Читать книгу The Wrong Twin - Harry Leon Wilson - Страница 26

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An establishment in Newbern Center, trading under the name of the Foto Art Shop, once displayed in its window a likeness of the twin sons of Dave Cowan. Side by side, on a lavishly fringed plush couch, they confronted the camera with differing aspects. One sat forward with a decently, even blandly, composed visage, nor had he meddled with his curls. His mate sat back, scowling, and fought the camera to the bitter end. His curls, at the last moment, had been mussed by a raging hand.

This was in the days of an earlier Newbern, when the twins were four and Winona Penniman began to be their troubled mentor—troubled lest they should not grow up to be refined persons; a day when Dave Cowan, the widely travelled printer, could rightly deride its citizenry as small-towners; a day when the Whipples were Newbern's sole noblesse and the Cowan twins not yet torn asunder.

The little town lay along a small but potent river that turned a few factory wheels with its eager current, and it drew sustenance from the hill farms that encircled it for miles about. You had to take a dingy way train up to the main line if you were going the long day's journey to New York, so that the Center of the name was often construed facetiously by outlanders.

Now Newbern Center is modern, and grows callous. Only the other day a wandering biplane circled the second nine of its new golf course, and of the four players on the tenth green but one paid it the tribute of an upward glance. Even this was a glance of resentment, for his partner at that instant eyed the alignment for a three-foot putt and might be distracted. The annoyed player flung up a hostile arm at the thing and waved it from the course. Seemingly abashed, the machine slunk off into a cloud bank.

Old Sharon Whipple, the player who putted, never knew that above him had gone a thing he had very lately said could never be. Sharon has grown modern with the town. Not so many years ago he scoffed at rumours of a telephone. He called it a contraption, and said it would be against the laws of God and common sense. Later he proscribed the horseless carriage as an impracticable toy. Of flying he had affirmed that the fools who tried it would deservedly break their necks, and he had gustily raged at the waste of a hundred and seventy-five acres of good pasture land when golf was talked.

Yet this very afternoon the inconsequent dotard had employed a telephone to summon his car to transport him to the links, and had denied even a glance of acknowledgment at the wonder floating above him. Much like that is growing Newbern. There was gasping aplenty when Winona Penniman abandoned the higher life and bought a flagrant pair of satin dancing slippers, but now the town lets far more sensational doings go almost unremarked.

The place tosses even with the modern fever of unrest. It has its bourgeoisie, its proletariat, its radicals, but also a city-beautiful association and a rather captious sanitary league. Lately a visiting radical, on the occasion of a certain patriotic celebration, expressed a conventional wish to spit upon the abundantly displayed flag. A knowing friend was quick to dissuade him.

"Don't do it! Don't try it! Here, now, you got no freedom! Should you spit only on their sidewalk, they fine the heart's blood out of you."

Midway between these periods of very early and very late Newbern there was once a shining summer morning on which the Cowan twins, being then nine years old, set out from the Penniman home to pick wild blackberries along certain wooded lanes that environed the town. They were bare-footed, wearing knee pants buttoned to calico waists, these being patterned with small horseshoes which the twins had been told by their father would bring them good luck. They wore cloth caps, and carried tin pails for their berries. These would be sold to the Pennimans at an agreed price of five cents a quart, and it was Winona's hope that the money thus earned on a beautiful Saturday morning would on Sunday be given to the visiting missionary lately returned from China. Winona had her doubts, however, chiefly of Wilbur Cowan's keenness for proselyting, on his own income, in foreign lands. Too often with money in hand, he had yielded to the grosser tyranny of the senses.

The twins ran races in the soft dust of the highway until they reached the first outlying berry patch. Here they became absorbed in their work. They were finding well-laden bushes along the fence of what to-day is known as the old graveyard.

Newbern now has a sophisticated new cemetery, with carved marble and tall shafts of polished granite, trimmed shrubs, and garnished mounds, contrasting—as the newer town to the old—with the dingy inclosure where had very simply been inhumed the dead of that simpler day. In the new cemetery blackberry bushes would not be permitted. Along the older plot they flourished. The place itself is over-grown with rank grasses, with ivy run wild, with untended shrubs, often hiding the memorials, which are mostly of brown sandstone or gray slate. It lies in deep shadow under cypress and willow. It is very still under the gloom of its careless growths—a place not reassuring to the imaginative.

The bottoms of the tin pails had been covered with berries found outside the board fence, and now a hunt for other laden bushes led the twins to a trove of ripened fruit partly outside and partly inside that plot where those of old Newbern had been chested and laid unto their fathers. There was, of course, no question as to the ownership of that fruit out here. It was any one's. There followed debate on a possible right to that which grew abundantly beyond the fence. By some strange but not unprecedented twisting of the mature mind of authority, might it not belong to those inside, or to those who had put them there? Further, would Mrs. Penniman care to make pies of blackberries—even the largest and ripest yet found—that had grown in a graveyard?

"They taste just the same," announced the Wilbur twin, having, after a cautious survey, furtively reached through two boards of the fence to retrieve a choice cluster.

"I guess nobody would want 'em that owns 'em," conceded Wilbur.

"Well, you climb over first."

"We better both go together at the same time."

