More Tish | Page 3

upstairs, Tish ahead and Aggie and I two flights behind, believing that Tish with an unloaded gun was a thousand times more dangerous than any outlaw with an entire arsenal loaded to the muzzle.
We had a cup of tea in Tish's parlor, but she kept us out of the bedroom, where we could hear Miss Swift running the sewing machine. Finally Aggie said out of a clear sky:
"Have you had any answers to your advertisement?"
Tish, who had been about to put a slice of lemon in her tea, put it in her mouth instead and stared at us both.
"What advertisement?"
"We know all about it, Tish," I said. "And if you think it proper for a woman of your age to go adventuring with only a donkey for company----"
"I've had worse!" Tish snapped. "And I'm not feeble yet, as far as my age goes. If I want to take a walking tour it's my affair, isn't it?"
"You can't walk with your bad knee," I objected. Tish sniffed.
"You're envious, that's what," she sneered. "While you are sitting at home, overeating and oversleeping and getting fat in mind and body, I shall be on the broad highway, walking between hedgerows of flowering--flowering--well, between hedgerows. While you sleep in stuffy, upholstered rooms I shall lie in woodland glades in my sleeping-bag and see overhead the constellation of--of what's its name. I shall talk to the birds and the birds will talk to me."
Sleeping-bag! That was what Aggie had meant that Miss Swift was making.
"What are you going to do when it rains?"
"It doesn't rain much in May. Anyhow, a friendly farmhouse and a glass of milk--even a barn----"
Aggie got up with the light of desperation in her eyes. Aggie hates woods and gnats, has no eye for Nature, and for almost half a century has pampered her body in a featherbed poultice, with the windows closed, until the first of June each year. Yet Aggie rose to the crisis.
"You shan't go alone, Tish," she said stoutly. "You'll forget to change your stockings when your feet are wet and you can't make a cup of coffee fit to drink. I'm going too."
Tish made a gesture of despair, but Aggie was determined. Tish glanced at me.
"Well?" she snapped. "We might as well make it a family excursion. Aren't you coming along, too, to look after Aggie?"
"Not at all," I observed calmly. "I'll have enough to do looking after myself. But I like the idea, and since you've invited me I'll come, of course."
At first I am afraid Tish was not particularly pleased. She said she had it all planned to make four miles an hour, or about forty miles a day; and that any one falling back would have to be left by the wayside. And that if we were not prepared to sleep on the ground, or were going to talk rheumatism every time she found a place to camp, she would thank us to remember that we had really asked ourselves.
But she grew more cheerful finally and seemed to be glad to talk over the details of the trip with somebody. She said it was a pity we had not had some practice with firearms, for we would each have to take a weapon, the mountains being full of outlaws, more than likely. Neither Aggie nor I could use a gun at all, but, as Tish observed, we could pot at trees and fenceposts along the road by way of practice.
When I suggested that the sight of three women of our age--we are all well on toward fifty; Aggie insists that she is younger than I am, but we were in the same infant class in Sunday-school--three women of our age "potting" at fences was hardly dignified, Tish merely shrugged her shoulders.
She asked us not to let Charlie Sands learn of the trip. He would be sure to be fussy and want to send a man along, and that would spoil it all.
What with the secrecy, and the guns and everything, I dare say we were like a lot of small boys getting ready to run away out West and kill Indians. In fact, Tish said it reminded her of the time, years ago, when Charlie Sands and some other boys had run away, with all the carving knives and razors they could gather together, and were found a week later in a cave in the mountains twenty miles or so from town.
Tish showed us her sleeping-bag, which was felt outside and her old white fur rug within. Aggie planned hers immediately on the same lines, with her fur coat as a lining; but I had mine made of oilcloth outside, my rheumatism having warned me that we were going to have rain. I was right about the rain.
I had an old army revolver