Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger
WHERE THERE'S A WILL
By Mary Roberts Rinehart
CONTENTS
I I HAVE A WARNING
II MISS PATTY ARRIVES
III A WILL
IV AND A WAY
V WANTED - AN OWNER
VI THE CONSPIRACY
VII MR. PIERCE ACQUIRES A WIFE
VII AND MR. MOODY INDIGESTION
IX DOLLY, HOW COULD YOU
X ANOTHER COMPLICATION
XI MISS PATTY'S PRINCE
XII WE GET A DOCTOR
XIII THE PRINCE - PRINCIPALLY
XIV PIERCE DISAPPROVES
XV THE PRINCE, WITH APOLOGIES
XVI STOP, THIEF!
XVII A BUNCH OF LETTERS
XVIII MISS COBB'S BURGLAR
XIX NO MARRIAGE IN HEAVEN
XX EVERY DOG HAS HIS DAY
XXI THE MUTINY
XXII HOME TO ROOST
XXIII BACK TO NATURE
XIV LIKE DUCKS TO WATER
XXV THE FIRST FRUITS
XXVI OVER THE FENCE IS OUT
XXVII A CUPBOARD FULL OF RYE
XXVIII LOVE, LOVE, LOVE
XXIX A BIG NIGHT TO-NIGHT
XXX LET GOOD DIGESTION
WHERE THERE'S A WILL
CHAPTER I
I HAVE A WARNING
When it was all over Mr. Sam came out to the spring-house to say good-by
to me before he and Mrs. Sam left. I hated to see him go, after all we
had been through together, and I suppose he saw it in my face, for he
came over close and stood looking down at me, and smiling. "You saved
us, Minnie," he said, "and I needn't tell you we're grateful; but do
you know what I think?" he asked, pointing his long forefinger at me.
"I think you've enjoyed it even when you were suffering most. Red-haired
women are born to intrigue, as the sparks fly upward."
"Enjoyed it!" I snapped. "I'm an old woman before my time, Mr. Sam. What
with trailing back and forward through the snow to the shelter-house,
and not getting to bed at all some nights, and my heart going by fits
and starts, as you may say, and half the time my spinal marrow fairly
chilled - not to mention putting on my overshoes every morning from force
of habit and having to take them off again, I'm about all in."
"It's been the making of you, Minnie," he said, eying me, with his hands
in his pockets. "Look at your cheeks! Look at your disposition! I don't
believe you'd stab anybody in the back now!"
(Which was a joke, of course; I never stabbed anybody in the back.)
He sauntered over and dropped a quarter into the slot-machine by the
door, but the thing was frozen up and refused to work. I've seen the
time when Mr. Sam would have kicked it, but he merely looked at it and
then at me.
"Turned virtuous, like everything else around the place. Not that I
don't approve of virtue, Minnie, but I haven't got used to putting my
foot on the brass rail of the bar and ordering a nut sundae. Hook
the money out with a hairpin, Minnie, and buy some shredded wheat in
remembrance of me."
He opened the door and a blast of February wind rattled the
window-frames. Mr. Sam threw out his chest under his sweater and waved
me another good-by.
"Well, I'm off, Minnie," he said. "Take care of yourself and don't sit
too tight on the job; learn to rise a bit in the saddle."
"Good-by, Mr. Sam!" I called, putting down Miss Patty's doily and
following him to the door; "good-by; better have something before you
start to keep you warm."
He turned at the corner of the path and grinned back at me.
"All right," he called. "I'll go down to the bar and get a lettuce
sandwich!"
Then he was gone, and happy as I was, I knew I would miss him terribly.
I got a wire hairpin and went over to the slot-machine, but when I had
finally dug out the money I could hardly see it for tears.
It began when the old doctor died. I suppose you have heard of Hope
Sanatorium and the mineral spring that made it famous. Perhaps you
have seen the blotter we got out, with a flash-light interior of the
spring-house on it, and me handing the old doctor a glass of mineral
water, and wearing the embroidered linen waist that Miss Patty Jennings
gave me that winter. The blotters were a great success. Below the
picture it said, "Yours for health," and in the body of the blotter,
in red lettering, "Your system absorbs the health-giving drugs in Hope
Springs water as this blotter soaks up ink."
The "Yours for health" was my idea.