"No, one of us better try it first and see; then, if it's all right, I'll climb over, too."

"Aw, I know a better patch up over West Hill in the Whipple woods."

"What you afraid of? Nobody would care about a few old blackberries."

"I ain't afraid."

"You act like it, I must say. If you wasn't afraid you'd climb that fence pretty quick, wouldn't you? Looky, the big ones!"

The Wilbur twin reflected on this. It sounded plausible. If he wasn't afraid, of course he would climb that fence pretty quick. It stood to reason. It did not occur to him that any one else was afraid. He decided that neither was he.

"Well, I'm afraid of things that ain't true that scare you in the dark," he admitted, "but I ain't afraid like that now. Not one bit!"

"Well, I dare you to go."

"Well, of course I'll go. I was just resting a minute. I got to rest a little, haven't I?"

"Well, I guess you're rested. I guess you can climb a plain and simple fence, can't you? You can rest over there, can't you—just as well as what you can rest here?"

The resting one looked up and down the lane, then peered forward into the shadowy tangle of green things with its rows of headstones. Then, inhaling deeply, he clambered to the top of the fence and leaped to the ground beyond.

"Gee, gosh!" he cried, for he had landed on a trailing branch of blackberry vine.

He sat down and extracted a thorn from the leathery sole of his bare foot. The prick of the thorn had cleaned his mind of any merely fanciful fears. A surpassing lot of berries was there for the bold to take. His brother stared not too boldly through the fence at the pioneer.

"Go on and try picking some," he urged in the subdued tones of extreme caution.

The other calmly set to work. The watcher awaited some mysterious punishment for this desecration. Presently, nothing having happened, he glowed with a boldness of his own and mounted to the top of the fence, where he again waited. He whistled, affecting to be at ease, but with a foot on the safe side of the fence. The busy worker inside paid him no attention. Presently Merle yawned.

"Well, I guess I'll come in there myself and pick a few berries," he said very loudly.

He was giving fair notice to any malign power that might be waiting to blast him. After a fitting interval, he joined his brother and fell to work.

"Well, I must say!" he chattered. "Who's afraid to come into a graveyard when they can get berries like this? We can fill the pails, and that's thirty cents right here."

The fruit fell swiftly. The Wilbur twin worked in silence. But Merle appeared rather to like the sound of a human voice. He was aimlessly loquacious. His nerves were not entirely tranquil.

"They're growing right over this old one," announced Wilbur presently. Merle glanced up to see him despoiling a bush that embowered one of the brown headstones and an all but obliterated mound.

"You better be careful," he warned.

"I guess I'm careful enough for this old one," retorted the bolder twin, and swept the trailing bush aside to scan the stone. It was weather-worn and lichened, but the carving was still legible.

"It says, 'Here lies Jonas Whipple, aged eighty-seven,' and it says, 'he passed to his reward April 23, 1828,' and here's his picture."

He pointed to the rounded top of the stone where was graven a circle inclosing primitive eyes, a nose, and mouth. From the bottom of the circle on either side protruded wings.

Merle drew near to scan the device. He was able to divine that the intention of the artist had not been one of portraiture.

"That ain't either his picture," he said, heatedly. "That's a cupid!"

"Ho, gee, gosh! Ain't cupids got legs? Where's its legs?"

"Then it's an angel."

"Angels are longer. I know now—it's a goop. And here's some more reading."

He ran his fingers along the worn lettering, then brought his eyes close and read—glibly in the beginning:

Behold this place as you pass by.

As you are now, so once was I.

As I am now, so you must be.

Prepare for death, and follow me.

The reader's voice lost in fullness and certainty as he neared the end of this strophe.

"Say, we better get right out of here," said Merle, stepping toward the fence. Even Wilbur was daunted by the blunt warning from beyond.

"Here's another," called Merle, pausing on his way toward the fence. In hushed, fearful tones he declaimed:

Dear companion in your bloom,

Behold me moldering in the tomb,

For

Death is a debt to Nature due,

Which I have paid, and so must you.

"There, now, I must say!" called Merle. "We better hurry out!"

But the Wilbur twin lingered. Ripe berries still glistened about the stone of the departed Jonas Whipple.

"Aw, gee, gosh, they're just old ones!" he declared. "It says this one passed to his reward in 1828, and we wasn't born then, so he couldn't be meaning us, could he? We ain't passed to our reward yet, have we? I simply ain't going to pay the least attention to it."

A bit nervously he fell again to picking the berries. The mere feel of them emboldened him.

"Gee, gosh! We ain't followed him yet, have we?"

"'As I am now, so you must be!'" quoted the other in warning.

"Well, my sakes, don't everyone in town know that? But it don't mean we're going to be—be it—right off."

"You better come just the samey!"

But the worker was stubborn.

"Ho, I guess I ain't afraid of any old Whipple as old as what this one is!"

"Well, anyway," called Merle, still in hushed tones, "I guess I got enough berries from this place."

"Aw, come on!" urged the worker.

In a rush of bravado he now extemporized a chant of defiance:

Old Jonas Whipple

Was an old cripple!

Old Jonas Whipple

Was an old cripple!

The Merle twin found this beyond endurance. He leaped for the fence and gained its top, looking back with a blanched face to see the offender smitten. He wanted to go at once, but this might be worth waiting for.

