Читать книгу The Greatest Murder Mysteries of Mary Roberts Rinehart - 25 Titles in One Edition - Mary Roberts Rinehart - Страница 94

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Well, Tish and I got the boat loose, and Tish dropped the scissors into the water. Then when we got in, Tish insisted on rowing with her face to the bow of the boat. She said she couldn't see where she was going if she didn't, which, of course, was true enough. We dragged the dog in by his tail and then sat and waited for Aggie. When she did come she was sulky, and almost the only words she said that entire night were "Kill him!" And that was under stress of great excitement, at three o'clock in the morning.

The night was very black, but a light on the boat-landing at Sunset Island gave us our direction. Tish and I rowed, I behind her, and as she had an unexpected habit of scooping the top off a wave with her oar and throwing it over my face and chest, finally, in desperation I turned my back to her. It was really easier rowing that way, although we did not keep very good time. But, as I explained when Tish objected, it was really safer, for by rowing back to back we could see in both directions at once.

When we were about a mile from shore, Aggie spoke for the first time.

"The boat 'th leaking!" she said.

"Gracious!" I exclaimed, and felt my petticoats. They were sopping.

"Nonsense!" Tish sneered. "It's the water Lizzie's been ladling in with her oars." Then she caught a wave with her oar, and poured it down my back. At that minute the dog moved uneasily in the bottom of the boat and crawled up on the seat in the bow, where he sat and wailed.

We should have gone back. I said so then, but Tish is like all-the Carberrys—immovably obstinate. When I tried to row back to the landing, she was rowing for Sunset Island, and all we did was to make as much splash as a paddle-wheel steamer, and not move an inch in either direction. And just then Tish broke an oar.

"There!" she snapped, turning on me, of course. "Just look what your pig-headed-ness—"

She never finished. She was staring, petrified, at the rim of the boat, which was just visible. There were two white splotches on it that looked like hands. The more I looked, the more I knew they were hands! And then the boat tilted to that side until we all screamed, and a head and shoulders appeared, fell back out of sight, upreared themselves with a mighty heave, and—dropped into the boat.

It was a man—a young man. Even in the darkness he gleamed white from head to foot. We shut our eyes and screamed. When we stopped he had sat down on the dog, discovered him, slid him with a splash into the bottom of the boat and had settled himself comfortably in the bow.

"I'm sorry I frightened you," he was saying, "but—I'd been swimming for a good while, and your boat was an oasis in the dusty desert"

"Get back into the water instantly!" Tish commanded, turning her profile to him. "Have you no shame?'

"Oh, as to that," he said aggrieved, "I—I have something on, you know. Of course, they are wet, and they stick to me, but—"

"Give him thith," Aggie broke in, and unwound herself from her shawl. I passed it to Letitia over my shoulder, and Letitia averted her face and held it out to him.

"Thanks, awfully," he said. "After all that exercise, the night air is cold on a fellow's back."

At that Letitia turned on him in a rage.

"Will you open that shawl out and cover yourself?" she asked furiously. ''Cover yourself. Your hack I Look at your legs I''

"As long as you sit quiet and behave yourself, you may stay in the boat," I added with as much composure as I could get over my trembling lips. "Otherwise, I warn you, we have a dog."

At that I think he prodded the dog with his foot, for he set up a nauseated whine—the dog, of course—and the young gentleman laughed.

"Your dog is quite safe, madam," he said. "I wouldn't bite him for anything." Then he leaned forward in the darkness and stared at Tish and myself.

"Upon my soul!" he muttered, and then aloud: "How in the name of all that is nautical did you ladies get as far from shore as this, when you are rowing in different directions?"

Tish refused to answer, and fell to rowing madly with her one oar, so that we turned around and around in a circle. Aggie had not said a word since she gave the young man her shawl. She was sitting in the stem with the jug in her lap and her handkerchief over her mouth.

"This is a wonderful piece of luck," he said finally. "I must have been blown up the lake. I hope I didn't startle you?"

"Not at all," I said, as coolly as I could. At least he didn't have a revolver: there was no place to hide one, or a knife either. "Are you out for a pleasure trip? Or did you have any definite objective point?" This scathingly.

"Just land," he said. "Any old land will do. Near a boat-house, if possible."

"We are going to Thunthet Island," Aggie lisped, encouraged by his good humor.

This seemed to surprise him, but after a minute he threw back his head and laughed: it was almost a chuckle. Certainly, if he was a lunatic, he was a cheerful one.

"To Sunset Island, then!" he exclaimed. "Forward, and God with us!"

