire and complained--all except Senator Biggs, who happened in just
as I was pouring melted butter over a dish of hot salted pop-corn.
He stood just inside the door, sniffling, with his eyes fixed on the
butter, and then groaned and went out.

He looked terrible--his clothes hung on him like bags; as the bishop
said, it was ghastly to see a convexity change to such a concavity in
three days.

Mr. Moody won three dollars that day from the slot-machine and was
almost civil to his wife, but old Jennings sat with his foot on a stool
and yelled if anybody slammed the door. Mrs. Hutchins brought him out
with her eyes red and asked me if she could leave him there.

"I'm sorry if I was rude to you the other night, Minnie," she said, "but
I was upset. I'm so worn-out that I'll have to lie down for an hour, and
if he doesn't get better soon, I--I shall have to have help. My nerves
are gone."

At four o'clock Mr. Sam came in, and he had Mr. Thoburn tight by the
arm.

"My dear old chap," he was saying, "it would be as much as your life's
worth. That ground is full of holes and just now covered with snow--!"

He caught my eye, and wiped his forehead.

"Heaven help us!" he said, coming over to the spring, "I found him
making for the shelter-house, armed with a foot rule! Somebody's got to
take him in hand--I tell you, the man's a menace!"

"What about the doctor?" I asked, reaching up his glass.

"Be here to-night," he answered, "on the--"

But at that minute a boy brought a telegram down and handed it to him.
The new doctor was laid up with influenza!

We sat there after the others had gone, and Mr. Sam said he was for
giving up the fight, only to come out now with the truth would mean such
a lot of explaining and a good many people would likely find it funny.
Mr. Pierce came in later and we gave him the telegram to read.

"I don't see why on earth they need a doctor, anyhow," he said, "they're
not sick. If they'd take a little exercise and get some air in their
lungs--"

"My dear fellow," Mr. Sam cried in despair, "some people are born
in sanatoriums, some acquire them, and others have them thrust upon
them--I've had this place thrust upon me. I don't know why they want a
doctor, but they do. They balked at Rodgers from the village. They want
somebody here at night. Mr. Jennings has the gout and there's the deuce
to pay. Some of them talk of leaving."

"Let 'em leave," said Mr. Pierce. "If they'd go home and drink three
gallons of any kind of pure water a day--"

"Sh! That's heresy here! My dear fellow, we've got to keep them."

Mr. Pierce glanced at the telegram and handed it back.

"Lot's of starving M. D.'s would jump at the chance," he said, "but if
it's as urgent as all this we can't wait to hunt. I'll tell you, Van
Alstyne, there's a chap down in the village he was the character man
with the Sweet Peas Company--and he's stranded there. I saw him this
morning. He's washing dishes in the depot restaurant for his meals.
We used to call him Doc, and I've a hazy idea that he's a graduate M.
D.--name's Barnes."

"Great!" cried Mr. Van Alstyne. "Let's have Barnes. You get him, will
you, Pierce?"

Mr. Pierce promised and they started out together. At the door Mr. Sam
turned.

"Oh, by the way, Minnie," he called, "better gild one of your chairs and
put a red cushion on it. The prince has arrived."

Well, I thought it all out that afternoon as I washed the glasses, and
it was terrible. I had two people in the shelter-house to feed and look
after like babies, with Tillie getting more curious every day about
the basket she brought, and not to be held much longer; and I had a man
running the sanatorium and running it to the devil as fast as it could
go. Not that he wasn't a nice young man, big, strong-jawed and all that,
but you can't make a diplomat out of an ordinary man in three days, and
it takes more diplomacy to run a sanatorium a week than it does to be
secretary of state for four years. Then I had a prince incognito, and
Thoburn stirring up mischief, and the servants threatening to strike,
and no house doctor--

Just as I got to that somebody opened the door behind me and looked in.
I glanced around, and it was a man with the reddest hair I ever saw.
Mine was pale by comparison. He was rather short and heavy-set, and he
had a pleasant face, although not handsome, his nose being slightly bent
to the left. But at first all I could see was his hair.

"Good evening," he said, edging himself in. "Are you Miss Waters?"

"Yes," I said, rising and getting a glass ready, "although I'm not
called that often, except by people who want to pun on my name and my
business." I looked at him sharply, but he hadn't intended any pun.

He took off his hat and came over to the spring where I was filling his
glass.

"If that's for me, you needn't bother," he said. "If it tastes as it
smells, I'm not thirsty. My name's Barnes, and I was to wait here for
Mr. Van Alstyne."

"Barnes!" I repeated. "Then you're the doctor."

He grinned, and stood turning his hat around in his hands.

"Not exactly," he said. "I graduated in medicine a good many years ago,
but after a year of it, wearing out more seats of trousers waiting
for patients than I earned enough to pay for, and having to have new
trousers, I took to other things."

"Oh, yes," I said. "You're an actor now."

He looked thoughtful.

"Some people think I'm not," he answered, "but I'm on the stage.
Graduated there from prize-fighting. Prize-fighting, the stage, and then
writing for magazines--that's the usual progression. Sometimes, as a
sort of denouement before the final curtain, we have dinner at the White
House."

I took a liking to the man at once. It was a relief to have somebody
who was willing to tell all about himself and wasn't incognito, or in
hiding, or under somebody else's name. I put a fresh log on the fire,
and as it blazed up I saw him looking at me.

"Ye gods and little fishes!" he said. "Another redhead! Why, we're as
alike as two carrots off the same bunch!"

In five minutes I knew how old he was, and where he was raised, and that
what he wanted more than anything on earth was a little farmhouse with
chickens and a cow.

"Where you can have air, you know," he said, waving his hands, which
were covered with reddish hair. "Lord, in the city I starve for air! And
where, when you're getting soft you can go out and tackle the wood-pile.
That's living!"

And then he wanted to know what he was to do at the sanatorium and
I told him as well as I could. I didn't tell him everything, but I
explained why Mr. Pierce was calling himself Carter, and about the two
in the shelter-house. I had to. He knew as well as I did that three days
before Mr. Pierce had had nothing to his name but a folding automobile
road map or whatever it was.

