The Best Short Stories of 1919 Part 33

Presently Hat brought down a heavy hand on her spouse's lean shoulder.

"You see what she's going to do, don't you?" she cried. "She's going to mix it with the Higgins place, that's what she's going to do! Give them a blue light. They're awake. I see a light burning in that south window."

Tyler fetched a blue light; but his matches were wet with the sweat of his efforts in the windla.s.s room. He could not strike fire.

"What are you doing? What are you doing, man?" shrieked Hat. "Come, if you can't strike a light give them a shot out of that shotgun. The whole place is coming down round their ears in a minute."

"I give away the last cartridges I had yisterday to a boy that come asking for them."

"I suppose you'd give 'em the s.h.i.+rt off your back if they come asking for it," cried Hat. "I never saw such a man. Get up the patent fog horn."

"I ain't got the key to the box," said Jed in the sulky tones of a man who can't begin to comply with the demands upon him.

"Ain't got the key! This is a pretty time to come telling me that. Run forward and see if you can't kink up the chain in the hawse pipe somehow."

Jed Tyler affected not to hear this. There was a glorious crash coming, and for his part he meant to be an eyewitness. Followed a marvelous silence, during which with fateful celerity the _Minnie Williams_ stalked the unsuspecting Higgins house. The seaward end of the wharf on which it stood had rotted away and fallen in, and nothing now remained but the line of spiles, which rose out of the water like a row of bad teeth from which the gums had fallen away. And on top of each spile roosted a huge sea gull of marvelous whiteness, fatted with the spoils of the harbor.

So quietly had the _Minnie Williams_ stolen upon them that the spiles on which they slept stirred and swayed out before they took note of the invasion. At the touch they rose shrieking on the night air with a vast flapping of wings.

The s.h.i.+p pa.s.sed between the long rows of spiling with nice judgment.

Certainly in the circ.u.mstance she was doing the best she could by herself and her owners. At the left of her lay a little steamer tied up for the winter, the top of her stack swathed like a sore thumb; and only twenty feet to the right, under water, lurked, as Hat well knew, a cruel weed-grown stone abutment. To the fine angular stern of the _Minnie Williams_ the Higgins place would be like nothing so much as a pillow stuffed with eiderdown.

That fated residence stood forlorn in the stars.h.i.+ne. It was old, it was gray, it suffered from some sort of s.h.i.+ngle mange, and blue and yellow tin tobacco signs were tacked on here and there. The crazy outside staircase was like an aspiration that had come to nothing.

No knight of old ever couched lance against the s.h.i.+eld of his enemy with surer aim than that which distinguished the _Minnie Williams_ when she set her main boom against the house of Higgins to overthrow it. And it availed it nothing that it was founded upon a rock.

"My G.o.d, Tyler, can't you see what's taking place?" yelled Hat Tyler.

Tyler unquestionably could. He had set a cold corn-cob pipe between his teeth; he answered nothing, but his fascinated saucer eyes were fixed on the precise spot where as it seemed the boom was destined to be planted.

This was at a place about six feet below the square of soapstone with a hole in it, through which the stovepipe pa.s.sed. He was not disappointed.

The boom in fact exerted its whole pressure against the body of the stove itself, with the result which we have seen. The stove made its way across the kitchen and appeared in the bedroom at the moment when Elmer had made up his lips to blow the flame.

Nor was this all. The inexorable stern of the _Minnie Williams_ followed after, raising the roof of the Higgins place with the skillful care of an epicure taking the cover off his favorite dish. The roof yielded with only a gentle rippling motion, and the s.h.i.+p's lifeboat, which hung from davits aft, sc.r.a.ped the remains of supper off the supper table with her keel.

Zinie Shadd, returning late from a lodge meeting which had wound up with a little supper in the banquet hall, felt a queer stir through his members to see the Higgins place alter its usually placid countenance, falter, turn half round, and get down on its knees with an apparently disastrous collapse of its four walls and of everything within them. The short wide windows narrowed and lengthened with an effect of bodily agony as the ribs of the place were snapped off short all round the eaves.

"G.o.d help them poor creatures inside!" he was moved to utter out of the goodness of his heart. "She went in jest as easy," he recounted later to one of his cronies. "It warn't no more exertion for her than 't would be to you to stick your finger through a cream puff."

"How come it they 'scaped with a whole skin?"

"I don't see for the life of me. Elmer says himself it's just another case of where it's _for_ a man to live, and if it ain't for him to he won't, and if it's for him to be will, and that's about all there is to it."

Elmer's exact phrase has been that he guessed nothing coming from the sea side would ever cheat the gallows.

Pearl Higgins told a friend of hers that the one thing that came into her mind as she lay there was that the place had been torpedoed.

"I knew what it was just as well as I wanted to," she said. She had known all along that if any place would get it it would be the Higgins place, on account of its exposed position, right in line with anything that showed up at the mouth of the harbor. Of course if she had stopped to think she would have known that a torpedo didn't come through a house at the snail's pace the stove was moving at when it looked through at her.

"But my land, at a time like that what is a body to think?" she inquired. Of course as soon as she could get her wits together she could see that it was her own stove, and nothing to be afraid of in itself if only she knew what was animating it.

There was the rub. The truth is, the performance of the stove, at that hour of the night, too, was so wholly out of the ordinary that she and Elmer had not so much as stirred out of their tracks for the fraction of a second it took the thing to come clear into the room. Pearl said later that she thought she was seeing things.