I have been spring-house girl at Hope Springs Sanatorium for fourteen
years. My father had the position before me, but he took rheumatism, and
as the old doctor said, it was bad business policy to spend thousands
of dollars in advertising that Hope Springs water cured rheumatism, and
then have father creaking like a rusty hinge every time he bent over to
fill a glass with it.
Father gave me one piece of advice the day he turned the spring-house
over to me.
"It's a difficult situation, my girl," he said. "Lots of people think
it's simply a matter of filling a glass with water and handing it over
the railing. Why, I tell you a barkeeper's a high-priced man mostly, and
his job's a snap to this. I'd like to know how a barkeeper would make
out if his customers came back only once a year and he had to remember
whether they wanted their drinks cold or hot or 'chill off'. And another
thing: if a chap comes in with a tale of woe, does the barkeeper have
to ask him what he's doing for it, and listen while he tells how much
weight he lost in a blanket sweat? No, sir; he pushes him a bottle and
lets it go at that."
Father passed away the following winter. He'd been a little bit
delirious, and his last words were: "Yes, sir; hot, with a pinch of
salt, sir?" Poor father! The spring had been his career, you may
say, and I like to think that perhaps even now he is sitting by some
everlasting spring measuring out water with a golden goblet instead of
the old tin dipper. I said that to Mr. Sam once, and he said he felt
quite sure that I was right, and that where father was the water would
be appreciated. He had heard of father.
Well, for the first year or so I nearly went crazy. Then I found things
were coming my way. I've got the kind of mind that never forgets a name
or face and can combine them properly, which isn't common. And when
folks came back I could call them at once. It would do your heart good
to see some politician, coming up to rest his stomach from the free
bar in the state house at the capital, enter the spring-house where
everybody is playing cards and drinking water and not caring a rap
whether he's the man that cleans the windows or the secretary of the
navy. If he's been there before, in sixty seconds I have his name on my
tongue and a glass of water in his hand, and have asked him about
the rheumatism in his right knee and how the children are. And in ten
minutes he's sitting in a bridge game and trotting to the spring to have
his glass refilled during his dummy hand, as if he'd grown up in
the place. The old doctor used to say my memory was an asset to the
sanatorium.
He depended on me a good bit - the old doctor did - and that winter he was
pretty feeble. (He was only seventy, but he'd got in the habit of making
it eighty to show that the mineral water kept him young. Finally he got
to BEING eighty, from thinking it, and he died of senility in the end.)
He was in the habit of coming to the spring-house every day to get his
morning glass of water and read the papers. For a good many years it had
been his custom to sit there, in the winter by the wood fire and in the
summer just inside the open door, and to read off the headings aloud
while I cleaned around the spring and polished glasses.
"I see the president is going fishing, Minnie," he'd say, or "Airbrake
is up to 133; I wish I'd bought it that time I dreamed about it. It was
you who persuaded me not to, Minnie."
And all that winter, with the papers full of rumors that Miss
Patty Jennings was going to marry a prince, we'd followed it by the
spring-house fire, the old doctor and I, getting angry at the Austrian
emperor for opposing it when we knew how much too good Miss Patty was
for any foreigner, and then getting nervous and fussed when we read that
the prince's mother was in favor of the match and it might go through.
Miss Patty and her father came every winter to Hope Springs and I
couldn't have been more anxious about it if she had been my own sister.
Well, as I say, it all began the very day the old doctor died. He
stamped out to the spring-house with the morning paper about nine
o'clock, and the wedding seemed to be all off. The paper said the
emperor had definitely refused his consent and had sent the prince, who
was his cousin, for a Japanese cruise, while the Jennings family was
going to Mexico in their private car. The old doctor was indignant, and
I remember how he tramped up and down the spring-house, muttering that
the girl had had a lucky escape, and what did the emperor expect if
beauty and youth and wealth weren't enough. But he calmed down, and soon
he was reading that the papers were predicting an early spring, and he
said we'd better begin to increase our sulphur percentage in the water.
I hadn't noticed anything strange in his manner, although we'd all
noticed how feeble he was growing, but when he got up to go back to
the sanatorium and I reached him his cane, it seemed to me he avoided
looking at me. He went to the door and then turned and spoke to me over
his shoulder.
"By the way," he remarked, "Mr. Richard will be along in a day or so,
Minnie. You'd better break it to Mrs. Wiggins."
Since the summer before we'd had to break Mr. Dick's coming to Mrs.
Wiggins the housekeeper, owing to his finding her false front where it
had blown out of a window, having been hung up to dry, and his wearing
it to luncheon as whiskers. Mr. Dick was the old doctor's grandson.