"Good for old Pierce!" he said when I finished. "He's a prince, Miss
Waters. If you'd seen him sending those girls back to town--well, I'll
do all I can to help him. But I'm not much of a doctor. It's safe to
acknowledge it; you'll find it out soon enough."

Mr. and Mrs. Van Alstyne came in just then, and Mr. Sam told him what
he was expected to do. It wasn't much: he was to tell them at what
temperatures to take their baths, "and Minnie will help you out with
that," he added, and what they were to eat and were not to eat. "Minnie
will tell you that, too," he finished, and Mr. Barnes, DOCTOR Barnes,
came over and shook my hand.

"I'm perfectly willing to be first assistant," he declared. "We'll put
our heads together and the result will be--"

"Combustion!" said Mr. Sam, and we all laughed.

"Remember," Mr. Sam instructed him, as Doctor Barnes started out, "when
you don't know what to prescribe, order a Turkish bath. The baths are to
a sanatorium what the bar is to a club--they pay the bills."

Well, we got it all fixed and Doctor Barnes started out, but at the door
he stopped.

"I say," he asked in an undertone, "the stork doesn't light around here,
does he?"

"Not if they see him first!" I replied grimly, and he went out.





CHAPTER XIII

THE PRINCE--PRINCIPALLY

It was all well enough for me to say--as I had to to Tillie many a
time--that it was ridiculous to make a fuss over a person for what,
after all, was an accident of birth. It was well enough for me to say
that it was only by chance that I wasn't strutting about with a crown on
my head and a man blowing a trumpet to let folks know I was coming, and
by the same token and the same chance Prince Oskar might have been a
red-haired spring-house girl, breaking the steels in her figure stooping
over to ladle mineral water out of a hole in the earth.

Nevertheless, at five o'clock, after every one had gone, when I saw Miss
Patty, muffled in furs, tripping out through the snow, with a tall thin
man beside her, walking very straight and taking one step to her four, I
felt as though somebody had hit me at the end of my breast-bone.

They stopped a minute outside before they came in, and I had to take
myself in hand.

"Now look here, Minnie, you idiot," I said to myself, "this is America;
you're as good as he is; not a bend of the knee or a stoop of the neck.
And if he calls you 'my good girl' hit him."

They came in together, laughing and talking, and, to be honest, if I
hadn't caught the back of a chair, I'd have had one foot back of the
other and been making a courtesy in spite of myself.

"We're late, Minnie!" Miss Patty said. "Oskar, this is one of my best
friends, and you are to be very nice to her."

He had one of those single glass things in his eye and he gave me a good
stare through it. Seen close he was handsomer than Mr. Pierce, but he
looked older than his picture.

"Ask her if she won't be nice to me," he said in as good English as
mine, and held out his hand.

"Any of Miss Patty's friends--" I began, with a lump in my throat, and
gave his hand a good squeeze. I thought he looked startled, and suddenly
I had a sort of chill.

"Good gracious!" I exclaimed, "should I have kissed it?"

They roared at that, and Miss Patty had to sit down in a chair.

"You see, she knows, Oskar," she said. "The rest are thinking and
perhaps guessing, but Minnie is the only one that knows, and she never
talks. Everybody who comes here tells Minnie his troubles."

"But--am I a trouble?" he asked in a low tone. I was down in the spring,
but I heard it.

"So far you have hardly been an unalloyed joy," she replied, and from
the spring I echoed "Amen."

"Yes--I'm so hung with family skeletons that I clatter when I walk," I
explained, pretending I hadn't heard, and brought them both glasses of
water. "It's got to be a habit with some people to save their sciatica
and their husband's dispositions and their torpid livers and their
unpaid bills and bring 'em here to me."

He sniffed at the glass and put it down.

"Herr Gott!" he said, "what a water! It is--the whole thing is
extraordinary! I can understand the reason for Carlsbad or Wiesbaden--it
is gay. One sees one's friends; it is--social. But here--!"

He got up and, lifting a window curtain, peered out into the snow.

"Here," he repeated, "shut in by forests and hills, a thousand miles
from life--" He shrugged his shoulders and came back to the table. "It
is well enough for the father," he went on to Miss Patty, "but for you!
Why--it is depressing, gray. The only bit of color in it all is--here,
in what you call the spring-house." I thought he meant Miss Patty's
cheeks or her lovely violet eyes, but he was looking at my hair. I had
caught his eye on it before, but this time he made no secret about it,
and he sighed, for all the world as if it reminded him of something.
He went over to the slot-machine and stood in front of it, humming and
trying the different combinations. I must say he had a nice back.

Miss Patty came over and slipped her hand in mine.

"Well?" she whispered, looking at me with her pretty eyebrows raised.

"He looks all right," I had to confess. "Perhaps you can coax him to
shave."

She laughed.

"Oskar!" she called, "you have passed, but you are conditioned. Minnie
objects to the mustache."

He turned and looked at me gravely.

"It is my--greatest attraction," he declared, "but it is also a great
care. If Miss Minnie demands it, I shall give it to her in a--in a
little box." He sauntered over and looked at me in his audacious way.
"But you must promise to care for it. Many women have loved it."

"I believe that!" I answered, and stared back at him without blinking.
"I guess I wouldn't want the responsibility."

But I had an idea that he meant what he said about the many women, and
that Miss Patty knew it as well as I did. She flushed a little, and
they went very soon after that. I stood and watched them until they
disappeared in the snow, and I felt lonelier than ever, and sad,
although certainly he was better than I had expected to find him. He was
a man, and not a little cub with a body hardly big enough to carry his
forefathers' weaknesses. But he had a cold eye and a warm mouth,
and that sort of man is generally a social success and a matrimonial
failure.

It wasn't until toward night that I remembered I'd been talking to a
real prince and I hadn't once said "your Highness" or "your Excellency"
or whatever I should have said. I had said "You!"

I had hardly closed the door after them when it opened again and Mr.
Pierce came in. He shut the door and, going over to one of the tables,
put a package down on it.

