Egbert was too agitated to eat any breakfast, and went out to superintend the strengthening of the poultry yard defences.
“I think she might at least have waited till the funeral was over,” said Amanda in a scandalised voice.
“It’s her own funeral, you know,” said Sir Lulworth; “it’s a nice point in etiquette how far one ought to show respect to one’s own mortal remains.”
Disregard for mortuary convention was carried to further lengths next day; during the absence of the family at the funeral ceremony the remaining survivors of the speckled Sussex were massacred. The marauder’s line of retreat seemed to have embraced most of the flower beds on the lawn, but the strawberry beds in the lower garden had also suffered.
“I shall get the otter hounds to come here at the earliest possible moment,” said Egbert savagely.
“On no account! You can’t dream of such a thing!” exclaimed Amanda. “I mean, it wouldn’t do, so soon after a funeral in the house.”
“It’s a case of necessity,” said Egbert;“once an otter takes to that sort of thing it won’t stop.”
“Perhaps it will go elsewhere now there are no more fowls left,” suggested Amanda.
“One would think you wanted to shield the beast,”said Egbert.
“There’s been so little water in the stream lately,” objected Amanda; “it seems hardly sporting to hunt an animal when it has so little chance of taking refuge anywhere.”
“Good gracious!” fumed Egbert, “I’m not thinking about sport. I want to have the animal killed as soon as possible.”
Even Amanda’s opposition weakened when, during church time on the following Sunday, the otter made its way into the house, raided half a salmon from the larder and worried it into scaly fragments on the Persian rug in Egbert’s studio.
“We shall have it hiding under our beds and biting pieces out of our feet before long,” said Egbert, and from what Amanda knew of this particular otter she felt that the possibility was not a remote one.
On the evening preceding the day fixed for the hunt Amanda spent a solitary hour walking by the banks of the stream, making what she imagined to be hound noises. It was charitably supposed by those who overheard her performance, that she was practising for farmyard imitations at the forth-coming village entertainment.
It was her friend and neighbour, Aurora Burret, who brought her news of the day’s sport.
“Pity you weren’t out; we had quite a good day. We found at once, in the pool just below your garden.”
“Did you—kill?” asked Amanda.
“Rather. A fine she-otter. Your husband got rather badly bitten in trying to ‘tail it.’ Poor beast, I felt quite sorry for it, it had such a human look in its eyes when it was killed. You’ll call me silly, but do you know who the look reminded me of? My dear woman, what is the matter?”
When Amanda had recovered to a certain extent from her attack of nervous prostration Egbert took her to the Nile Valley to recuperate. Change of scene speedily brought about the desired recovery of health and mental balance. The escapades of an adventurous otter in search of a variation of diet were viewed in their proper light. Amanda’s normally placid temperament reasserted itself. Even a hurricane of shouted curses, coming from her husband’s dressing-room, in her husband’s voice, but hardly in his usual vocabulary, failed to disturb her serenity as she made a leisurely toilet one evening in a Cairo hotel.
“What is the matter? What has happened?” she asked in amused curiosity.
“The little beast has thrown all my clean shirts into the bath! Wait till I catch you, you little—”
“What little beast?” asked Amanda, suppressing a desire to laugh; Egbert’s language was so hopelessly inadequate to express his outraged feelings.
“A little beast of a naked brown Nubian boy,”spluttered Egbert.
And now Amanda is seriously ill.
TEETH IS TEETH, by Ellis Parker Butler
Daniel, the gateman, was sitting on the pine bench before his little square gatehouse, gazing gloomily up the empty stretch of South Fourteenth Street. He was an old man, and having outlived his days of usefulness as an active railroad man had been given the gates at the grade crossing in South Fairview. It was not a lively job. During the middle of the day nothing ever used the track but an occasional bobtail freight, and South Fourteenth Street itself was not lively. Teams avoided the heavy road of loose sawdust, knee-deep over a bed of pine slabs. Morning and evening, to be sure, the sawmill hands passed the gatehouse in a hurrying stream, and some time during the day S. Potts usually dropped over to have a word with Daniel. The days were as long for S. Potts as for Daniel. Except in the morning and evening customers seldom entered his corner saloon, and S. Potts could sit on Daniel’s bench and keep an eye on his own door. For five years he had poured upon Daniel the vast stores of his knowedge, and he felt a sort of proprietorship in the old man.
“S. Potts,” said Daniel, as his friend look his customary seat on the bench, “I wisht I had turned out to be an inventor, ’stead of a railroad man, I do.”
S. Potts settled his long legs comfortably, and shook his head. “Now, there you go, Daniel!” he said reproachfully. “Here I’ve been teachin’ you philosophy for near six years—just chuckin’ it into you free gratis by wholesale, as I might say—an’ still you ain’t satisfied.”
“I am satisfied, S. Potts,” said the old man. “I’m just too satisfied for any use.”
“No, you ain’t, Daniel,” insisted S. Potts. “You’re sore an’ mad an’ discontented, an’ it pretty nigh discourages me. Here you are, sixty-four years old, goin’ on sixty-five, an’ you’ve got a good job as gateman to this railroad, an’ yet you ain’t satisfied.”
“Yes, I am,” insisted Daniel; “yes, I am, S. Potts.”
“No, you ain’t,” S. Potts reasserted, “an’ I don’t take it as no compliment to me, neither. It ain’t everybody that has a chance to associate with me an’ hear me talk. You can’t claim I’ve been stingy in giving you free information, Daniel. I’ve give you enough knowledge to make you equal to Solomon, an’ I’ve learned you philosophy until you ought to be chuck-full of it. But the more I learn you the less you seems to know, an’ you keep kickin’ all the time.”
“You hadn’t ought to git mad at me, S. Potts,” said Daniel. “You know—”
“I wouldn’t blame you so much, Daniel,” interrupted S. Potts, “if you didn’t have me to talk to, but it does seem, associating with me like you do, an’ hearing me talk, you ought to have more sense. Sometimes I think I won’t bother with you no more, only I’m so full of knowledge it sort of hurts my head. An’ all of it, every drop of it, I pour out on you, Daniel. You ought to be mighty thankful.”
“I am thankful,” began Daniel, but S. Potts interrupted him again.
“If you was you’d be singing and dancing like a nightingale,” he said. “If you knew what was best for you, you would be mighty glad to sit on this bench here an’ listen to me talk.”
“I am,” declared Daniel.
“No, you ain’t,” insisted S. Potts. “I’ve knowed you five years, Daniel, and if I had thought it was best for you to be an inventor I’d have made you into one. But I seen you wasn’t fitted to be made into an inventor, an’ that is why I didn’t make you into one. I seen you was fitted to be a gateman, an’ I left you be one, didn’t I?”
“You did, S. Potts,” Daniel admitted.
“I might have made you into an inventor an’, sent you off, an’ then had