"Humph!" I said, and he turned around and looked square at me.
"He's a good boy at heart, Minnie," he said. "We've had our troubles
with him, you and I, but everything has been quiet lately."
When I didn't say anything he looked discouraged, but he had a fine way
of keeping on until he gained his point, had the old doctor.
"It HAS been quiet, hasn't it?" he demanded.
"I don't know," I said; "I have been deaf since the last explosion!" And
I went down the steps to the spring. I heard the tap of his cane as he
came across the floor, and I knew he was angry.
"Confound you, Minnie," he exclaimed, "if I could get along without you
I'd discharge you this minute."
"And if I paid any attention to your discharging me I'd have been gone
a dozen times in the last year," I retorted. "I'm not objecting to Mr.
Dick coming here, am I? Only don't expect me to burst into song about
it. Shut the door behind you when you go out."
But he didn't go at once. He stood watching me polish glasses and get
the card-tables ready, and I knew he still had something on his mind.
"Minnie," he said at last, "you're a shrewd young woman - maybe more head
than heart, but that's well enough. And with your temper under control,
you're a CAPABLE young woman."
"What has Mr. Dick been up to now?" I asked, growing suspicious.
"Nothing. But I'm an old man, Minnie, a very old man."
"Stuff and nonsense," I exclaimed, alarmed. "You're only seventy. That's
what comes of saying in the advertising that you are eighty - to show
what the springs have done for you. It's enough to make a man die of
senility to have ten years tacked to his age."
"And if," he went on, "if anything happens to me, Minnie, I'm counting
on you to do what you can for the old place. You've been here a good
many years, Minnie."
"Fourteen years I have been ladling out water at this spring," I said,
trying to keep my lips from trembling. "I wouldn't be at home any place
else, unless it would be in an aquarium. But don't ask me to stay here
and help Mr. Dick sell the old place for a summer hotel. For that's what
he'll do."
"He won't sell it," declared the old doctor grimly. "All I want is for
you to promise to stay."
"Oh, I'll stay," I said. "I won't promise to be agreeable, but I'll
stay. Somebody'll have to look after the spring; I reckon Mr. Dick
thinks it comes out of the earth just as we sell it, with the whole
pharmacopoeia in it."
Well, it made the old doctor happier, and I'm not sorry I promised, but
I've got a joint on my right foot that throbs when it is going to rain
or I am going to have bad luck, and it gave a jump then. I might have
known there was trouble ahead.
CHAPTER II
MISS PATTY ARRIVES
It was pretty quiet in the spring-house that day after the old doctor
left. It had started to snow and only the regulars came out. What with
the old doctor talking about dying, and Miss Patty Jennings gone to
Mexico, when I'd been looking forward to her and her cantankerous old
father coming to Hope Springs for February, as they mostly did, I was
depressed all day. I got to the point where Mr. Moody feeding nickels
into the slot-machine with one hand and eating zwieback with the other
made me nervous. After a while he went to sleep over it, and when he
had slipped a nickel in his mouth and tried to put the zwieback in the
machine he muttered something and went up to the house.
I was glad to be alone. I drew a chair in front of the fire and wondered
what I would do if the old doctor died, and what a fool I'd been not to
be a school-teacher, which is what I studied for.
I was thinking to myself bitterly that all that my experience in the
spring fitted me for was to be a mermaid, when I heard something running
down the path, and it turned out to be Tillie, the diet cook.
She slammed the door behind her and threw the Finleyville evening paper
at me.
"There!" she said, "I've won a cake of toilet soap from Bath-house Mike.
The emperor's consented."
"Nonsense!" I snapped, and snatched the paper. Tillie was right; the
emperor HAD! I sat down and read it through, and there was Miss Patty's
picture in an oval and the prince's in another, with a turned-up
mustache and his hand on the handle of his sword, and between them both
was the Austrian emperor. Tillie came and looked over my shoulder.
"I'm not keen on the mustache," she said, "but the sword's
beautiful - and, oh, Minnie, isn't he aristocratic? Look at his nose!"
But I'm not one to make up my mind in a hurry, and I'd heard enough talk
about foreign marriages in the years I'd been dipping out mineral water
to make me a skeptic, so to speak.
"I'm not so sure," I said slowly. "You can't tell anything by that kind
of a picture. If he was even standing beside a chair I could get a line
on him. He may be only four feet high."