Wilbur continued to pick berries. Again he chanted loudly, mocking the solemnities of eternity:

Old Jonas Whipple

Was an old cripple!

Was an old—

The mockery died in his throat, and he froze to a statue of fear. Beyond the headstone of Jonas Whipple, and toward the centre of the plot, a clump of syringa was plainly observed to sway with the movements of a being unseen.

"I told you!" came the hoarse whisper of Merle, but he, too, was chained by fright to the fence top.

They waited, breathless, in the presence of the king of terrors. Again the bush swayed with a sinister motion. A deeper hush fell about them; the breeze died and song birds stilled their notes. A calamity was imminent. Neither watcher now doubted that a mocked Jonas Whipple would terribly issue from the tangle of shrubbery.

The bushes were again agitated; then at the breaking, point of fear for the Cowan twins the emergent figure proved to be not Jonas but a trifling and immature female descendant of his, who now sped rapidly toward them across the intervening glade, nor were the low mounds sacred to her in her progress. Her short shirt of a plaid gingham flopped above her thin, bony legs as she ran, and she grasped a wide-brimmed straw hat in one hand.

It should be said that this girl appalled the twins hardly less than would an avenging apparition of the outraged Jonas Whipple. Beings of a baser extraction, they had looked upon Whipples only from afar and with awe. Upon this particular Whipple they had looked with especial awe. Other known members of the tribe were inhumanly old and gray and withered, not creatures with whom the most daring fancy could picture the Cowan twins sustaining any sane human relationship. But this one was young and moderately understandable. Observed from across the room of the Methodist Sunday-school, she was undoubtedly human like them; but always so befurbished with rare and shining garments, with glistening silks and costly velvets and laces, with bonnets of pink rosebuds and gloves of kid, that the thought of any secular relationship had been preposterous. Yet she was young, an animal of their own age, whose ways could be comprehended.

She halted her mad flight when she discovered them, then turned to survey the way she had come. She was panting. The twins regarded her stonily, shaping defenses if she brought up anything regarding any one who might have mocked Jonas Whipple.

When again she could breathe evenly, she said: "It was Cousin Juliana driving by was why I dashed in here. I think I have foiled her."

She was not now the creature of troubled elegance that Sabbaths had revealed her. The gingham dress was such as a daughter of the people might have worn, and the straw hat, though beribboned, was not impressive. She was a bony little girl, with quick, greenish eyes and a meagre pigtail of hair of the hue that will often cause a girl to be called Carrots. Her thin, eager face was lavishly freckled; her nose was trivial to the last extreme. Besides her hat, she carried and now nonchalantly drew refreshment from a stick of spirally striped candy inserted for half its length through the end of a lemon. The candy was evidently of a porous texture, so that the juice of the fruit would reach the consumer's pursed lips charmingly modified by its passage along the length of the sweet. One needed but to approximate a vacuum at the upper end of the candy, and the mighty and mysterious laws of atmospheric pressure completed the benign process.

It should be said for the twins that they were not social climbers. In their instant infatuation for this novel device they quite lost the thrill that should have been theirs from the higher aspects of the encounter. They were not impressed at meeting a Whipple on terms of seeming equality. They had eyes and desire solely for this delectable refection. Again and again the owner enveloped the top of the candy with prehensile lips; deep cavities appeared in her profusely spangled cheeks. Her eyes would close in an ecstasy of concentration. The twins stared, and at intervals were constrained to swallow.

"Gee, gosh!" muttered the Wilbur twin, helpless in the sight of so fierce a joy. His brother descended briskly from the fence.

"I bet that's good," he said, genially, and taking the half-filled pail from his brother's unresisting grasp he approached the newcomer. "Try some of these nice ripe blackberries," he royally urged.

"Thanks a lot!" said the girl, and did so. But the hospitality remained one-sided.

"I have to keep up my strength," she explained. "I have a long, hard journey before me. I'm running away."

Blackberry juice now stained her chin, enriching a colour scheme already made notable by dye from the candy.

"Running away!" echoed the twins. This, also, was sane.

"Where to?" demanded Wilbur.

"Far, far off to the great city with all its pitfalls."

"New York?" demanded Merle. "What's a pitfall?"

"The way Ben Blunt did when his cruel stepmother beat him because he wouldn't steal and bring it home."

"Ben Blunt?" questioned both twins.

"That's whom I am going to be. That's whom I am now—or just as soon as I change clothes with some unfortunate. It's in a book. 'Ben Blunt, the Newsboy; or, From Rags to Riches.' He run off because his cruel stepmother beat him black and blue, and he become a mere street urchin, though his father, Mr. Blunt, was a gentleman in good circumstances; and while he was a mere street urchin he sold papers and blacked boots, and he was an honest, manly lad and become adopted by a kind, rich old gentleman named Mr. Pettigrew, that he saved from a gang of rowdies that boded him no good, and was taken to his palatial mansion and given a kind home and a new suit of clothes and a good Christian education, and that's how he got from rags to riches. And I'm going to be it; I'm going to be a mere street urchin and do everything he did."

"Ho!" The Wilbur twin was brutal. "You're nothing but a girl!"