"Here's the stuff you wanted for the spring, Minnie," he announced. "I
suppose I can't do anything more than register a protest against it?"

"You needn't bother doing that," I answered, "unless it makes you feel
better. Your authority ends at that door. Inside the spring-house I'm in
control."

(It's hard to believe, with things as they are, that I once really
believed that. But I did. It was three full days later that I learned
that I'd been mistaken!)

Well, he sat there and looked at nothing while I heated water in my
brass kettle over the fire and dissolved the things against Thoburn's
quick eye the next day, and he didn't say anything. He had a gift for
keeping quiet, Mr. Pierce had. It got on my nerves after a while.

"Things are doing better," I remarked, stirring up my mixture.

"Yes," he said, without moving.

"I suppose they're happier now they have a doctor?"

"Yes--no--I don't know. He's not much of a doctor, you know--and there
don't seem to be any medical books around."

"There's one on the care and feeding of infants in the circulating
library," I said, "and he can have my Anatomy."

"You're generous!" he remarked, with one of his quick smiles.

"It's a book," I snapped, and fell to stirring again. But he was moping
once more, with his feet out and his hands behind his head, staring at
the ceiling.

"I say, Minnie--"

"Yes?"

"Miss--Miss Jennings and the von Inwald were here just now, weren't
they? I passed them on the bridge."

"Yes."

"What--how do you like him?"

"Better than I expected and not so well as I might," I said. "If you are
going to the house soon you might take Miss Patty her handkerchief. It's
there under that table."

I took my mixture into the pantry and left it to cool. But as I started
back I stopped. He had got the handkerchief and was standing in front of
the fire, holding it in the palm of his hand and looking at it. And all
in a minute he crushed it to his face with both hands and against the
firelight I could see him quivering.

I stepped back into the pantry and came out again noisily. He
was standing very calm and quiet where he had been before, and no
handkerchief in sight.

"Well," I said, "did you get it?"

"Get what?"

"Miss Patty's handkerchief?"

"Oh--that! Yes. Here it is." He pulled it out of his pocket and held it
up by the corner.

"Ridiculous size, isn't it, and--" he held it up to his nose--"I dare
say one could almost tell it was hers by the scent. It's--it's like
her."

"Humph!" I said, suddenly suspicious, and looked at it. "Well," I said,
"it may remind you of Miss Patty, and the scent may be like Miss Patty,
but she doesn't use perfume on her handkerchief. This has an E. C. on
it, which means Eliza Cobb."

He left soon after, rather crestfallen, but to save my life I couldn't
forget what I'd seen--him with that scrap of linen that he thought was
hers crushed to his face, and his shoulders heaving. I had an idea that
he hadn't cared much for women before, and that, this being a first
attack, he hadn't established what the old doctor used to call an
immunity.





CHAPTER XIV

PIERCE DISAPPROVES

Mrs. Hutchins came out to the spring-house the next morning. She was
dressed in a black silk with real lace collar and cuffs, and she was so
puffed up with pride that she forgot to be nasty to me.

"I thought I'd better come to you, Minnie," she said. "There seems to be
nobody in authority here any more. Mr. Carter has put the--has put Mr.
von Inwald in the north wing. I can not imagine why he should have given
him the coldest and most disagreeable part of the house."

I said I'd speak to Mr. Carter and try to have him moved, and she
rustled over to where I was brushing the hearth and stooped down.

"Mr. von Inwald is incognito, of course," she said, "but he belongs to a
very old family in his own country--a noble family. He ought to have the
best there is in the house."

I promised that, too, and she went away, but I made up my mind to talk
to Mr. Pierce. The sanatorium business isn't one where you can put your
own likes and dislikes against the comfort of the guests.

Miss Cobb came out a few minutes after; she had on her new green silk
with the white lace trimming. She saw me staring as she threw off her
cape and put her curler on the log.

"It's a little dressy for so early, of course, Minnie," she said, "but
I wish you'd see some of the other women! Breakfast looked like an
afternoon reception. What would you think of pinning this black velvet
ribbon around my head?"

"It might have done twenty years ago, Miss Cobb," I answered, "but I
wouldn't advise it now." I was working at the slot-machine, and I heard
her sniff behind me as she hung up her mirror on the window-frame.

She tried the curler on the curtain, which she knows I object to, but
she was too full of her subject to be sulky for long.

"I wish you could see Blanche Moody!" she began again, standing holding
the curler, with a thin wreath of smoke making a halo over her head.
"Drawn in--my dear, I don't see how she can breathe! I guess there's no
doubt about Mr. von Inwald."

"I'd like to know who put this beer check in the slot-machine
yesterday," I said as indifferently as I could. "What about Mr. von
Inwald?"

She tiptoed over to me, the halo trailing after her.

"About his being a messenger from the prince to Miss Jennings!" she
answered in a whisper. "He spent last night closeted with papa, and
the chambermaid on that floor told Lily Biggs that there was almost a
quarrel."

"That doesn't mean anything," I objected. "If the Angel Gabriel was shut
in with Mr. Jennings for ten minutes he'd be blowing his trumpet for
help."

Miss Cobb shrugged her shoulders and took hold of a fresh wisp of hair
with the curler.

"I dare say," she assented, "but the Angel Gabriel wouldn't have
waited to breakfast with Miss Jennings, and have kissed her hand before
everybody at the foot of the stairs!"

"Is he handsome?" I asked, curious to know how he would impress other
women. But Miss Cobb had never seen a man she would call ugly.

"Handsome!" she said. "My dear, he's beautiful! He has a duel scar on
his left cheek--all the nobility have them over there. I've a cousin
living in Berlin--she's the wittiest person--and she says the German
child of the future will be born with a scarred left cheek!"

Well, I was sick enough of hearing of Mr. von Inwald before the day was
over. All morning in the spring-house they talked Mr. von Inwald. They
pretended to play cards, but they were really playing European royalty.
Every time somebody laid down a queen, he'd say, "Is the queen still
living, or didn't she die a few years ago?" And when they played the
knave, they'd start off about the prince again. They'd all decided that
Mr. von Inwald was noble--somebody said that the "von" was a sort of
title. The women were planning to make the evenings more cheerful, too.
They couldn't have a dance with the men using canes or forbidden to
exercise, but Miss Cobb had a lot of what she called "parlor games" that
she wanted to try out. "Introducing the Jones family" was one of them.