"Then Miss Jennings wouldn't love him," declared Tillie. "How do you
reckon he makes his mustache point up like that?"
"What's love got to do with it?" I demanded. "Don't be a fool, Tillie.
It takes more than two people's pictures in a newspaper with a red heart
around them and an overweight cupid above to make a love-match. Love's a
word that's used to cover a good many sins and to excuse them all."
"She isn't that kind," said Tillie. "She's - she's as sweet as she's
beautiful, and you're as excited as I am, Minnie Waters, and if you're
not, what have you got the drinking glass she used last winter put on
the top shelf out of reach for?" She went to the door and slammed it
open. "Thank heaven I'm not a dried-up old maid," she called back over
her shoulder, "and when you're through hugging that paper you can send
it up to the house."
Well, I sat there and thought it over, Miss Patty, or Miss Patricia,
being, so to speak, a friend of mine. They'd come to the Springs every
winter for years. Many a time she'd slipped away from her governess and
come down to the spring-house for a chat with me, and we'd make pop-corn
together by my open fire, and talk about love and clothes, and even the
tariff, Miss Patty being for protection, which was natural, seeing that
was the way her father made his money, and I for free trade, especially
in the winter when my tips fall off considerable.
And when she was younger she would sit back from the fire, with the
corn-popper on her lap and her cheeks as red as cranberries, and say: "I
DON'T know why I tell you all these things, Minnie, but Aunt Honoria's
funny, and I can't talk to Dorothy; she's too young, you know. Well, HE
said - " only every winter it was a different "he."
In my wash-stand drawer I'd kept all the clippings about her coming out
and the winter she spent in Washington and was supposed to be engaged to
the president's son, and the magazine article that told how Mr. Jennings
had got his money by robbing widows and orphans, and showed the little
frame house where Miss Patty was born - as if she's had anything to do
with it. And so now I was cutting out the picture of her and the prince
and the article underneath which told how many castles she'd have, and I
don't mind saying I was sniffling a little bit, for I couldn't get used
to the idea. And suddenly the door closed softly and there was a rustle
behind me. When I turned it was Miss Patty herself. She saw the clipping
immediately, and stopped just inside the door.
"YOU, TOO," she said. "And we've come all this distance to get away from
just that."
"Well, I shan't talk about it," I replied, not holding out my hand, for
with her, so to speak, next door to being a princess - but she leaned
right over and kissed me. I could hardly believe it.
"Why won't you talk about it?" she insisted, catching me by the
shoulders and holding me off. "Minnie, your eyes are as red as your
hair!"
"I don't approve of it," I said. "You might as well know it now as
later, Miss Patty. I don't believe in mixed marriages. I had a cousin
that married a Jew, and what with him making the children promise to be
good on the Talmud and her trying to raise them with the Bible, the poor
things is that mixed up that it's pitiful."
She got a little red at that, but she sat down and took up the clipping.
"He's much better looking than that, Minnie," she said soberly, "and
he's a good Catholic. But if that's the way you feel we'll not talk
about it. I've had enough trouble at home as it is."
"I guess from that your father isn't crazy about it," I remarked,
getting her a glass of spring water. The papers had been full of how Mr.
Jennings had forbidden the prince the house when he had been in America
the summer before.
"Certainly he's crazy about it - almost insane!" she said, and smiled at
me in her old way over the top of the glass. Then she put down the glass
and came over to me. "Minnie, Minnie," she said, "if you only knew how
I've wanted to get away from the newspapers and the gossips and come to
this smelly little spring-house and talk things over with a red-haired,
sharp-tongued, mean-dispositioned spring-house girl - !"
And with that I began to blubber, and she came into my arms like a baby.
"You're all I've got," I declared, over and over, "and you're going to
live in a country where they harness women with dogs, and you'll never
hear an English word from morning to night."
"Stuff!" She gave me a little shake. "He speaks as good English as I
do. And now we're going to stop talking about him - you're worse than the
newspapers." She took off her things and going into my closet began to
rummage for the pop-corn. "Oh, how glad I am to get away," she sang
out to me. "We're supposed to have gone to Mexico; even Dorothy doesn't
know. Where's the pop-corner or the corn-popper or whatever you call
it?"
She was as happy to have escaped the reporters and the people she knew
as a child, and she sat down on the floor in front of the fire and began
to shell the corn into the popper, as if she'd done it only the day
before.
