Tish snorted. "If he ever sees that flea-bitten creature he will keep him."
(Carpenter, being an original settler, had never subscribed to the liquor, phonograph and dog clause.)
At eleven o'clock the Dog turned over on his side and went to sleep. We were ready. My sponge, saturated with Aggie's liniment and impaled on the end of Tish's umbrella, was held to his nostrils, and we each drew a long breath. But we had counted without Aggie's hay fever. Just as the creature seemed about settled and was growing limp, Aggie began to sneeze, and by the time the paroxysm was over the dog was awake and had eaten part of the sponge. It was a terrible disappointment. As Tish said afterward, we should have anaesthetized Aggie first
However, perhaps it was for the best, after all, for it made him very ill, and when, after Tish had washed the floor, she prodded him with the wooden handle of the mop and he only groaned, he had ceased to be formidable.
"It's now or never," Tish said, with determination, and put on her overshoes. It had been raining, and luckily Aggie put her plaid shawl around her shoulders. What we should have done later without that shawl I shudder to think. Tish put on a knitted cape and I tied a scarf over my head. Then, with the dog—no longer a capital D—wobbling at the end of a clothes-line, we started.
At the last minute Tish had a spell of conscience and hunted up a bottle of cleaning fluid to put in the boat.
"It's mostly gasoline," she said. "If it's mange it won't do any harm, and if it's fleas it will kill them- We can put it on just before we leave him on Sunset Island. You start pouring it at his nose and work along his back. The fleas will drop off his tail. Every creature deserves a chance."
None of us thought of the ether in the stuffy although, as it turned out, it did not hurt the dog. It was never used on the dog.
We got to the dock without incident, Aggie ahead with the dog, and Tish and I feeling for the rope of Carpenter's skiff. Tish had the scissors, in case we couldn't untie it. Just as we found it and stooped, something splashed. Tish straightened and gripped me by the arm.
"Did you throw anything in?" she demanded in an awful tone.
"Stop pinching me, Tish Carberry!" I snapped, "or I will."
There was silence for a minute; then there was a swirling whitish appearance at our very feet, and something dark raised itself up in the water and stood waving its arms. Then it gave a gurgle or two, choked, coughed and finally sneezed. We knew the sneeze; it was Aggie!
It was when she got her breath that she said the incredible thing, the thing she flatly denied afterward, but for which she was obliged to pay five dollars into the fine box.
"That damned dog pulled me in!" she gurgled. "I've thwallowed—" She clapped her hands to her mouth, and we knew at once. Her teeth!
We pulled them both out grimly—Aggie and the dog, and Tish ordered Aggie to the house for dry clothes at once. "And it might be as well, Agatha," she added coldly, "if you would wash your mouth out with soap. You can buy new teeth, but you can not buy another immortal soul."
Agatha sloshed a half-dozen steps up the dock. Then she turned on us both in the darkness.
"If you had thwallowed two gallonth of dirty water, tho that you can feel it thaking in you when you walk, and had lotht your thell back comb and your betht upper teeth, you wouldn't care, Tith Carberry, whether you had an immortal thoul or not."
Then she thtalked—stalked, I mean, up to the house. Tish was furious, but luckily, I have a sense of humor. With Aggie's soul hanging fire, so to speak, I sat down on the dock in the rain and laughed. That was the beginning of my deterioration; from that instant, when I braved rheumatism and Tish's displeasure, to that later moment just at dawn, when we came back to the dock again, draggled, dirty and guilty, I was forty-nine years young, reckless, disdainful of consequences, unmindful of wet feet and the proprieties, forgetful even of law and order. That awful, glorious night, when young Love—but that's the story.
Chapter III.
A Wet Young Man
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,"