In the afternoon Mr. von Inwald came out to the spring-house and sat
around, very affable and friendly, drinking the water. He and the bishop
grew quite chummy. Miss Patty was not there, but about four o'clock Mr.
Pierce came out. He did not sit down, but wandered around the room, not
talking to anybody, but staring, whenever he could, at the prince. Once
I caught Mr. von Inwald's eyes fixed on him, as if he might have seen
him before. After a while Mr. Pierce sat down in a corner like a sulky
child and filled his pipe, and as nobody noticed him except to complain
about the pipe, which he didn't even hear, he sat there for a half-hour,
bent forward, with his pipe clenched in his teeth, and never took his
eyes off Mr. von Inwald's face.

Senator Biggs was the one who really caused the trouble. He spent a good
deal of time in the spring-house trying to fool his stomach by keeping
it filled up all the time with water. He had got past the cranky stage,
being too weak for it; his face was folded up in wrinkles like an
accordion and his double chin was so flabby you could have tucked it
away inside his collar.

"What do you think of American women, Mr. von Inwald?" he asked, and
everybody stopped playing cards and listened for the answer. As Mr.
von Inwald represented the prince, wouldn't he be likely to voice the
prince's opinion of American women?

It's my belief Mr. von Inwald was going to say something nice. He
smiled as if he meant to, but just then he saw Mr. Pierce in his corner
sneering behind his pipe. They looked at each other steadily, and nobody
could mistake the hate in Mr. Pierce's face or his sneer. After a minute
the prince looked away and shrugged his shoulders, but he didn't make
his pretty speech.

"American women!" he said, turning his glass of spring water around
on the table before him, "they are very lovely, of course." He looked
around and there were Mrs. Moody and Mrs. Biggs and Miss Cobb, and he
even glanced at me in the spring. Then he looked again at Mr. Pierce and
kept his eyes there. "But they are spoiled, fearfully spoiled. They rule
their parents and they expect to rule their husbands. In Europe we do
things better; we are not--what is the English?--hag-ridden?"

There was a sort of murmur among the men, but the women all nodded as if
they thought Europe was entirely right. They'd have agreed with him if
he'd advocated sixteen wives sitting cross-legged on a mat, like the
Turks. Mr. Pierce was still staring at the prince.

"What I don't quite understand, Mr. von Inwald," the bishop put in in
his nice way, "is your custom of expecting a girl to bring her husband
a certain definite sum of money and to place it under the husband's
control. Our wealthy American girls control their own money," He was
thinking of Miss Patty, and everybody knew it.

The prince turned red and glared at the bishop. Then I think he
remembered that they didn't know who he was, and he smiled and started
to turning the glass again.

"Pardon!" he said. "Is it not better? What do women know of money? They
throw it away on trifles, dress, jewels--American women are extravagant.
It is one result of their--of their spoiling."

Mr. Pierce got up and emptied his pipe into the fire. Then he turned.

"I'm afraid you have not known the best type of American women," he
said, looking hard at the prince. "Our representative women are our
middle-class women. They do not contract European alliances, not having
sufficient money to attract the attention of the nobility, or enough to
buy titles, as they do pearls, for the purpose of adornment."

Mr. von Inwald got up, and his face was red. Mr. Pierce was white and
sneering.

"Also," he went on, "when they marry they wish to control their own
money, and not see it spent in--ways with which you are doubtless
familiar."

We were all paralyzed. Nobody moved. Mr. Pierce put his pipe in his
pocket and stalked out, slamming the door. Then Mr. von Inwald shrugged
his shoulders and laughed.

"I see I shall have to talk to our young friend," he said and picked
up his glass. "I'm afraid I've given a wrong impression. I like the
American women very much; too well," he went on with a flash of his
teeth, looking around the room, and brought the glass to the spring for
me to fill. But as I've said before, I can tell a good bit about a man
from the way he gives me his glass, and he was in a perfect frenzy of
rage. When I reached it back to him he gripped it until his nails were
white.

My joint ached all the rest of the afternoon. About five o'clock Mr.
Thoburn stopped in long enough to say: "What's this I hear about Carter
making an ass of himself to-day?"

"I haven't heard it," I answered. "What is it?"

But he only laughed and turned up his collar to go.

"Jove, Minnie," he said, "why do women of your spirit always champion
the losing side? Be a good girl; give me a hand now and then with this
thing, and I'll see you don't lose by it."

"We're not going to lose," I retorted angrily. "Nobody has left yet. We
are still ahead on the books."

He came over and shook a finger in my face.

"Nobody has left--and why? Because they're all taking a series of baths.
Wait until they've had their fifteen, or twenty-one, or whatever the
cure is, and then see them run!"

It was true enough; I knew it.





CHAPTER XV

THE PRINCE, WITH APOLOGIES

Tillie brought the supper basket for the shelter-house about six o'clock
and sat down for a minute by the fire. She said Mr. Pierce (Carter to
her) had started out with a gun about five o'clock. It was foolish, but
it made me uneasy.

"They've gone plumb crazy over that Mr. von Inwald," she declared. "It
makes me tired. How do they know he's anything but what he says he is?
He may be a messenger from the emperor of Austria, and he may be selling
flannel chest protectors. Miss Cobb's all set up; she's talking about
getting up an entertainment and asking that Miss Summers to recite."

She got up, leaving the basket on the hearth.

"And say," she said, "you ought to see that dog now. It's been soakin'
in peroxide all day!"

She went out with the peroxide, but a moment later she opened the door
and stuck her head in, nodding toward the basket.

"Say," she said, "the chef's getting fussy about the stuff I'm using in
the diet kitchen. You've got to cut it out soon, Minnie. If I was you
I'd let him starve."

"What!" I screeched, and grasped the rail of the spring.

"Let him starve!" she repeated.