"I guess you're safe enough here," I said. "It's always slack in
January - only a few chronics and the Saturday-to-Monday husbands, except
a drummer now and then who drives up from Finleyville. It's too early
for drooping society buds, and the chronic livers don't get around until
late March, after the banquet season closes. It will be pretty quiet for
a while."
And at that minute the door was flung open, and Bath-house Mike
staggered in.
"The old doctor!" he gasped. "He's dead, Miss Minnie - died just now in
the hot room in the bathhouse! One minute he was givin' me the divil for
something or other, and the next - I thought he was asleep."
Something that had been heavy in my breast all afternoon suddenly seemed
to burst and made me feel faint all over. But I didn't lose my head.
"Does anybody know yet?" I asked quickly. He shook his head.
"Then he didn't die in the bath-house, Mike," I said firmly. "He died
in his bed, and you know it. If it gets out that he died in the hot room
I'll have the coroner on you."
Miss Patty was standing by the railing of the spring. I got my shawl and
started out after Mike, and she followed.
"If the guests ever get hold of this they'll stampede. Start any
excitement in a sanatorium," I said, "and one and all they'll dip their
thermometers in hot water and swear they've got fever!"
And we hurried to the house together.
CHAPTER III
A WILL
Well, we got the poor old doctor moved back to his room, and had one of
the chambermaids find him there, and I wired to Mrs. Van Alstyne, who
was Mr. Dicky Carter's sister, and who was on her honeymoon in South
Carolina. The Van Alstynes came back at once, in very bad tempers, and
we had the funeral from the preacher's house in Finleyville so as not to
harrow up the sanatorium people any more than necessary. Even as it was
a few left, but about twenty of the chronics stayed, and it looked as if
we might be able to keep going.
Miss Patty sent to town for a black veil for me, and even went to the
funeral. It helped to take my mind off my troubles to think who it was
that was holding my hand and comforting me, and when, toward the end
of the service, she got out her handkerchief and wiped her eyes I was
almost overcome, she being, so to speak, in the very shadow of a throne.
After it was all over the relatives gathered in the sun parlor of the
sanatorium to hear the will - Mr. Van Alstyne and his wife and about
twenty more who had come up from the city for the funeral and stayed
over - on the house.
Well, the old doctor left me the buttons for his full dress waistcoat
and his favorite copy of Gray's Anatomy. I couldn't exactly set up
housekeeping with my share of the estate, but when the lawyer read that
part of the will aloud and a grin went around the room I flounced out of
my chair.
"Maybe you think I'm disappointed," I said, looking hard at the family,
who weren't making any particular pretense at grief, and at the house
people standing around the door. "Maybe you think it's funny to see an
unmarried woman get a set of waistcoat buttons and a medical book. Well,
that set of buttons was the set he bought in London on his wedding trip,
and the book's the one he read himself to sleep with every night for
twenty years. I'm proud to get them."
Mr. Van Alstyne touched me on the arm.
"Everybody knows how loyal you've been, Minnie," he assured me. "Now sit
down like a good girl and listen to the rest of the will."
"While I'm up I might as well get something else off my mind," I said.
"I know what's in that will, but I hadn't anything to do with it, Mr.
Van Alstyne. He took advantage of my being laid up with influenza last
spring."
They thought that was funny, but a few minutes later they weren't so
cheerful. You see the sanatorium was a mighty fine piece of property,
with a deer park and golf links. We'd had plenty of offers to sell it
for a summer hotel, but we'd both been dead against it. That was one of
the reasons for the will.
The whole estate was left to Dicky Carter, who hadn't been able to come,
owing to his being laid up with an attack of mumps. The family sat up
and nodded at one another, or held up its hands, but when they heard
there was a condition they breathed easier.
Beginning with one week after the reading of the will - and not a day
later - Mr. Dick was to take charge of the sanatorium and to stay there
for two months without a day off. If at the end of that time the place
was being successfully conducted and could show that it hadn't lost
money, the entire property became his for keeps. If he failed it was to
be sold and the money given to charity.
You would have to know Richard Carter to understand the excitement the
will caused. Most of us, I reckon, like the sort of person we've never
dared to be ourselves. The old doctor had gone to bed at ten o'clock all
his life and got up at seven, and so he had a sneaking fondness for the
one particular grandson who often didn't go to bed at all. Twice to
my knowledge when he was in his teens did Dicky Carter run away from
school, and twice his grandfather kept him for a week hidden in the
shelter-house on the golf links. Naturally when Mr. Van Alstyne and I
had to hide him again, which is further on in the story, he went to the
old shelter-house like a dog to its kennel, only this time - but that's
ahead, too.