The runaway flashed him a hostile glance.

"Don't be silly! What difference does it make? Haven't I a cruel stepmother that is constantly making scenes if I do the least little thing, especially since Miss Murtree went home because her mother has typhoid in Buffalo. You wait till I get the right clothes."

"Does she beat you something awful?" demanded the Merle twin unctuously.

The victim hesitated.

"Well, you might call it that."

"What kind of right clothes?" asked his brother.

"Boy's clothes; filthy rags of boy's clothes—like yours," she concluded. Her appraising glance rested on the garments of the questioning twin. Both became conscious of their mean attire, and squirmed uneasily.

"These are just everyday clothes," muttered the Wilbur twin.

"We have fine new Sunday suits at home," boasted Merle. "Too fine to wear every day. If you saw those clothes once I guess you'd talk different. Shoes and stockings, too."

The girl effaced his grandeur with a shrug.

"That's nothing—everyone has mere Sunday clothes."

"Is Miss Murtree that old lady that brings you to the Sunday-school?" demanded Wilbur.

"Yes; she's my governess, and had to go to her dying mother, and I hope she gets a cruel stepmother that will be harsh to her childish sports, like that Mrs. Blunt was. But she isn't old. It's her beard makes her look so mature."

"Aw!" cried both twins, denoting incredulity.

"She has, too, a beard! A little moustache and some growing on her chin. When I first got 'Ben Blunt, or from Rags to Riches,' out of the Sunday-school library I asked her how she made it grow, because I wanted one to grow on me, but she made a scene and never did tell me. I wish it would come out on me that way." She ran questing fingers along her brief upper lip and round her pointed chin. "But prob'ly I ain't old enough."

"You're only a girl," declared the Wilbur twin, "and you won't ever have a beard, and you couldn't be Ben Blunt."

"Only a girl!" she flashed, momentarily stung into a defense of her sex. "Huh! I guess I'd rather be a girl than a nasty little boy with his hands simply covered with warts."

The shamed hands of Wilbur Cowan sought the depths of his pockets, but he came up from the blow.

"Yes, you'd rather be a girl!" he retorted, with ponderous irony. "It's a good thing you wasn't born in China. Do you know what? If you'd been born in China, when they seen what it was they'd simply have chucked you into the river to drown'd."

"The idea! They would not!"

"Ho! You're so smart! I guess you think you know more than that missionary that told us so at the meeting. I guess you think he was telling lies. They'd have drownded you as soon as they seen it was a girl. But boys they keep."

"I don't listen to gossip," said the girl, loftily.

"And besides," continued the inquisitor, "if you think boys are such bad ones, what you trying to be one for, and be Ben Blunt and all like that?"

"You're too young to understand if I told you," she replied with a snappish dignity.

The Merle twin was regretting these asperities. His eyes clung constantly to the lemon and candy.

"She can be Ben Blunt if she wants to," he now declared in a voice of authority. "I bet she'll have a better moustache than that old Miss Murphy's."

"Murtree," she corrected him, and spoke her thanks with a brightening glance. "Here," she added, proffering her treasure, "take a good long suck if you want to."

He did want to. His brother beheld him with anguished eyes. As Merle demonstrated the problem in hydraulics the girl studied him more attentively, then gleamed with a sudden new radiance.

"Oh, I'll tell you what let's do!" she exclaimed. "We'll change clothes with each other, and then I'll be Ben Blunt without waiting till I get to the great city. Cousin Juliana could pass me right by on the street and never know me." She clapped her small brown hands. "Goody!" she finished.

But the twins stiffened. The problem was not so simple.

"How do you mean—change clothes?" demanded Merle.

"Why, just change! I'll put on your clothes and look like a mere street urchin right away."

"But what am I going to—"

"Put on my clothes, of course. I explained that."

"Be dressed like a girl?"

"Only till you get home; then you can put on your Sunday clothes."

"But they wouldn't be Sunday clothes if I had to wear 'em every day, and then I wouldn't have any Sunday clothes."

"Stupid! You can buy new ones, can't you?"

"Well, I don't know."

"I'd give you a lot of money to buy some."

"Let's see it."

Surprisingly the girl stuck out a foot. Her ankle seemed badly swollen; she seemed even to reveal incipient elephantiasis.

"Money!" she announced. "Busted my bank and took it all. And I put it in my stocking the way Miss Murtree did when she went to Buffalo to visit her dying mother. But hers was bills, and mine is nickels and dimes and quarters and all like that—thousands of dollars' worth of 'em, and they're kind of disagreeable. They make me limp—kind of. I'll give you a lot of it to buy some new clothes. Let's change quick." She turned and backed up to the Merle twin. "Unbutton my waist," she commanded.

The Merle twin backed swiftly away. This was too summary a treatment of a situation that still needed thought.

"Let's see your money," he demanded.

"Very well!" She sat on the grassy low mound above her forebear, released the top of the long black stocking from the bite of a hidden garter and lowered it to the bulky burden. "Give me your cap," she said, and into Merle's cap spurted a torrent of coins. When this had become reduced to a trickle, and then to odd pieces that had worked down about the heel, the cap held a splendid treasure. Both twins bent excitedly above it. Never had either beheld so vast a sum. It was beyond comprehension. The Wilbur twin plunged a hand thrillingly into the heap.