"Wha--what are you talking about?" I demanded when I got my voice.

She winked at me from the doorway.

"Oh, I'm on all right, Minnie!" she assured me, "although heaven only
knows where he puts it all! He's sagged in like a chair with broken
springs."

I saw then that she thought I was feeding Senator Biggs on the sly, and
I breathed again. But my nerves were nearly gone, and when just then I
heard a shot from the direction of the deer park, even Tillie noticed
how pale I got.

"I don't know what's come over you, Minnie," she said. "That's only Mr.
Carter shooting rabbits. I saw him go out as I started down the path."

I was still nervous when I put on my shawl and picked up the basket.
But there was a puddle on the floor and the soup had spilled. There
was nothing for it but to go back for more soup, and I got it from the
kitchen without the chef seeing me. When I opened the spring-house door
again Mr. Pierce was by the fire, and in front of him, where I'd left
the basket, lay a dead rabbit. He was sitting there with his chin in his
hands looking at the poor thing, and there was no basket in sight.

"Well," I asked, "did you change my basket into a dead rabbit?"

"Basket!" he said, looking up. "What basket?"

I looked everywhere, but the basket was gone, and after a while I
decided that Mr. Dick had had an attack of thoughtfulness (or hunger)
and had carried it out himself.

And all the time I looked for the basket Mr. Pierce sat with the gun
across his knees and stared at the rabbit.

"I'd thank you to take that messy thing out of here," I told him.

"Poor little chap!" he exclaimed. "He was playing in the snow, and
I killed him--not because I wanted food or sport, Minnie, but--well,
because I had to kill something."

"I hope you don't have those attacks often," I said. He looked at the
rabbit and sighed.

"Never in my life!" he answered. "For food or sport, that's different,
but--blood-lust!" He got up and put the gun in the corner, and I saw he
looked white and miserable.

"I don't like myself to-night, Minnie," he said, trying to smile, "and
nobody likes me. I'm going into the garden to eat worms!"

I didn't like to scold him when he was feeling bad anyhow, but business
is business. So I asked him how long he thought people would stay if he
acted as he had that day. I said that a sanatorium was a place where
the man who runs it can't afford to have likes and dislikes; that for my
part I'd a good deal rather he'd get rid of his excitement by shooting
off a gun, provided he pointed it away from the house, than to sit
around and let his mind explode and kill all our prospects. I told him,
too, to remember that he wasn't responsible for the morals or actions of
his guests, only for their health.

"Health!" he echoed, and kicked a chair. "Health! Why, if I wanted to
keep a good dog in condition, Minnie, I wouldn't bring him here."

"No," I retorted, "you'd shut him in an old out oven, and give him a
shoe to chew, and he'd come out in three days frisking and happy. But
you can't do that with people."

"Why not?" he asked. "Although, of course, the supply of out ovens and
old shoes is limited here."

"As far as Mr. von Inwald goes," I went on, "that's not your affair or
mine. If Miss Patty's own father can't prevent it, why should you worry
about it?"

"Precisely," he agreed. "Why should I? But I do, Minnie--that's the
devil of it."

"There are plenty of nice girls," I suggested, feeling rather sorry for
him.

"Are there? Oh, I dare say." He stooped and picked up his rabbit.
"Straight through the head; not so bad for twilight. Poor little chap!"

He said good night and went out, taking the gun and the rabbit with him,
and I went into the pantry to finish straightening things for the night.
In a few minutes I heard voices in the other room, one Mr. Pierce's, and
one with a strong German accent.

"When was that?" Mr. von Inwald's voice.

"A year ago, in Vienna."

"Where?"

"At the Bal Tabarin. You were in a loge. The man I was with told me who
the woman was. It was she, I think, who suggested that you lean over the
rail--"

"Ah, so!" said Mr. von Inwald as if he just remembered. "Ah, yes, I
recall--I was with--the lady was red-haired, is it not? And it was she
who desired me--"

"You leaned over the rail and poured a glass of wine on my head. It was
very funny. The lady was charmed."

"I recall it perfectly. I remember that I did it under protest--it was a
very fine wine, and expensive."

"Then you also recall," said Mr. Pierce, very quietly, "that because
you were with a--well, because you were with a woman, I could not return
your compliment. But I demanded the privilege at some future date when
you were alone."

"It is a pity," replied Mr. von Inwald, "that now, when I am alone,
there is no wine!"

"No, there is no wine," Mr. Pierce agreed slowly, "but there is--"

I opened the door at that, and both of them started. Mr. von Inwald was
standing with his arms folded, and Mr. Pierce had one arm raised holding
up a glass of spring water. In another second it would have been in the
other man's face.

I walked over to Mr. Pierce and took the glass out of his hand, and his
expression was funny to see.

"I've been looking everywhere for that glass," I said. "It's got to be
washed."

Mr. von Inwald laughed and picked up his soft hat from the table.

He turned around at the door and looked back at Mr. Pierce, still
laughing.

"Accept my apologies!" he said. "It was such a fine wine, and so
expensive."

Then he went out.





CHAPTER XVI

STOP, THIEF!

I was pretty nervous when I took charge of the news stand that evening.
Amanda King had an appointment with the dentist and had left everything
topsyturvey. I was still straightening up when people began to come down
to dinner.

Miss Cobb walked over to the news stand, and she'd cut the white yoke
out of her purple silk. She looked very dressy, although somewhat thin.

"Everybody has dressed for dinner to-night, Minnie," she informed me.
"We didn't want Mr. von Inwald to have a wrong idea of American society,
especially after Mr. Carter's ridiculous conduct this afternoon, and
I wonder if you'll be sweet enough to start the phonograph in the
orchestra gallery as we go in--something with dignity, you know--the
wedding march, or the overture from Aida."

"Aida's cracked," I said shortly, "and as far as I'm concerned, Mr.
von Inwald can walk in to his meals without music, or starve to death
waiting for the band."