Well, the family went back to town in a buzz of indignation, and I
carried my waistcoat buttons and my Anatomy out to the spring-house
and had a good cry. There was a man named Thoburn who was crazy for the
property as a summer hotel, and every time I shut my eyes I could see
"Thoburn House" over the veranda and children sailing paper boats in the
mineral spring.
Sure enough, the next afternoon Mr. Thoburn drove out from Finleyville
with a suit case, and before he'd taken off his overcoat he came out to
the spring-house.
"Hello, Minnie," he exclaimed. "Does the old man's ghost come back to
dope the spring, or do you do it?"
"I don't know what you are talking about, Mr. Thoburn," I retorted
sharply. "If you don't know that this spring has its origin in - "
"In Schmidt's drug store down in Finleyville!" he finished for me. "Oh,
I know all about that spring, Minnie! Don't forget that my father's
cows used to drink that water and liked it. I leave it to you," he said,
sniffing, "if a self-respecting cow wouldn't die of thirst before she
drank that stuff as it is now."
I'd been filling him a glass - it being a matter of habit with me - and he
took it to the window and held it to the light.
"You're getting careless, Minnie," he said, squinting at it. "Some of
those drugs ought to be dissolved first in hot water. There's a lump of
lithia there that has Schmidt's pharmacy label on it."
"Where?" I demanded, and started for it. He laughed at that, and putting
the glass down, he came over and stood smiling at me.
"As ingenuous as a child," he said in his mocking way, "a nice, little
red-haired child! Minnie, how old is this young Carter?"
"Twenty-three."
"An - er - earnest youth? Willing to buckle down to work and make the old
place go? Ready to pat the old ladies on the shoulder and squeeze the
young ones' hands?"
"He's young," I said, "but if you're counting on his being a fool - "
"Not at all," he broke in hastily. "If he hasn't too much character
he'll probably succeed. I hope he isn't a fool. If he isn't, oh, friend
Minnie, he'll stand the atmosphere of this Garden of Souls for about a
week, and then he'll kill some of them and escape. Where is he now?"
"He's been sick," I said. "Mumps!"
"Mumps! Oh, my aunt!" he exclaimed, and fell to laughing. He was still
laughing when he got to the door.
"Mumps!" he repeated, with his hand on the knob. "Minnie, the old place
will be under the hammer in three weeks, and if you know what's good for
you, you'll sign in under the new management while there's a vacancy.
You've been the whole show here for so long that it will be hard for you
to line up in the back row of the chorus."
"If I were you," I said, looking him straight in the eye, "I wouldn't
pick out any new carpets yet, Mr. Thoburn. I promised the old doctor I'd
help Mr. Dick, and I will."
"So you're actually going to fight it out," he said, grinning. "Well,
the odds are in your favor. You are two to my one."
"I think it's pretty even," I retorted. "We will be hindered, so to
speak, by having certain principles of honor and honesty. You have no
handicap."
He tried to think of a retort, and not finding one he slammed out of the
spring-house in a rage.
Mr. Van Alstyne and his wife came in that same day, just before dinner,
and we played three-handed bridge for half an hour. As I've said, they'd
been on their honeymoon, and they were both sulky at having to stay at
the Springs. It was particularly hard on Mrs. Van Alstyne, because, with
seven trunks of trousseau with her, she had to put on black. But she
used to shut herself up in her room in the evenings and deck out for Mr.
Sam in her best things. We found it out one evening when Mrs. Biggs set
fire to her bureau cover with her alcohol curling-iron heater, and Mrs.
Sam, who had been going around in a black crepe dress all day, rushed
out in pink satin with crystal trimming, and slippers with cut-glass
heels.
After the first rubber Mrs. Van Alstyne threw her cards on the floor and
said another day like this would finish her.
"Surely Dick is able to come now," she said, like a peevish child.
"Didn't he say the swelling was all gone?"
"Do you expect me to pick up those cards?" Mr. Sam asked angrily,
looking at her.
Mrs. Sam yawned and looked up at him.
"Of course I do," she answered. "If it wasn't for you I'd not have
stayed a moment after the funeral. Isn't it bad enough to have seven
trunks full of clothes I've never worn, and to have to put on poky old
black, without keeping me here in this old ladies' home?"
Mr. Sam looked at the cards and then at her.