"Gee, gosh!" he murmured from the sheer loveliness of it. Shining silver—thousands of dollars of it, the owner had declared.

"Now I guess you'll change," said the girl, observing the sensation she had made.

The twins regarded each other eloquently. It seemed to be acknowledged between them that anything namable would be done to obtain a share of this hoard. Still it was a monstrous infamy, this thing she wanted. Merle filtered coins through his fingers for the wondrous feel of them.

"Well, mebbe we better," he said at last.

"How much do we get?" demanded Wilbur, exalted but still sane.

"Oh, a lot!" said the girl, carelessly. Plainly she was not one to haggle. "Here, I'll give you two double handfuls—see, like that," and she measured the price into the other cap, not skimping. They were generous, heaping handfuls, and they reduced her horde by half. "Now!" she urged. "And hurry! I must be far by nightfall. I'll keep my shoes and stockings and not go barefoot till I reach the great city. But I'll take your clothes and your cap. Unbutton my waist."

Again she backed up to Merle. He turned to Wilbur.

"I guess we better change with her for all that money. Get your pants and waist off and I'll help button this thing on you."

It was characteristic of their relations that there was no thought of Merle being the victim of this barter. The Wilbur twin did not suggest it, but he protested miserably.

"I don't want to wear a girl's clothes."

"Silly!" said the girl. "It's for your own good."

"You only put it on for a minute, and sneak home quick," reminded his brother, "and look at all the money we'll have! Here, show him again all that money we'll have!"

And the girl did even so, holding up to him riches beyond the dreams of avarice. There was bitterness in the eyes of the Wilbur twin even as they gloated on the bribe. The ordeal would be fearful. He was to become a thing—not a girl and still not a boy—a thing somehow shameful. At last the alternative came to him.

"You change with her," he said, brightening. "My pants got a tear here on the side, and my waist ain't so clean as yours."

"Now don't begin that!" said his brother, firmly. "We don't want a lot of silly arguments about it, do we? Look at all the money we'll have!"

"Your clothes are the best," said the girl. "I must be filthy and ragged. Oh, please hurry!" Then to Merle: "Do unbutton my waist. Start it at the top and I can finish."

Gingerly he undid the earliest buttons on that narrow back of checked gingham, and swiftly the girl completed the process to her waist. Then the waist was off her meagre shoulders and she stepped from the hated garment. The Wilbur twin was aghast at her downright methods. He had a feeling that she should have retired for this change. How was he to know that an emergency had lifted her above prejudices sacred to the meaner souled? But now he raised a new objection, for beneath her gown the girl had been still abundantly and intricately clad, girded, harnessed.

"I can't ever put on all those other things," he declared, indicating the elaborate underdressing.

"Very well, I'll keep 'em on under the pants and waist till I get to the great city," said the girl, obligingly. "But why don't you hurry?"

She tossed him the discarded dress. He was seized with fresh panic as he took the thing.

"I don't like to," he said, sullenly.

"Look at all the money we'll have!" urged the brother.

"Here," said the girl, beguilingly, "when you've done it I'll give you two long sucks of my lemon candy."

She took the enticing combination from Merle and held it fair before his yearning eyes; the last rite of a monstrous seduction was achieved. The victim wavered and was lost. He took the dress.

"Whistle if any one comes," he said, and withdrew behind the headstone of the late Jonas Whipple. He—of the modest sex—would not disrobe in public. At least it was part modesty; in part the circumstance that his visible garments were precisely all he wore. He would not reveal to this child of wealth that the Cowans had not the habit of multifarious underwear. Over the headstone presently came the knee pants, the faded calico waist with bone buttons. The avid buyer seized and apparelled herself in them with a deft facility. The Merle twin was amazed that she should so soon look so much like a boy. From behind the headstone came the now ambiguous and epicene figure of the Wilbur twin, contorted to hold together the back of his waist.

"I can't button it," he said in deepest gloom.

"Here!" said the girl.

"Not you!"

It seemed to him that this would somehow further degrade him. At least another male should fasten this infamous thing about him. When the buttoning was done he demanded the promised candy and lemon. He glutted himself with the stimulant. He had sold his soul and was taking the price. His wrists projected far from the gingham sleeves, and in truth he looked little enough like a girl. The girl looked much more like a boy. The further price of his shame was paid in full.

"I'd better take charge of it," said Merle, and did so with an air of large benevolence. "I just don't know what all we'll spend it for," he added.

The Wilbur twin's look of anguish deepened.

"I got a pocket in this dress to hold my money," he suggested.

"You might lose it," objected Merle. "I better keep it for us."

The girl had transferred her remaining money to the pockets which, as a boy, she now possessed. Then she tried on the cap. But it proved to be the cap of Merle.

"No; you must take Wilbur's cap," he said, "because you got his clothes."

"And he can wear my hat," said the girl.

The Wilbur twin viciously affirmed that he would wear no girl's hat, yet was presently persuaded that he would, at least when he sneaked home. It was agreed by all finally that this would render him fairly a girl in the eyes of the world. But he would not yet wear it. He was beginning to hate this girl. He shot hostile glances at her as—with his cap on her head, her hands deep in the money-laden pockets—she swaggered and swanked before them.