The rain was over, and by the starlight we could make out a little more about our intruder. He seemed large and not bad looking, and he had a nice voice. (It was a disappointment, when we finally saw him in the daylight, to find that his hair was red, but it was offset by an attractive smile and exceedingly good teeth. Next to a nice nose, I like a man to have good teeth.) But, of course, some of the greatest rascals have all the physical attributes at the expense of the moral ones. As to his good humor, every one knows that a man can smile and smile and be a villain still. He wanted to take the oars, but an oar is a mighty effective weapon: neither Tish nor I would give ours up. Finally—

"I suppose you haven't any gasoline with you?" he inquired, leaning forward and hugging the shawl under his chin.

"Ther'th a quart bottle of cleaning fluid—" Aggie began, but Tish interrupted her.

"Agatha!" she said.

"I suppose you don't know of a boat-house near where we could steal some, do you?" he reflected.

Tish lifted her oar out of the water and leaned on it. There is no space here to set down what she said, but she did it thoroughly. She told him what she thought of his going around in his present costume; she told him that two of us were Methodist Protestants and one an Episcopalian, and that we would not assist him to steal anybody's gasoline, or his wife or his silver spoons: and she ended up by demanding that he go back where he came from immediately: that we could not compromise ourselves by landing him anywhere in his existing undress—only Tish called it negligee.

He listened meekly.

"If that's the way you feel," he said finally, "of course I'll drop back into the water. Browning's an easy death. But if during your excursion you happen to come across a motorboat containing a girl, I wish you would tell her that I did the best I could."

He stood up and began to take off the shawl. Tish poked at him with her oar.

"Don't be a young idiot," she snapped. "We're not making you walk the plank. What about the young lady?"

"It's rather a story," he said, drawing the shawl around him again and sitting down. "But the idea is this: when a fellow starts to elope with a girl, and then funks it, by getting drowned or running out of gasoline or anything of that sort, and leaves her sitting in a dead motor-boat in the middle of the night, she's—she's apt to be touchy about it."

"Lord have mercy!" said Tish. "You were abducting a young woman!"

"Penitentiary offense," he confirmed coolly.

"When she didn't want to be eloped with!" I added. I confess I had a queer thrill up and down my back.

"Well," he considered, "hardly that. She only thought she didn't. She has been told so many times that she mustn't like me that now she thinks she doesn't. Pure power of suggestion. If she hadn't pitched a can of gasoline overboard in a temper, we'd have been miles away by this time," he finished, with his first suggestion of gloom.

In the darkness I heard Aggie draw a long breath. Aggie is romantic, having been engaged a long time ago to a young man in the roofing business, who fell off a roof.

"How you mutht love her!" she said, and one could imagine her clasping her hands. "And how alarmed the mutht be for you."

"She said she hoped I would drown," he said, more cheerfully, "but that's only girl's talk. When she gets over thinking she doesn't like me, she's going to be crazy about me. When a girl hates a fellow, she's next door to loving him."

" 'Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings,' " Tish snorted with scorn, and just then the dog began to whine again and tried to crawl up into Aggie's lap. The young man in the shawl started to say something about having a minister waiting at Telusah, and stopped suddenly.

"It isn't raining now," he said, "and yet this boat is filling. Does she leak?"

She did, we knew it then. The water that had been sloshing around in the bottom was almost to the top of our overshoes, and an instant later Aggie, with a fine disregard of the proprieties, had her feet up on the thwarts. We are all vague about the next few minutes, but after a great deal of screeching and tip-ping of the boat, our young man, with the shawl belted around him as a petticoat, was in Tish's seat, rowing like mad, and we were all bailing like mad with our rubber shoes.

We headed the boat straight for Sunset Island, which was as near as any place, but in spite of us it kept on getting fuller. And just when Aggie had lifted her jug into her lap to lighten her end of the boat, and the water was well above our shoe tops, and climbing, and Tish was muttering the alphabet under the impression that she was praying, the boat stopped suddenly and the young man said:

"Why don't you women bail? What are you doing? Tickling the ribs of the boat? We'll never get to shore at this rate!"

Aggie began to sniffle, and the man in the shawl stood up and peered over the water.

"Lillian!" he shouted. "Wave the lantern! Coo—ee!"

We all heard it. From far down the lake came a distant "coo—ee" that was not an echo. The shawl man muttered something and lurched where he stood: the boat tipped, of course, and more water came over the edge.

Aggie began fervently, "For what we are about to receive, O Lord, make us duly thankful," when the boat bumped without warning into something.

It was just in time. As I, the last, was hauled into the motor-launch, the Witch Hazel slid greasily under the surface, to rise no more.

(The loss of the Witch Hazel was deplorable, and later on we sent Carpenter, anonymously, money to buy a new boat. He has one, which he calls the Urticaria, but the ghost of the Witch Hazel still walks, a sort of Pond's Extract in his memory.)