But she got the phonograph, anyhow, and put the elevator boy in the
gallery with it. She picked out some things by Caruso and Tetrazzini
and piled them on a chair, but James had things to himself up there, and
played The Spring Chicken through three times during dinner, with Miss
Cobb glaring at the gallery until the back of her neck ached, and the
dining-room girls waltzing in with the dishes and polka-ing out.

Mr. Moody came out when dinner was over in a fearful rage and made for
the news stand.

"One of your ideas, I suppose," he asserted. "What sort of a night am
I going to have after chewing my food to rag-time, with my jaws doing a
skirt-dance? Why in heaven's name couldn't you have had something slow,
like Handel's Largo, if you've got to have music?"

But dinner was over fifteen minutes sooner than usual. James cake-walked
everybody out to My Ann Elizer, and Miss Cobb was mortified to death.

Two or three things happened that night. For one, I got a good look at
Miss Julia Summers. She was light-haired and well-fleshed, with an ugly
face but a pleasant smile. She wore a low-necked dress that made Miss
Cobb's with the yoke out look like a storm collar, and if she had a
broken heart she didn't show it.

"Hello," she cried, looking at my hair, "are you selling tobacco here or
are you the cigar-lighter?"

"Neither," I answered, looking over her head. "I am employed as the
extinguisher of gay guests."

"Good," she said, smiling. "I'm something fine at that myself. Suppose
I stay here and help. If I watch that line of knitting women I'll be
crotcheting Arabella's wool in my sleep to-night."

Well, she was too cheerful to be angry with. So she stayed around for a
while, and it was amazing how much tobacco I sold that evening. Men who
usually bought tobies bought the best cigars, and when Mr. Jennings came
up, scowling, and I handed him the brand he'd smoked for years, she took
one, clipped the end of it as neat as a finger nail and gave it to him,
holding up the lighter.

"I'm not going to smoke yet, young woman," he said, glaring at her. But
she only smiled.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I've been waiting hungrily until some
discriminating smoker would buy one of those and light it. I love the
aroma."

And he stood there for thirty minutes, standing mostly on one foot on
account of the gouty one, puffing like a locomotive, with her sniffing
at the aroma and telling him how lonely she felt with no friends around
and just recovering from a severe illness.

At eight o'clock he had Mrs. Hutchins bring him his fur-lined coat and
he and Miss Julia took Arabella, the dog, for a walk on the veranda!

The rest of the evening was quiet, and I needed it. Miss Patty and Mr.
von Inwald talked by the fire and I think he told her something--not
all--of the scene in the spring-house. For she passed Mr. Pierce at the
foot of the stairs on her way up for the night and she pretended not to
see him. He stood there looking up after her with his mouth set, and at
the turn she glanced down and caught his eye. I thought she flushed,
but I wasn't sure, and at that minute Senator Biggs bought three
twenty-five-cent cigars and told me to keep the change from a dollar.
I was so surprised at the alteration in him that I forgot Miss Patty
entirely.

About twelve o'clock, just after I went to my room, somebody knocked at
the door. When I opened, the new doctor was standing in the hall.

"I'm sorry to disturb you," he said, "but nobody seems to know where the
pharmacy clerk is and I'll have to get some medicine."

"If I'd had my way, we'd have had a bell on that pharmacy clerk long
ago," I snapped, getting my keys. "Who's sick?"

"The big man," he replied. "Biggs is his name, I think, a senator or
something."

I was leading the way to the stairs, but I stopped. "I might have known
it," I said. "He hasn't been natural all evening. What's the matter with
him? Too much fast?"

"Fast!" He laughed. "Too much feast! He's got as pretty a case of
indigestion as I've seen for some time. He's giving a demonstration
that's almost theatrical."

Well, he insisted it was indigestion, although I argued that it wasn't
possible, and he wanted ipecac.

"I haven't seen a pharmacopoeia for so long that I wouldn't know one if
I met it," he declared, "but I've got a system of mnemonics that never
fails. Ipecac and colic both end with 'c'--I'll never forget that
conjunction. It was pounded in and poured in in my early youth."

Well, the pharmacy was locked, and we couldn't find a key to fit it. And
when I suggested mustard and warm water he jumped at the idea.

"Fine!" he said. "Better let me dish out the spring-water and you take
my job! Lead on, MacDuff, to the kitchen."

Although it was only midnight there was not a soul about. A hall leads
back of the office to the kitchen and pantries, and there was a low
light there, but the rest was dark. We bumped through the diet kitchen
and into the scullery, when we found we had no matches. I went back for
some, and when I got as far as the diet kitchen again Doctor Barnes was
there, just inside the door.

"Sh!" he whispered. "Come into the scullery. The kitchen is dark, but
there is somebody in there, fumbling around, striking matches. I suppose
you don't have such things as burglars in this neck of the woods?"

Well, somebody had broken into Timmons' candy store a week before and
stolen a box of chewing-gum and a hundred post-cards, and I told him so
in a whisper.

"Anyhow, it isn't the chef," I said. "He's had a row with the bath man
and is in bed with a cut hand and a black eye, and nobody else has any
business here."

We tiptoed into the scullery in the dark: just then somebody knocked
a kettle down in the kitchen and it hit the stove below with a crash.
Whoever was there swore, and it was not Francois, who expresses his
feelings mostly in French. This was English.

There's a little window from the kitchen into the scullery as well as
a door. The window had a wooden slide and it was open an inch or so. We
couldn't see anything, but we could hear a man moving around. Once he
struck a match, but it went out and he said "Damn!" again, and began to
feel his way toward the scullery.

Doctor Barnes happened to touch my hand and he patted it as if to tell
me not to be frightened. Then he crept toward the scullery door and
waited there.

It swung open slowly, but he waited until it closed again and the man
was in the room. Then he yelled and jumped and there was the sound of
a fall. I could hardly strike the match--I was trembling so--but when I
did there was Mr. Dick lying flat on the floor and the doctor sitting on
him.

"Mister Dick!" I gasped, and dropped the match.

"Something hit me!" Mr. Dick said feebly, and when I had got a candle
lighted and had explained to Doctor Barnes that it was a mistake, he
got off him and let him up. He was as bewildered as Mr. Dick and pretty
nearly as mad.