"I'm Ben Blunt—I'm Ben Blunt," she muttered, hoarsely, and swung her shoulders and brandished her thin legs to prove it.

He laughed with scorn.

"Yes, you are!" he gibed. "Look at your hair! I guess Ben Blunt didn't have long girl's hair, did he—stringy old red hair?"

Her hands flew to her pigtail.

"My hair is not red," she told him. "It's just a decided blonde." Then she faltered, knowing full well that Ben Blunt's hair was not worn in a braid. "Of course I'm going to cut it off," she said. "Haven't you boys got a knife?"

They had a knife. It was Wilbur's, but Merle quite naturally took it from him and assumed charge of the ensuing operation. Wilbur Cowan had to stand by with no place to put his hands—a mere onlooker. Yet it was his practical mind that devised the method at last adopted, for the early efforts of his brother to sever the braid evoked squeals of pain from the patient. At Wilbur's suggestion she was backed up to the fence and the braid brought against a board, where it could be severed strand by strand. It was not neatly done, but it seemed to suffice. When the cap was once more adjusted, rather far back on the shorn head, even the cynical Wilbur had to concede that the effect was not bad. The severed braid, a bow of yellow ribbon at the end, now engaged the notice of its late owner.

"The officers of the law might trace me by it," she said, "so we must foil them."

"Tie a stone to it and sink it in the river," urged Wilbur.

"Hide it in those bushes," suggested Merle.

But the girl was inspired by her surroundings.

"Bury it!" she ordered.

The simple interment was performed. With the knife a shallow grave was opened close to the stone whereon old Jonas Whipple taunted the living that they were but mortal, and in it they laid the pigtail to its last rest, patting the earth above it and replacing the turf against possible ghouls.

Again the girl swaggered broadly before them, swinging her shoulders, flaunting her emancipated legs in a stride she considered masculine. Then she halted, hands in pockets, rocked easily upon heel and toe, and spat expertly between her teeth. For the first time she impressed the Wilbur twin, extorting his reluctant admiration. He had never been able to spit between his teeth. Still, there must be things she couldn't do.

"You got to smoke and chew and curse," he warned her.

"I won't, either! It says Ben Blunt was a sturdy lad of good habits. Besides, I could smoke if I wanted to. I already have. I smoked Harvey D.'s pipe."

"Who's Harvey D.?"

"My father. I smoked his pipe repeatedly."

"Repeatedly?"

"Well, I smoked it twice. That's repeatedly, ain't it? I'd have done it more repeatedly, but Miss Murtree sneaked in and made a scene."

"Did you swallow the smoke through your nose?"

"I—I guess so. It tasted way down on my insides."

Plainly there was something to the girl after all. The Wilbur twin here extracted from the dress pocket, to which he had transferred his few belongings, the half of something known to Newbern as a pennygrab. It was a slender roll of quite inferior dark tobacco, and the original purchaser had probably discarded it gladly. The present owner displayed it to the girl.

"I'll give you a part of this, and we'll light up."

"Well, I don't know. It says Ben Blunt was a sturdy lad of good——"

"I bet you never did smoke repeatedly!"

Her manhood was challenged.

"I'll show you!" she retorted, grim about the lips.

With his knife he cut the evil thing in fair halves. The girl received her portion with calmness, if not with gratitude, and lighted it from the match he gallantly held for her. And so they smoked. The Merle twin never smoked for two famous Puritan reasons—it was wrong for boys to smoke and it made him sick. He eyed the present saturnalia with strong disapproval. The admiration of the Wilbur twin—now forgetting his ignominy—was frankly worded. Plainly she was no common girl.

"I bet you'll be all right in the big city," he said.

"Of course I will," said the girl.

She spat between her teeth with a fine artistry. In truth she was spitting rather often, and had more than once seemed to strangle, but she held her weed jauntily between the first and second fingers and contrived an air of relish for it.

"Anyway," she went on, "it'll be better than here where I suffered so terribly with everybody making the vilest scenes about any little thing that happened. After they find it's too late they'll begin to wish they'd acted kinder. But I won't ever come back, not if they beg me to with tears streaming down their faces, after the vile way they acted; saying maybe I could have a baby brother after Harvey D. got that stepmother, but nothing was ever done about it, and just because I tried to hide Mrs. Wadley's baby that comes to wash, and then because I tried to get that gypsy woman's baby, because everyone knows they're always stealing other people's babies, and she made a vile scene, too, and everyone tortured me beyond endurance."

This was interesting. It left the twins wishing to ask questions.

"Did that stepmother beat you good?" again demanded Merle.

"Well, not the way Ben Blunt's stepmother did, but she wanted to know what I meant by it and all like that. Of course she's cruel. Don't you know that all stepmothers are cruel? Did you ever read a story about one that wasn't vile and cruel and often tried to leave the helpless children in the woods to be devoured by wolves? I should say not!"

"Where did you hide that Wadley baby?"

"Up in the storeroom in a nice big trunk, where I fixed a bed and everything for it, while its mother was working down in the laundry, and I thought they'd look a while and give it up, but this Mrs. Wadley is kind of simple-minded or something. She took on so I had to say maybe somebody had put it in this trunk where it could have a nice time. And this stepmother taking on almost as bad."

