LELIA WAS IN EXCELLENT spirits the next morning, and over the breakfast table proposed a plan. This was that she walk to a town of which she knew across the mountain and there telephone to Eddie.
Tish wished to accompany her, but she insisted on going alone, and at last she departed, wearing a bandanna of Aggie’s to hide her red hair, and with—as Tish observed—the light of hope in her young face. She had no more than gone when we heard a scrambling among some rocks and turned to see the Bellamy man climbing up the trail.
It was a real shock, but I felt almost sorry for him. He looked as though he had not slept for a week, and it was not until he had searched the cabin and we had told him about the bear that he was convinced of our innocence and apologized.
“All right,” he said dejectedly. “She wins. If there was a bear here, and she saw it, she’d have it doing tricks for her and eating out of her hand.” And he added in a gloomy voice: “Some of these days I’ll end by believing that story of hers myself. I feel it coming on. I’m weakening. Either that or she’s smarter than I am. You can take your choice.”
He then took up his hat and prepared to go. At the top of the path, however, he stopped.
“Just in case you happen to see her,” he said, “you can tell her for me that I’m through, and that I’m going back to my regular job. It’s easy. It’s simple. I can understand professionals. Either you get them or they get you. But these amateurs—”
Here he checked himself, and soon after that he was out of sight, leaving us rather puzzled, but relieved. As Tish said at the time, under other conditions one could have liked him very much. He had a pleasant smile and was quite good-looking. But with things as they were—
Nothing else occurred that day, although Aggie, on her way to the spring, slipped and sat down on a porcupine and was most uncomfortable for some time. Lelia returned safely by evening, looking tired but quite contented, and ate a ravenous supper. She explained that she had got Eddie on the telephone and arranged with him to secure some clothing for her and a moderate sum of money and to hire a plane and drop them, packed in a small bag, at a point in the hills to be indicated by a white sheet laid out on the ground. We were then to gather up bag and sheet, and there would be nothing to indicate the spot.
Once properly dressed and with adequate funds, she was to meet Eddie and then determine on their future course.
This is the co-called villainous plot, laid to Letitia Carberry’s door and called by the ugly name of extortion. And it is worthy of note that, while our arrest for it covered the front pages of the papers, the refutation was hidden among the advertising matter.
But to go back. Lelia was quite firm about the sheet, but there was nothing of the sort at the camp, and as the plane was to arrive the following day, it fell to my lot to go down to the farm that night and secure one.
It was indeed a painful and arduous journey, especially in view of the bear. Also, Hannah had locked the house carefully, and in the end I was compelled to break a window in order to enter. This wakened her, and as I had no wish to be recognized I was obliged to wrap myself in the sheet and make my escape as best I could.
This, I may say here, is the origin of the ghost story which still persists in the neighborhood, and I am happy to lay at rest.
However, I found everything ready on my return, and long before daylight we were on our way. Necessarily our progress was slow, owing to the dark and to no path whatever, but by daylight we had covered several miles and were quite ready for our breakfast of broiled ham, toast, and coffee.
We rested for a brief time and then started again, and it was not until noon that Tish paused. We were on the top of a mountain where a lumbering company had cut some timber, and a chute led far down the mountainside and out of sight, and Tish surveyed it carefully.
“This, I think,” she observed, “answers all requirements. It is open to the sky, and we can remain sheltered among the trees. We can eat a light lunch, and by that time the plane should be here.”
This we did, and after spreading the sheet we rested our weary bodies. I can still remember the sun on Lelia’s bright head, and Tish’s statement that we were on a crusade and that if any trouble developed we could take to the chute and slide to safety. Then I must have slept, for when I wakened it was almost dusk, and Aggie was shaking me by the shoulder and sneezing wildly.
“It’s coming, Lizzie,” she said. “I cad hear it.”
Well, we at once retired to our places in the woods, and soon the plane was overhead. It seemed suspicious at first, for it circled several times. Then it came lower, and soon we saw the bag tossed overboard. To our horror, however, it missed the sheet entirely and fell among the trees instead.