"I'm not going to pick them up," he declared. "And as to our staying
here, don't you realize that if we don't your precious brother will
never show up here at all, or stay if he does come? And don't you also
realize that this is probably the only chance he'll ever have in the
world to become financially independent of us?"
"You needn't be brutal," she said sharply. "And it isn't so bad for
you here as it is for me. You spend every waking minute admiring Miss
Jennings, while I - there isn't a man in the place who'll talk anything
but his joints or his stomach."
She got up and went to the window, and Mr. Sam followed her. Nobody
pays any attention to me in the spring-house; I'm a part of it, like the
brass rail around the spring, or the clock.
"I'm not admiring Miss Jennings," he corrected, "I'm sympathizing, dear.
She looks too nice a girl to have been stung by the title bee, that's
all."
She turned her back to him, but he pretended to tuck the hair at the
back of her neck up under her comb, and she let him do it. As I stooped
to gather up the cards he kissed the tip of her ear.
"Listen," he said, "there's a scream of a play down at Finleyville
to-night called Sweet Peas. Senator Biggs and the bishop went down last
night, and they say it's the worst in twenty years. Put on a black veil
and let's slip away and see it."
I think she agreed to do it, but that night after dinner, Amanda King,
who has charge of the news stand, told me the sheriff had closed the
opera-house and that the leading woman was sick at the hotel.
"They say she looked funny last night," Amanda finished, "and I guess
she's got the mumps."
Mumps!
My joint gave a throb at that minute.
CHAPTER IV
AND A WAY
Mr. Sam wasn't taking any chances, for the next day he went to the city
himself to bring Mr. Dick up. Everything was quiet that day and the day
after, except that on the second day I had a difference of opinion with
the house doctor and he left.
The story of the will had got out, of course, and the guests were
waiting to see Mr. Dick come and take charge. I got a good bit of gossip
from Miss Cobb, who had had her hair cut short after a fever and used to
come out early in the morning and curl it all over her head, heating the
curler on the fire log. I never smell burnt hair that I don't think
of Miss Cobb trying to do the back of her neck. She was one of our
regulars, and every winter for ten years she'd read me the letters she
had got from an insurance agent who'd run away with a married woman the
day before the wedding. She kept them in a bundle, tied with lavender
ribbon.
It was on the third day, I think, that Miss Cobb told me that Miss Patty
and her father had had a quarrel the day before. She got it from one of
the chambermaids. Mr. Jennings was a liver case and not pleasant at any
time, but he had been worse than usual. Annie, the chambermaid, told
Miss Cobb that the trouble was about settlements, and that the more Miss
Patty tried to tell him it was the European custom the worse he got.
Miss Patty hadn't come down to breakfast that day, and Mr. Moody and
Senator Biggs made a wager in the Turkish bath - according to Miss
Cobb - Mr. Moody betting the wedding wouldn't come off at all.
"Of course," Miss Cobb said, wetting her finger and trying the iron to
see if it was hot, "of course, Minnie, they're not married yet, and if
Father Jennings gets ugly and makes any sort of scandal it's all off. A
scandal just now would be fatal. These royalties are very touchy about
other people's reputations."
Well, I heard that often enough in the next few days.
Mr. Sam hadn't come back by the morning of the sixth day, but he wired
his wife the day before that Mr. Dick was on the way. But we met every
train with a sleigh, and he didn't come. I was uneasy, knowing Mr. Dick,
and Mrs. Sam was worried, too.
By that time everybody was waiting and watching, and on the early train
on the sixth day came the lawyer, a Mr. Stitt. Mr. Thoburn was going
around with a sort of greasy smile, and if I could have poisoned him
safely I'd have done it.
It had been snowing hard for a day or so, and at eleven o'clock that day
I saw Miss Cobb and Mrs. Biggs coming down the path to the spring-house,
Mrs. Biggs with her crocheting-bag hanging to the handle of her
umbrella. I opened the door, but they wouldn't come in.
"We won't track up your clean floor, Minnie," Mrs. Biggs said - she was a
little woman, almost fifty, who'd gone through life convinced she'd only
lived so long by the care she took of herself - "but I thought I'd better
come and speak to you. Please don't irritate Mr. Biggs to-day. He's been
reading that article of Upton Sinclair's about fasting, and hasn't had a
bite to eat since noon yesterday."
I noticed then that she looked pale. She was a nervous creature,
although she could drink more spring water than any human being I ever
saw, except one man, and he was a German.