"Did you nearly get a gypsy woman's baby?"

"Nearly. They're camped in the woods up back of our place, and I went round to see their wagons, and the man had some fighting roosters that would fight anybody else's roosters, and they had horses to race, and the gypsy woman would tell the future lives of anybody and what was going to happen to them, and so I saw this lovely, lovely baby asleep on a blanket under some bushes, and probably they had stole it from some good family, so while they was busy I picked it up and run."

"Did they chase you?"

Wilbur Cowan was by now almost abject in his admiration of this fearless spirit.

"Not at first; but when I got up to our fence I heard some of 'em yelling like very fiends, and they came after me through the woods, but I got inside our yard, and the baby woke up and yelled like a very fiend, and Nathan Marwick came running out of our barn and says: 'What in time is all this?' And someone told folks in the house and out comes Harvey D.'s stepmother that he got married to, and Grandpa Gideon and Cousin Juliana that happened to be there, and all the gypsies rushed up the hill and everyone made the vilest scene and I had to give back this lovely baby to the gypsy woman that claimed it. You'd think it was the only baby in the wide world, the way she made a scene, and not a single one would listen to reason when I tried to explain. They acted simply crazy, that's all."

"Gee, gosh!" muttered the Wilbur twin. This was indeed a splendid and desperate character, and he paid her the tribute of honest envy. He wished he might have a cruel stepmother of his own, and so perhaps be raised to this eminence of infamy. "I bet they did something with you!" he said.

The girl waved it aside with a gesture of repugnance, as if some things were too loathsome for telling. He perceived that she had, like so many raconteurs, allowed her cigar to go out.

"Here's a match," he said, and courteously cupped his hands about its flame. The pennygrab seemed to have become incombustible, and the match died futilely. "That's my last match," he said.

"Maybe I better keep this till I get to the great city."

But he would not have it so.

"You can light it from mine," and he brought the ends of the two penny grabs together.

"First thing you know you'll be dizzy," warned the moralist, Merle.

"Ho, I will not!"

She laughed in scorn, and valiantly puffed on the noisome thing. Thus stood Ben Blunt and the Wilbur twin, their faces together about this business of lighting up; and thus stood the absorbed Merle, the moral perfectionist, earnestly hoping his words of warning would presently become justified. It did not seem right to him that others should smoke when it made him sick.

At last smoke issued from the contorted face of Ben Blunt, and some of this being swallowed, strangulation ensued. When the paroxysm of coughing was past the hero revealed running eyes, but the tears were of triumph, as was the stoic smile that accompanied them.

And then, while the reformer Merle awaited the calamity he had predicted, while Wilbur surrendered anew to infatuation for this intrepid soul that would dare any crime, while Ben Blunt rocked on spread feet, the glowing pennygrab cocked at a rakish angle, while, in short, vice was crowned and virtue abased, there rang upon the still air the other name of Ben Blunt in cold and fateful emphasis. The group stiffened with terror. Again the name sounded along those quiet aisles of the happy dead. The voice was one of authority—cool, relentless, awful.

"Patricia Whipple!" said the voice.

The twins knew it for the voice of Miss Juliana Whipple, who had remotely been a figure of terror to them even when voiceless. Juliana was thirty, tall, straight, with capable shoulders, above which rose her capable face on a straight neck. She wore a gray skirt and a waist of white, with a severely starched collar about her throat, and a black bow tie. Her straw hat was narrow of brim, banded with a black ribbon. Her steely eyes flashed from beneath the hat. Once before the twins had encountered her and her voice, and the results were blasting, though the occasion was happier. Indeed, the intention of Juliana had been wholly amiable, for it was at the picnic of the Methodist Sunday-school.

She came upon the twins in a fair dell, where they watched other children at a game, and she took very civil notice of them, saying, "How do you do, young gentlemen?" in deep, thrilling tones, and though they had been doing very well until that moment, neither of the twins had recovered strength to say so. To them she had been more formidable than a schoolteacher. Their throats had closed upon all utterance. Now as she faced them, a dozen feet away, even though the words "Patricia Whipple" applied to but one of their number, the twins took the challenge to themselves and quailed. They knew that deep and terrible voice menaced themselves as well as the late Ben Blunt—for that mere street urchin, blown upon by the winds of desolation, had shrivelled and passed. In his place drooped a girl in absurd boy's clothes, her hair messily cut off, smoking something she plainly did not wish to smoke. The stricken lily of vice drooped upon its stem.

One by one the three heads turned to regard the orator. How had she contrived that noiseless approach? How had she found them at all in this seclusion? The heads having turned to regard her, turned back and bowed in stony glares at the rich Whipple-nourished turf. They felt her come toward them; her shadow from the high sun blended with theirs. And again the voice, that fearsome organ on which she managed such dread effects:

"Patricia Whipple, what does this mean?"

She confronted them, a spare, grim figure, tall, authoritative, seeming to be old as Time itself. How were they to know that Juliana was still youthful, even attired youthfully, though by no means frivolously, or that her heart was gentle? She might, indeed, have danced to them as Columbine, and her voice would still have struck them with terror. She brought her deepest tones to those simple words, "What does this mean?" All at once it seemed to them that something had been meant, something absurd, monstrous, lawless, deserving a ghastly punishment.