It never struck the ground at all.
It was some time before we discovered it. For one thing, Lelia, running toward us, had fallen and sprained her ankle, and we were obliged to look after her first. But at last we saw it, hanging to a branch far up in a tree and utterly beyond our reach.
Lelia sat on the ground and stared at it furiously.
“The fools!” she said. “The blithering idiots! They did it on purpose.”
She refused to explain further, and as evening was now falling rapidly our problem had become acute.
With her injured ankle, Lelia could not climb the tree, and at last Tish suggested that Aggie, being the lightest among us, should go up and bring down the bag. I shall never forget poor Aggie’s face.
“Clibe that tree?” she asked. “What do you thik I ab? A skyrocket?”
In the end, however, she agreed—although none too willingly—and at last we succeeded in hoisting her to a lower limb. For some time we could hear her moving upward, until she was far above us; and then suddenly we heard the stealthy sounds of movement all about us, and realized that we were surrounded!
How shall I relate what followed? The shocking sight of Mr. Bellamy, red-faced and raging, catching our unfortunate Lelia and deliberately turning her over and—I hesitate to relate this—spanking her violently; my own fingers closing without intention on both barrels of the shotgun, and an explosion which threw me flat and knocked out a pivot tooth, followed by a yelp from a state trooper; and as I went down, a brief vision of Tish pushing at the sheriff as he tried to lay hands on her; and his sudden disappearance into the timber chute—those are the pictures which rise in my mind as I write this, and bitter indeed they are.
Somewhere above us in a tree were Aggie and the bag, but I could see neither of them; nor in that long walk and, later, ride to the county jail did either Tish or I mention them. We were handcuffed, and to this crowning indignity Tish made no protest.
“If it is a crime,” she said, “to bring young lives together, then I am indeed a criminal!”
We saw nothing more of the sheriff, although we learned later that, the chute ending in the river, he had had a most unpleasant experience. But one thing puzzled us both. This was their insistence that we had hidden the bag from the plane, and that it contained a huge sum of money. Not, indeed, until after Charlie Sands had come and gone the next day had we the slightest comprehension of what they meant. Then I looked out to see him standing beyond the bars of our cell.
“Well,” he said, “I guess you are beyond help this time.”
“I don’t even know what you are talking about,” said Tish. “If I have tried to help a pair of young lovers, that is entirely my affair. I have committed no felony.”
“Maybe not in this state,” he said coldly, “but in some parts of this great and glorious Union shooting at a sheriff and then filling him full of splinters is not regarded with any favor.”
“He slipped,” said Tish calmly.
“He says you pushed him,” Charlie Sands retorted. “I’ve been in to see him, and he has two constables and a deputy working over him with tweezers.”
It was some time before he could induce her to tell him the story, and when she had finished he simply held on to the bars and stared at her.
“I see,” he said rather feebly. “Of course, it’s quite simple. The cruel parents and the sweet young thing to be saved. And Eddie and Theodore. And Aggie still in a tree with a bag dropped from a plane. What could be more natural? I say,” he added, “you haven’t a spot of blackberry cordial about, have you? I feel rather queer.”
He went away soon after that, and I believe that Aggie was rescued later that day by some fire department or other which carried up a long ladder. They found the bag also, and it contained fifty thousand dollars in small bills, and no clothing whatever.
It was the ransom money for Edith Lee, and Lelia had been Edith Lee all the time! Moreover, although we did not know it then, she had merely invented all the attempts to kidnap her, in order to get money so she could go into motion pictures; and Mr. Bellamy and the man with the pipe had been not her jailers, but guards to protect her.
It was late that evening that Mr. Bellamy came to the cell to see us and was admitted. He sat down as though he was very tired and for some time merely examined his hands, which appeared to be badly scratched.