"Scared? I was petrified! I couldn't stir hand or foot," she told her friend. "You talk about your flabbergasted women! I never had such a feeling come over me before."

Of course neither of them had the faintest notion of what was at the back of it, and that made it all the worse. Pearl lay there under the clothes as limp as a rag, and the main boom of the _Minnie Williams_, which as we know was the thing behind it all, urged the stove forward until it was in square contact with the foot of the bed.

Now if there was one thing on which Pearl Higgins prided herself it was her bed. It was a mountainous, whale-backed, feather-bedded four-poster, built in the days of San Domingo mahogany, and quite capable of supporting the weight of a baby elephant without a quiver. Equipped with the legs of a colossus it had a frame to match. Tradition had it that a governor of the state had once lain in it. If there was one thing sure, therefore, it was that the bed would not collapse. But then again the _Minnie Williams_ was a lady not to be denied. She must come on; she could not help it for her heart, for the bitter end of the chain cable was not yet, and she still had way on her.

The bed, the stove and the boom met, they fitted together as if they had been made for one another from the beginning, they engaged each other like vertebra in a spine, they stiffened. There came a fearful rending of laths; the mopboard buckled; two vases of alabaster fell from the parlor mantel, and almost at the same moment the red plush clock with the stone cuckoo-bird over the dial and the music box "where its gizzard should have been," as Elmer always said, fell likewise. Pearl said afterward she knew that had gone because it started playing there on the floor at a great rate. And the next thing she knew she was in the parlor herself; and such a mess! She didn't know as she ever wanted to lay eyes on it again after that night's works.

Elmer, uncertain what part to play, walked along with the bed, still carrying the hand lamp in his hand, to light the _Minnie Williams_ along, and dodging falling walls and plaster. He said when questioned by Zinie Shadd that he hadn't felt any particular alarm, on account of the deliberate way she had come poking in there, with a kind of a root-hog-or-die look about her; and he said he never for a minute doubted his ability and Pearl's to make good their escape if the worst came to the worst.

It really wasn't until the parlor went, as he explained to the Tall Stove Club, that he took it into his head to look over his shoulder; and it was then that he saw the lifeboat sweeping on victoriously across the kitchen, or what had been the kitchen. And on top of that he saw Hat Tyler looking down as cool as a cuc.u.mber, and her husband standing beside her.

"She had come on deck jest as she was," he stated at that time with a quiet chuckle, "and I never see anything like so much interest showing in a human countenance before."

Hat Tyler might well show interest; for after the house came the land--and the land, well she knew it, was made of sterner stuff. A shriek from Pearl told Elmer that his wife had found her tongue, as he phrased it. The fact is she had caught sight of Hat Tyler standing over her like an avenging fury.

But precisely at this moment the chain cable, which had all this time lain lethargic on the floor of the harbor, roused itself link by link, tautened, took a grip on the hook and snubbed the s.h.i.+p. None too soon, it had run out to the bitter end.

Pearl Higgins' bed halted, the stove halted, and Elmer set down his lamp. The boom receded. With the same swanlike ease she had used in effecting an entrance, the _Minnie Williams_ floated out into the stream again.

And in the very instant of that heaven-sent reversal Hat Tyler cried in trumpet tones, "Travel yourself, and see how you like it!"

A shriek of demoniac laughter came on the heels of that. There were none present to laugh with Hat, but that laugh of hers rang in Pearl Higgins'

ears like the last trump. She got herself over the side of the bed in short order. Too late, alas! Hat Tyler's had been a Parthian shot. The s.h.i.+p was out of the house altogether by then, and the roof had settled back over its joists at a rakish angle. The whole after part of the house was mashed into a neat concavity which would have made a perfect mold for the _Minnie Williams'_ stern, and the _Minnie Williams_ was in the stream again, with not a scratch about her.

"Ain't that something?" Elmer Higgins said, standing at the edge of this declivity. "Ain't that something huge?"

"Stand there and gawk! I would if I was you!" cried his wife. "Oh, will I ever get that laugh out of my ears if I live to be a hundred? Did ever you hear anything so hateful? I think you're a pretty small part of a man myself! The least you could have done was to have lit into her when you had the chance.

"But no, not you! What do you do but stand there and never so much as open your mouth!"

"I was so kind of took aback," Elmer advanced, "what with one thing and another, I couldn't seem to lay my hands on jest the words I wanted. And she standing there jest as she was too. Ain't she immense? Where you going to look to for a solider woman than Hat?"

"It's just like her for all the world, pus.h.i.+ng herself in where she's not wanted," sobbed Pearl miserably. "The gall of her! And she just itching to get this house out of the way too! I suppose you'll be just contrary-minded enough now to say that she didn't do it on purpose?"

"No," said Elmer, solemn as a judge. "She forelaid for it all right, all right. I been saying right along she warn't a woman to sit quiet under a blow, and I told you as much at the time, mamma, if you'll recollect. I said, 'When Hat hits back I look out from under.'"

He picked a lump of plaster out of his ear and lifted high the lamp.

"But my grief, my grief, when all is said and done, ain't she a dabster!" he whispered with a tinge of admiration. "And warn't it--warn't it nice calculation?"

THE MEEKER RITUAL[14]