We put him--Mr. Dick--in a chair and gave him a glass of water, and
after he had got his breath--the doctor being a heavy man--he said he
was trying to find something to eat.

"Confound it, Minnie," he exclaimed, "we're starving! It seems to me
there are enough of you here at least to see that we are fed. Not a bite
since lunch!"

"But I thought you had the basket," I explained. "I left it at the
spring-house, and when I went back it was gone."

"So that was it!" he answered. And then he explained that just about the
time they expected their supper they saw a man carry a basket stealthily
through the snow to the deer park. It was twilight, but they watched him
from the window, and he put the basket through the barbed-wire fence and
then crawled after it. Just inside he sat down on a log and, opening
the basket, began to eat. He was still there when it got too dark to see
him.

"If that was our dinner," he finished savagely, "I hope he choked to
death over it."

Doctor Barnes chuckled. "He didn't," he said, "but he's got the worst
case of indigestion in seven counties."

Well, I got the mustard and water ready with Mr. Dick standing by hoping
Mr. Biggs would die before he got it, and then I filled a basket for the
shelter-house. I put out the light and he took the basket and started
out, but he came back in a hurry.

"There's somebody outside talking," he said. I went to the door with him
and listened.

"The sooner the better," Mike was saying. "I'm no good while I've got it
on my mind."

And Mr. Thoburn: "To-morrow is too soon: they're not in the mood yet.
Perhaps the day after. I'll let you know."

I didn't get to sleep until almost morning, and then it was to dream
that Mr. Pierce was shouting "Hypocrites" to all the people in the
sanatorium and threatening to throw glasses of mustard and warm water at
them.





CHAPTER XVII

A BUNCH OF LETTERS

When people went down to breakfast the next morning they found a card
hanging on the office door with a half dozen new rules on it, and when
I went out to the spring-house the guests were having an indignation
meeting in the sun parlor, with the bishop in the chair, and Senator
Biggs, so wobbly he could hardly stand, making a speech.

I tried to see Mr. Pierce, but early as it was he had gone for a
walk, taking Arabella with him. So I called a conference at the
shelter-house--Miss Patty, Mr. and Mrs. Van Alstyne, Mr. and Mrs. Dick,
and myself. Mrs. Dick wasn't dressed, but she sat up on the edge of her
cot in her dressing-gown, with her feet on the soap box, and yawned. As
we didn't have enough chairs, Miss Patty jerked the soap box away and
made me sit down. Mr. Dick was getting breakfast.

We were in a tight place and we knew it.

"He is making it as hard for us as he can," Mrs. Sam declared. "The idea
of having the card-room lights put out at midnight, and the breakfast
room closed at ten! Nobody gets up at that hour."

"He was to come here every evening for orders," said Mr. Dick, measuring
ground coffee with a tablespoon, as I had showed him. "He came just
once, and as for orders--well, he gave 'em to me!"

But Miss Patty was always fair.

"I loathe him," she asserted. "I want to quarrel with him the minute I
see him. He--he is presumptuous to the point of impertinence--but he's
honest: he thinks we're all hypocrites--those that are well and those
that are sick or think they are--and he hates hypocrisy."

Everybody talked at once, then, and she listened.

"Very well," she said. "I'll amend it. We're not all hypocrites. My
motives in all this are perfectly clear--and selfish."

"You and old Pierce would make a fine team, Pat," Mrs. Dick remarked
with a yawn. "I like hypocrites myself. They're so comfy. But if you're
not above advice, Pat, you'll have Aunt Honoria break her neck or
something--anything to get father back to town. Something is going to
explode, and Oskar doesn't like to be agitated."

She curled up on the cot with that and went sound asleep. The rest of us
had coffee and talked, but there wasn't anything to do. As Mr. Sam said,
Mr. Pierce didn't want to stay, anyhow, and as likely as not if we went
to him in a body and told him he must come to the shelter-house for
instructions, and be suave and gentle when he was called down by the
guests about the steam-pipes making a racket, he'd probably prefer to go
down to the village and take Doctor Barnes' place washing dishes at the
station. That wouldn't call for any particular mildness.

But he settled it by appearing himself. He came across the snow from the
direction of Mount Hope, and he had a pair of skees over his shoulder.
(At that time I didn't even know the name of the things, but I learned
enough about them later.) I must say he looked very well beside Mr.
Dick, who wasn't very large, anyhow, and who hadn't had time to put on
his collar, and Mr. Sam, who's always thin and sallow and never takes a
step he doesn't have to.

I let him in, and when he saw us all there he started and hesitated.

"Come in, Pierce," Mr. Sam said. "We've just been talking about you."

He came in, but he didn't look very comfortable.

"What have you decided to do with me?" he asked. "Put me under
restraint?"

He was unbuttoning his sweater, and now he took out two of the smallest
rabbits I ever saw and held them up by the ears. Miss Patty gave a
little cry and took them, cuddling them in her lap.

"They're starving and almost frozen, poor little devils," he said. "I
found them near where I shot the mother last night, Minnie, and by way
of atonement I'm going to adopt them."

Well, although the minute before they'd all been wishing they'd never
seen him, they pretty nearly ate him up. Miss Patty held the rabbits, so
we all had turns at feeding them warm milk with a teaspoon and patting
their pink noses. When it came Mr. Pierce's turn they were about full
up, so he curled his big body on the floor at Miss Patty's feet and
talked to the rabbits and looked at her. He had one of those faces
that's got every emotion marked on it as clear as a barometer--when he
was mad his face was mad all over, and when he was pleased he glowed to
the tips of his ears. And he was pleased that morning.

But, of course, he had to be set right about the sanatorium, and Mr. Sam
began it. Mr. Pierce listened, sitting on the floor and looking puzzled
and more and more unhappy. Finally he got up and drew a long breath.

"Exactly," he agreed. "I know you are all right and I'm wrong--according
to your way of thinking. But if these people want to be well, why should
I encourage them to do the wrong thing? They eat too much, they don't
exercise"--he turned to Mr. Van Alstyne.