The late Ben Blunt squirmed and bored a heel desperately into the turf above a Whipple whose troubles had ceased in 1828. She made a rough noise in her throat, but it was not informing. The Wilbur twin, forgetting his own plight, glanced warm encouragement to her.

"I guess she's got aright to run away," he declared, brazenly.

But in this burst of bravado he had taken too little account of his attire. He recalled it now, for the frosty gray eyes of Juliana ran about him and came to rest upon his own eyes. For the taut moment that he braved her glance it unaccountably seemed to him that the forbidding mouth of the woman twitched nervously into the beginning of a smile. It was a fleeting effect, but it did seem as if she had almost laughed, then caught herself. And there was a tremolo defect in the organ tone with which she now again demanded in blistering politeness, "May I ask what this means?"

The quick-thinking Merle twin had by now devised an exit from any complicity in whatever was meant. He saw his way out. He spoke up brightly and with no shadow of guilt upon his fair young face.

"I told her it was wrong for the young to smoke; it stunts their growth and leads to evil companions. But she wouldn't listen to me."

There was a nice regret in his tone.

Miss Juliana ignored him.

"Patricia!" she said, terribly.

But the late Ben Blunt, after the first devastating shock, had been recovering vitality for this ordeal.

"I don't care!" she announced. "I'll run away if I want to!" And again, bitterly, "I don't care!"

"Run away!"

Juliana fairly bayed the words. She made running away seem to be something nice people never, never did.

"I don't care!" repeated the fugitive, dully.

There was a finality about it that gave Juliana pause. She had expected a crumpling, but the offender did not crumple. It seemed another tack must be taken.

"Indeed?" she inquired, almost cooingly. "And may I ask if this absurd young creature was to accompany you on your—your travels?" She indicated the gowned Wilbur, who would then have gone joyously to his reward, even as had Jonas Whipple. His look of dumb suffering would have stayed a judge less conscientious. "I presume this is some young lady of your acquaintance—one of your little girl friends," she continued, though it was plain to all that she presumed nothing of the sort.

"He is not!" The look of dumb suffering had stoutened one heart to new courage. "He's a very nice little boy, and he gave me these ragged clothes to run away in, and now he'll have to wear his Sunday clothes. And you know he's a boy as well as I do!"

"She made him take a lot of money for it," broke in the Merle twin. "I was afraid she wasn't doing right, but she wouldn't listen to me, so she gave him the money and I took charge of it for him."

He beamed virtuously at Miss Juliana, who now rewarded him with a hurried glance of approval. It seemed to Miss Juliana and to him that he had been on the side of law and order, condemning and seeking to dissuade the offenders from their vicious proceedings. He felt that he was a very good little boy, indeed, and that the tall lady was understanding it. He had been an innocent bystander.

Miss Juliana again eyed the skirted Wilbur, and the viewless wind of a smile's beginning blew across the lower half of her accusing face. Then she favoured the mere street urchin with a glance of extreme repugnance.

"I shall have to ask all of you to come with me," she said, terribly.

"Where to?" demanded the chief culprit.

"You know well enough."

This was all too true.

"Me?" demanded the upright Merle, as if there must have been some mistake. Surely no right-thinking person could implicate him in this rowdy affair!

"You, if you please," said Miss Juliana, but she smiled beautifully upon him. He felt himself definitely aligned with the forces of justice. He all at once wanted to go. He would go as an assistant prosecuting attorney.

"Not—not me?" stammered the stricken Wilbur.

"By all means—you!" Miss Juliana sharpened her tone She added, mysteriously: "It would be good without you—good, but not perfect."

"Now I guess you'll learn how to behave yourself in future!" admonished Merle, the preacher, and edged toward Miss Juliana as one withdrawing from contamination.

"Oh, not me!" pleaded the voice of Wilbur.

"I think you heard me," said Miss Juliana. "Come!"

She uttered "come" so that not mountains would have dared stay, much less a frightened little boy in a girl's dress. In his proper garb there had been instant and contemptuous flight. But the dress debased all his manly instincts. He came crawling, as the worm. The recent Ben Blunt pulled a cap over a shorn head and advanced stoically before the group.

"One moment," said Miss Juliana. "We seem to be forgetting something." She indicated the hat of Patricia Whipple lying on the ground near where smouldered the two ends of the abandoned pennygrab. "I think you might resume this, my dear, and restore the cap to its rightful owner." It was but a further play of her debased fancy. The mere street urchin was now decked in a girl's hat and a presumable girl wore an incongruous cap. "I will ask you two rare specimens to precede me," she said when the change was made. They preceded her.

"I don't care!" This was more bravado from the urchin.

"Well, don't you care!" Juliana said it, soothingly.

"I will, too, care!" retorted the urchin, betraying her sex.

"Will she take us to the jail?" whispered the trembling Wilbur.

"Worse!" said the girl. "She'll take us home!" Side by side they threaded an aisle between rows of the carefree dead, whom no malignant Miss Juliana could torture. Behind them marched their captor, Merle stepping blithely beside her.

"It's lovely weather for this time of year," they heard him say.