Well, I promised to be careful. I've seen them fast before, and when a
fat man starts to live on his own fat, like a bear, he gets about the
same disposition.
Mrs. Biggs started back, but Miss Cobb waited a moment at the foot of
the steps.
"Mr. Van Alstyne is back," she said, "but he came alone."
"Alone!" I repeated, staring at her in a sort of daze.
"Alone," she said solemnly, "and I heard him ask for Mr. Carter. It
seems he started for here yesterday."
But I'd had time to get myself in hand, and if I had a chill up my
spine she never knew it. As she started after Mrs. Biggs I saw Mr. Sam
hurrying down the path toward the spring-house, and I knew my joint
hadn't throbbed for nothing.
Mr. Sam came in and slammed the door behind him.
"What's this about Mr. Dick not being here?" he shouted.
"Well, he isn't. That's all there is to it, Mr. Van Alstyne," I said
calmly. I am always calm when other people get excited. For that reason
some people think my red hair is a false alarm, but they soon find out.
"But he MUST be here," said Mr. Van Alstyne. "I put him on the train
myself yesterday, and waited until it started to be sure he was off."
"The only way to get Mr. Richard anywhere you want him to go," I said
dryly, "is to have him nailed in a crate and labeled."
"Damned young scamp!" said Mr. Van Alstyne, although I have a sign in
the spring-house, "Profanity not allowed."
"EXACTLY what was he doing when you last laid eyes on him?" I asked.
"He was on the train - "
"Was he alone?"
"Yes."
"Sitting?"
"No, standing. What the deuce, Minnie - "
"Waving out the window to you?"
"Of course not!" exclaimed Mr. Van Alstyne testily. "He was raising the
window for a girl in the next seat."
"Precisely!" I said. "Would you know the girl well enough to trace her?"
"That's ridiculous, you know," he said trying to be polite. "Out of a
thousand and one things that may have detained him - "
"Only one thing ever detains Mr. Dick, and that always detains him," I
said solemnly. "That's a girl. You're a newcomer in the family, Mr. Van
Alstyne; you don't remember the time he went down here to the station to
see his Aunt Agnes off to the city, and we found him three weeks later
in Oklahoma trying to marry a widow with five children."
Mr. Van Alstyne dropped into a chair, and through force of habit I gave
him a glass of spring water.
"This was a pretty girl, too," he said dismally.
I sat down on the other side of the fireplace, and it seemed to me that
father's crayon enlargement over the mantel shook its head at me.
After a minute Mr. Van Alstyne drank the water and got up.
"I'll have to tell my wife," he said. "Who's running the place, anyhow?
You?"
"Not - exactly," I explained, "but, of course, when anything comes up
they consult me. The housekeeper is a fool, and now that the house
doctor's gone - "
"Gone! Who's looking after the patients?"
"Well, most of them have been here before," I explained, "and I know
their treatment - the kind of baths and all that."
"Oh, YOU know the treatment!" he said, eying me. "And why did the house
doctor go?"
"He ordered Mr. Moody to take his spring water hot. Mr. Moody's spring
water has been ordered cold for eleven years, and I refused to change.
It was between the doctor and me, Mr. Van Alstyne."
"Oh, of course," he said, "if it was a matter of principle - " He
stopped, and then something seemed to strike him. "I say," he said;
"about the doctor - that's all right, you know; lots of doctors and all
that. But for heaven's sake, Minnie, don't discharge the cook."
Now that was queer, for it had been running in my head all morning that
in the slack season it would be cheaper to get a good woman instead of
the chef and let Tillie, the diet cook, make the pastry.
Mr. Sam picked up his hat and looked at his watch.
"Eleven thirty," he said, "and no sign of that puppy yet. I guess it's
up to the police."
"If there was only something to do," I said, with a lump in my throat,
"but to have to sit and do nothing while the old place dies it's - it's
awful, Mr. Van Alstyne."
"We're not dead yet," he replied from the door, "and maybe we'll need
you before the day's over. If anybody can sail the old bark to shore,
you can do it, Minnie. You've been steering it for years. The old doctor
was no navigator, and you and I know it."
It was blowing a blizzard by that time, and Miss Patty was the only one
who came out to the spring-house until after three o'clock. She shook
the snow off her furs and stood by the fire, looking at me and not
saying anything for fully a minute.
"Well," she said finally, "aren't you ashamed of yourself?"