The Stone Image | Page 6

paid for. I would gladly have forfeited the unpaid balance for the pleasure of smashing the hateful thing into smithereens; but Betty's frugal soul revolted at the mere suggestion. Ready as she is to pauperize herself--and me--for new things, Betty would sooner part with an arm than suffer a loss on any article once in her possession.
Then, too, the image had to be crated and packed before any drayman would consent to handle it; so, pending the time it could be properly prepared for its journey to the auction rooms, we wrapped it in rugs and stood it in a secluded corner of the backyard, where it stared in hooded fury at the blank wall of the garage and attracted the speculative interest of all the small boys in the neighborhood.
I was forever going to take a day off and box the thing up properly, but like the man who pleaded inclement weather as an excuse for not mending his leaking roof when it was raining, and lack of necessity when the weather was fine, I delayed the operation from day to day, while the image stood unpacked, save for its covering of carpet.
"You'd better get someone out from the city to crate that thing today," Betty advised me one morning about three weeks after the statue had been evicted from the house.
"Um-m?" I answered absently, engrossed in a combination of toast, coffee, and the morning's paper.
"Yes, you would," she repeated, "or I'll be leaving the house. Look!" She pointed through the dining-room window to the backyard.
I looked, and set my paper down suddenly, swallowing several mouthfuls of air in quick succession as I did so. "It can't be!" I ejaculated.
"But it is," Betty insisted.
And it was. The image was nearer the house by twenty feet than it had been the night before. "How the devil did it get there?" I asked querulously of nobody in particular.
"I--I d-don't know," Betty faltered. But from the shakiness of her voice and the wideness of her eyes I knew that she had her own opinion.
"Well, it can't have walked there, you know," I argued.
"N-no, of course not," Betty agreed a trifle too readily.
I went out to investigate, not stopping to put on either hat or overcoat. There was no doubt about it; the thing had moved nearer the house since darkness the day before. "Some of the neighborhood boys must have decided to play a joke on us, and moved the thing during the night," I explained, after looking the ground over. "They probably intended to set it up on the front lawn, but gave it up when they found out how heavy it was."
"Yes, that must be it," Betty concurred rather unsteadily. "It simply couldn't have walked there itself," she repeated, as if anxious to convince herself of the impossibility of any such thing having happened.
With the aid of our Swedish maid, who was as strong as any man and twice as clumsy, we replaced the statue and returned to the house, I to finish my interrupted breakfast, Betty to chirp happily over the details of the dance we were going to attend that night.
By the time I returned to the house that evening I had developed one of the worst head colds it had ever been my misfortune to acquire, due to my hatless excursion into the yard that morning. Every other breath was followed by a sniff, and each time I spoke the remark was punctuated by a sneeze. In such a condition my attendance at the dance was quite impossible.
"Another score I owe that cursed image," I muttered as I discarded the fifth handkerchief I had used that day and unfolded the sixth.
Betty's sympathy for me was matched only by her disappointment at missing the dance. "Miss the dance?" I echoed as I brought my seventh handkerchief into play. "Who said you'd have to miss the dance? You can go with Frank and Edith Horton in their car, and they can drop you here on the way home."
"And you won't mind staying here alone, and won't get sick, old dear?" Betty asked as she picked up the telephone to tell the Hortons to call for her. "Doctor Towbridge will be there tonight, I know, and I'll bring him home with me, if you wish."
I gave the simple homemade cough remedy I was compounding another vigorous shake. "If you bring any sawbones into this house tonight, Betty Haig," I threatened, "I'll surely do him bodily injury." I added a bit more rock candy to the flask of whisky.
"You'll be in a state of beastly intoxication when I get back, I know," Betty said as she viewed my bottle of rock and rye dubiously, "but that doesn't prevent your tying these ankle ribbons for me now." And she put a slender,