He threw the shawl to us and dived into the darkness. Somebody was shouting at the Lovell dock, but we sat In safe obscurity and listened to the wash of the water against the piles. The absurdity of the situation began to dawn on me, and the sight of Tish and Aggie, luminous in the starlight—it had stopped raining—trying to get into their wet shoes, made me fairly hysterical. To add to it all, the patter of Mr. Mansfield's bare feet on the boards of the dock waked our sleeping dog, and with a series of staccato barks he was at our unlucky young man's heels. He seemed to have a fondness for feet.
"If you could see yourself, Lizzie, I might understand your mirth," Tish said scathingly. "But I fail to see anything funny."
"Then for goodness sake, Tish," I cried, "stop dangling that shoe on your toe and see what is the matter with your figure. It has slipped up under your chin."
"Good heaventh!" said Aggie. "They are coming down the beach after uth!"
It was true. The lanterns had left the Lovell dock and were bobbing wildly along the water-front in bur direction, guided by the barking of the dog. Of all the hours of that awful night, that was the most terrible. We sat there shivering and helpless and watched Nemesis chasing and bobbing down on us. About half way to us the first lantern stopped and fired a gun, and back along the beach new lanterns kept adding themselves to the line that stretched out like the tail of a comet.
Tish thought she was very cool, but both Aggie and I distinctly heard her say that the stars had stopped raining. And once she said that she had always been a respected member of the community, and that nobody in his sober senses would believe her if she told the true story. And when the first lantern was so close that we could see a vague outline of the man behind it, desperation gave me a courage that has appalled me since.
I went over to the engine and tried to "spinner."
What is more to the point, I did it. The wheels began to revolve with a sickening speed: the whole frame of the boat jarred and quivered. I sank back on my knees and closed my eyes.
"We're not moving," Tish said with awful calmness.
And at that a white figure hurled itself from . the darkness at the end of the landing and flew down the dock to us. It had a can in one hand and a lantern in the other. It hesitated a second to throw off the rope, which was why we hadn't moved, of course, and, as the engine was going full, he had only time to catch one of the awning supports as it flew past. It went as if it had been shot out of a gun, and when Aggie and Tish and I had assorted ourselves from a heap on the floor, we were well out from shore.
It was lucky that Aggie took one of her awful sneezing spells just then, as she always does when she is excited, for by the time she was breathing easily again the shore was well behind and Mr. Mansfield had put on the shawl again.
Chapter V.
The Cave-man and His Woman
It is a little difficult, looking back, to explain our state of mind that night. It was only our second taste of romance—Aggie's roofer being too far back to count. Now, with six months of perspective, I think we were intoxicated with adventure to the point of abandon. For when Mr. Mansfield offered to take us home, before starting on his pursuit of the motor canoe, we refused to go. As Tish said:
"No doubt when you do overtake them, Mr. Mansfield, the young woman will feel the need of some of her own sex, women of—er—maturity and experience, to advise her. I consider it our duty to go."
"Oh, leth go!" said Aggie. "Mr. Carletonth a large man. Do you think you will have to fight him for your lady?" Aggie's tone was cheerfully bloodthirsty, and she clutched the end of the broken oar like a club. Aggie, the apostle of peace!
"Frankly, I should like to see the end of the affair myself," I admitted. "I should like to see the young lady's face when she finds you eloping with three maiden ladies, and—I am curious to know how your cave-man theory works out."
He was working over the engine, and we were headed down the lake. While I was speaking he moved to the other side of the launch, and it tilted villainously. He loomed very large in the darkness, and the strength of his bare arms and heavy chest, his sinewy legs, made him not unlike his prototype.
He did not answer me at once. He had found some cigarettes in the boat, and he lighted one. Only when it was well aglow did he show that he had heard me.
"The original cave man was no fool," he observed, calmly looking ahead. "A man doesn't carry a woman off unless he's crazy about her, in the first place. If he's got sufficient force of character to dare her daddy's stone club— jail, in this case—and enough physical strength to hold her to him with one arm and fight off pursuit and rivals with the other, it—well, it doesn't matter much what the girl thinks of him in the beginning: she'll die for him, in the end."
Aggie positively thrilled in the darkness beside me, and even Tish was silenced by the vision of this masculine point of view. As for me, just at that instant I quite agreed with the young savage I
"Ith—ith the very pretty?" Aggie ventured, after swallowing hard.
"I don't know," he said indifferently, straining his eyes ahead. "Oh— yes, I suppose she is. I never thought about it. I haven't thought of anybody else— anything else, for the week I've known her."
"The week!" we all repeated faintly.
"When her groom lifts her off her horse, I want to kill him. If that ass Carleton gets her to Telusah first and marries her, I'll take her from him. She's my woman."
Tish stood right up in the boat and pointed her finger at him. "You d-don't know what you are talking about," she stuttered. "How —how dare you speak of taking a married woman from her husband!"
"Figs!" he said disrespectfully. "In the first place, if the engine holds out, we'll rim them down at least a mile from Telusah, and in the second place, while I judge you are talking by the book and not by experience— a, few words said over a man and a woman don't make them husband and wife. It gives the woman the man's name, but—the man don't necessarily get the woman. Mine—or nobody's," he added under his breath.
Tish collapsed into her chair. I admit I felt queer all over, and Aggie's heart had fluttered back to the thin young man with the curled-up mustache and a dimple in his chin, who had fallen off a roof.
''Mister Wigginth usthed to talk exactly that way!" she said softly.
That is the way we went down toward Telusah: the prehistoric gentleman in the bow steering and watching the engine, now and then stopping it dead to listen for the throb of the motor canoe ahead. Aggie twitteringly in the past, with her bare feet tucked under her for warmth and the broken oar in her lap; Tish blazing with indignation and excitement, and I saved by my sense of humor from going into violent hysteria and embracing the hot-headed, mad, ridiculous and altogether satisfactory young animal at the wheel. I merely said:
"I wish somebody had wooed me like that thirty years ago. I wouldn't be earning my own living, young man."
"That's what she wants to do—stay single and work for a livelihood," he said with disgust. "I told her it was all fool nonsense; that the place for her kind of woman was in some man's home—"
"Cave," I suggested.
"Bearing his children—"
"Silence!" Tish shouted, and even Aggie was roused out of a dream.
He shut down the engine just then, and we all heard it: a faint throbbing that one felt in the ears, rather than heard. He leaped up on the peak of the boat and stared into the darkness ahead.
"Better than I expected," he said with suppressed excitement "They're not a mile ahead. I wish I had a stick of some sort: I may have to knock that chump on the head."
Luckily