"Why, do you know, I asked a half dozen of the men--one after the
other--to go skeeing with me this morning and not one of them accepted!"

"Really!" Mr. Sam exclaimed mockingly.

"What can you do with people like that?" Mr. Pierce went on. "They don't
want to be well; they're all hypocrites. Look at that man Biggs! I'll
lay you ten to one that after fasting five days and then stealing a
whole chicken, a dozen oysters and Lord knows what else, now that he's
sick, he'll hold it against me."

"He's not holding anything," I objected.

"Because HE is a hypocrite--" Mr. Sam began.

"That's not the point, Pierce," Mr. Dick broke in importantly. "You were
to come here for orders and you haven't done it. You're running this
place for me, not for yourself."

Mr. Pierce looked at Mr. Dick and from there to Mr. Sam and smiled.

"I did come," he explained. "I came twice, and each time we played
roulette. I lost all the money I'd had in advance. Honestly," he
confessed, "I felt I couldn't afford to come every day."

Miss Patty got up and put the baby rabbits into her sister's big fur
muff.

"We are all talking around the question," she said. "Mr. Pierce
undertook to manage the sanatorium, and to try to manage it
successfully. He can not do that without making some attempt at
conciliating the people. It's--it's absurd to antagonize them."

"Exactly," he said coldly. "I was to manage it, and to try to do it
successfully. I'm sorry my methods don't meet with the approval of
this--er--executive committee. But it might as well be clear that I
intend to use my own methods--or none."

Well, what could we do? Miss Patty went out with her head up, and the
rest of us stayed and ate humble pie, and after a while he agreed to
stay if he wasn't interfered with. He said he and Doctor Barnes had a
plan that he thought was a winner--that it would either make or break
the place, and he thought it would make it. And by that time we were so
meek that we didn't even ask what it was.

Doctor Barnes and Miss Summers were the first to come to the mineral
spring that morning. She stopped just inside the door and sniffed.

"Something's dead under the floor," she said.

"If there's anything dead," Doctor Barnes replied, "it's in the center
of the earth. That's the sulphur water."

She came in at that, but unwillingly, and sat down with her handkerchief
to her nose. Then she saw me.

"Good gracious!" she exclaimed. "What have you done that they put you
here?"

"If you mean the bouquet from the spring, you get to like it after a
while," I said grimly. "Ordinary air hasn't got any snap for me now."

"Humph!" She looked at me suspiciously, but I was busy wiping off the
tables. "Well," she said, holding up the glass Doctor Barnes had brought
her, "it doesn't cost me anything, so here goes. But think of paying
money for it!"

She drank it down in a gulp and settled herself in her chair.

"What'll it do to me?" she asked. "Mixed drinks always play the deuce
with me, Barnes, and you know it."

"If you'll cut down your diet and take some exercise it will make you
thin," I began. "'The process is painless and certain: kindly nature in
her benevolent plan--'"

"Give me another!" she interrupted, and Doctor Barnes filled her glass
again. "Some women spell fate f-a-t-e," she said, looking at the water,
"but I spell it without the e."

She took half of it and then put down the glass. "Honestly," she
declared, "I'd rather be fat."

Mr. Pierce met them there a few minutes later and they had a
three-cornered chat. But Miss Summers evidently didn't know just how
much I knew and was careful of what she said. Once, however, when I was
in the pantry she thought I was beyond ear-shot.

"Good heavens, Pierce," she said, "if they could put THAT in a play!"

"Cut it out, Julia," Doctor Barnes snapped, and it wasn't until they had
gone that I knew she'd meant me. I looked through the crack of the door
and she was leaning over taking a puff at Doctor Barnes' cigarette.

"Curious old world, isn't it?" she said between puffs. "Here we are the
three of us--snug and nice, having seven kinds of hell-fire water and
not having to pay for it; three meals a day and afternoon tea ditto,
good beds and steam-heat ditto--and four days ago where were we? Pierce,
you were hocking your clothes! Doc, you--"

"Washing dishes!" he said. "I never knew before how extravagant it is to
have a saucer under a cup!"

"And I!" she went on, "I, Julia Summers, was staring at a ceiling in the
Finleyville hotel, with a face that looked like a toy balloon."

"And now," said Doctor Barnes, "you are more beautiful than ever. I am a
successful physician--oh, lord, Julia, if you'd hear me faking lines in
my part! And my young friend here--Pierce--Julia, Pierce has now become
a young reprobate named Dicky Carter, and may the Lord have mercy on his
soul!"

I tried to get out in time, but I was too late. I saw her rise, saw the
glass of water at her elbow roll over and smash on the floor, and saw
her clutch wildly at Mr. Pierce's shoulder.

"Not--not DICKY Carter!" she cried.

"Richard--they call him Dick," Mr. Pierce said uneasily, and loosened
her fingers from his coat.

Oh, well, everybody knows it now--how she called Mr. Dick everything in
the calendar, and then began to cry and said nobody would ever know what
she'd been through with, and the very dress she had on was a part of
the trousseau she'd had made, and what with the dressmaker's bills--

Suddenly she stopped crying.

"Where is he, anyhow?" she demanded.

"All we are sure of," Mr. Pierce replied quietly, "is that he is not in
the sanatorium."

She looked at us all closely, but she got nothing from my face.

"Oh, very well," she said, shrugging her shoulders, "I'll wait until he
shows up. It doesn't cost anything."

Then, with one of her easy changes, she laughed and picked up her muff
to go.

"Minnie and I," she said, "will tend bar here, and in our leisure
moments we will pour sulphur water on a bunch of Dicky's letters that I
have, to cool 'em." She walked to the door and turned around, smiling.

"Carry fire insurance on 'em all the time," she finished and went out,
leaving us staring at one another!





CHAPTER XVIII

MISS COBB'S BURGLAR

I went to bed early that night. What with worrying and being alternately
chilled by tramping through the snow and roasted as if I was sitting on
a volcano with an eruption due, I was about all in. We'd been obliged to
tell Mrs. Sam about the Summers woman, and I had to put hot flannels on
her from nine to ten. She was quieter when I

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