“Someday,” he said at last, “some good strong man is going to take that redhead and beat Hollywood out of her. Then he’ll probably marry her and live happily ever after. But I am not the man. Theodore might have done it; I don’t know. But not Eddie. I never cared for Eddie. With a mind like hers, she should have done better with Eddie. In my opinion Eddie was a washout.”
“Was?” said Tish in a dreadful voice. “Has anything happened to him?”
“My dear lady,” he said, “Eddie has passed into limbo again, as has Theodore. They lived their short but eventful lives wholly in her mind, and if Providence is good to me I shall go back to Washington and hand in my resignation. Anyone who could fall for a girl like that isn’t safe to be let loose.”
He then got up and gave a sort of groan. “The right man,” he said heavily, “could make something of her. But I’ve got my fingers crossed.”
Well, it turned out that he was actually a G-man or something of the sort, and when the Lee girl made up her story about kidnapers and her people hid her in the country he had been sent to watch her. But he never had believed that story, and I must say for her that when they got Aggie and the bag she told the truth for once, and we were released that night.
We went at once to the farm, to find our poor Aggie with her cold much worse and using language she had never used before.
“It was all right for you,” she said bitterly. “You were id a dice warb cell. But I was id a tree, with a policemad udder be, tryig to look like a dabbed bird! If you thik that’s fuddy, go ad try it.”
She was very resentful, as the policeman had not moved from her vicinity all night; and once she had had to sneeze, and he whipped out his revolver. After that, every now and then she had had to make a noise like a bird, for he was evidently suspicious. The worst trouble she had, however, was with a squirrel. It got used to her after a time, she said, and was evidently nesting, as little by little it bit off most of her new switch and carried it away.
Nothing would induce her to stay at the farm after that, and so we spent the remainder of the spring and summer in the city. But that fall we had a great surprise. We received an invitation to Lelia’s—or I should say Edith Lee’s—wedding; she was marrying the Bellamy man, after all!
We went to the church, and I must say she made a beautiful bride. Under her veil her hair did not seem as red as usual, but she had not entirely changed; for, coming down the aisle just beside our pew, Mr. Bellamy stepped on her dress and she said something under her breath.
He never stopped smiling, but all of us saw him give her arm quite a dreadful pinch, and Charlie Sands, who was sitting with us, leaned over and spoke to Tish.
“Don’t worry about them,” he said. “She’s under control. Everything’s under control from now on.” …
Well, that is the story. I have felt it necessary to tell it in detail, as one of the smart-aleck national magazines has recently referred to our dear Tish as “whilom kidnaper, Letitia Carberry.” This is most unfair, as it was Edith Lee herself—pretending to be Lelia Vaughn—who, while professing to get in touch with an Eddie who did not exist, called her anxious parents by telephone and said that she had been kidnaped. It was her idea about the sheet and the ransom money also; and I have always regarded it as outrageous that the sheriff sent us a bill for a new suit of clothes and for medical attention, including the removal of certain splinters from his person.
We have all recovered, save, perhaps, Aggie. She has been subject to nightmares ever since, and her nerves are not what they were. Once or twice at night I have found her standing up in her bed, clutching a bedpost and uttering a sort of feeble peep-peep, as though she were a bird.
But, as I have intimated, the whole affair has left Tish with a definite complex as to red lanterns. As a result, only a few days ago she drove past one at night, to discover too late that she had driven onto a large hoist which was carrying building materials to the upper stories of a new structure that was being erected.
It did not pause until it had reached the sixteenth floor, and as work ceased at that time, we were left there all night.
I shall never forget the expressions of the men on the ground when we were lowered there the next morning and drove away. But I shall also always remember Charlie Sands’ face when he brought in the evening paper.
“I am not a betting man,” he said, “but if you will tell me you were not the three women who spent last night in a car on top of the steel work of the new Standard Building, I will not only go to church next Sunday, I will put ten dollars on the plate.”
There was nothing to do but to tell him, and over a glass of blackberry cordial he regarded us, one after the other.
“I shall go to church anyhow,” he said solemnly.