At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern Part 2

With the characteristic independence of cats, the visitor yawned. The conversation evidently bored him.

"Come, kitty," said Harlan, more firmly, with a low swoop of his arm. The cat arched his back, erected an enlarged tail, and hissed threateningly.

In a dignified but effective manner, he eluded all attempts to capture him, even avoiding Dorothy and her broom.

"There's something more or less imperial about him," she remarked, wiping her flushed cheeks, when they had finally decided not to put the cat out.

"As long as he's adopted us, we'll have to keep him. What shall we name him?"

"Claudius Tiberius," answered Harlan. "It suits him down to the ground."

"His first name is certainly appropriate," laughed Dorothy, with a rueful glance at her scratched hand. Making the best of a bad bargain, she spread an old grey shawl, nicely folded, on the floor by the stove, and requested Claudius Tiberius to recline upon it, but he persistently ignored the invitation.

"This is jolly enough," said Harlan. "A cosy little supper in our own house, with a gale blowing outside, the tea kettle singing over the fire, and a cat purring on the hearth."

"Have you heard Claudius purr?" asked Dorothy, idly.

"Come to think of it, I haven't. Perhaps something is wrong with his purrer. We'll fix him to-morrow."

From a remote part of the house came twelve faint, silvery tones. The kitchen clock struck next, with short, quick strokes, followed immediately by a casual record of the hour from the clock on the mantel beneath Uncle Ebeneezer's portrait. Then the grandfather's clock in the hall boomed out twelve, solemn funereal chimes. Afterward, the silence seemed acute.

"The end of the honeymoon," said Dorothy, a little sadly, with a quick, inquiring look at her husband.

"The end of the honeymoon!" repeated Harlan, gathering her into his arms.

"To-morrow, life begins!"

Several hours later, Dorothy awoke from a dreamless sleep to wonder whether life was any different from a honeymoon, and if so, how and why.

II

The Day Afterward

By the pitiless light of early morning, the house was even uglier than at night. With an irreverence essentially modern, Dorothy decided, while she was dressing, to have all the furniture taken out into the back yard, where she could look it over at her leisure. She would make a bonfire of most of it, or, better yet, have it cut into wood for the fireplace. Thus Uncle Ebeneezer's c.u.mbrous bequest might be quickly transformed into comfort.

"And," thought Dorothy, "I'll take down that hideous portrait over the mantel before I'm a day older."

But when she broached the subject to Harlan, she found him unresponsive and somewhat disinclined to interfere with the existing order of things.

"We'll be here only for the Summer," he said, "so what's the use of monkeying with the furniture and burning up fifty or sixty beds? There's plenty of wood in the cellar."

"I don't like the furniture," she pouted.

"My dear," said Harlan, with patronising kindness, "as you grow older, you'll find lots of things on the planet which you don't like. Moreover, it'll be quite out of your power to cremate 'em, and it's just as well to begin adjusting yourself now."

This bit of philosophy irritated Mrs. Carr unbearably. "Do you mean to say," she demanded, with rising temper, "that you won't do as I ask you to?"

"Do you mean to say," inquired Harlan, wickedly, in exact imitation of her manner, "that you won't do as I ask you to? Four weeks ago yesterday, if I remember rightly, you promised to obey me!"

"Don't remind me of what I'm ashamed of!" flashed Dorothy. "If I'd known what a brute you were, I'd never have married you! You may be sure of that!"

Claudius Tiberius insinuated himself between Harlan's feet and rubbed against his trousers, leaving a thin film of black fur in his wake. Being fastidious about his personal appearance, Harlan kicked Claudius Tiberius vigorously, grabbed his hat and went out, slamming the door, and whistling with an exaggerated cheerfulness.

"Brute!" The word rankled deeply as he went downhill with his hands in his pockets, whistling determinedly. So Dorothy was sorry she had married him!

After all he'd done for her, too. Giving up a good position in New York, taking her half-way around the world on a honeymoon, and bringing her to a magnificent country residence in a fas.h.i.+onable locality for the Summer!

Safely screened by the hill, he turned back to look at the "magnificent country residence," then swore softly under his breath, as, for the first time, he took in the full meaning of the eccentric architecture.

Perched high upon the hill, with intervening shrubbery carefully cut down, the Judson mansion was not one to inspire confidence in its possessor.

Outwardly, it was grey and weather-worn, with the s.h.i.+ngles dropping off in places. At the sides, the rambling wings and outside stairways, branching off into s.p.a.ce, conveyed the impression that the house had been recently subjected to a powerful influence of the centrifugal sort. But worst of all was the front elevation, with its two round windows, its narrow, long window in the centre, and the low windows on either side of the front door--the grinning, distorted semblance of a human face.

The bare, uncurtained windows loomed up boldly in the searching sunlight, which spared nothing. The blue smoke rising from the kitchen chimney appeared strangely like a plume streaming out from the rear. Harlan noted, too, that the railing of the narrow porch extended almost entirely across the front of the house, and remembered, dimly, that they had found the steps at one side of the porch the night before. Not a single unpleasant detail was in any way hidden, and he clutched instinctively at a tree as he realised that the supports of the railing were cunningly arranged to look like huge teeth.

"No wonder," he said to himself "that the stage driver called it the Jack-o'-Lantern! That's exactly what it is! Why didn't he paint it yellow and be done with it? The old devil!" The last disrespectful allusion, of course, being meant for Uncle Ebeneezer.

"Poor Dorothy," he thought again. "I'll burn the whole thing, and she shall put every blamed crib into the purifying flames. It's mine, and I can do what I please with it. We'll go away to-morrow, we'll go----"

Where could they go, with less than four hundred dollars? Especially when one hundred of it was promised for a typewriter? Harlan had parted with his managing editor on terms of great dignity, announcing that he had forsworn journalism and would hereafter devote himself to literature. The editor had remarked, somewhat cynically, that it was a better day for journalism than for literature, the fine, inner meaning of the retort not having been fully evident to Harlan until he was some three squares away from the office.

Much chastened in spirit, and fully ready to accept his wife's estimate of him, he went on downhill into Judson Centre.

It was the usual small town, the post-office, grocery, meat market, and general loafing-place being combined under one roof. Near by was the blacksmith shop, and across from it was the inevitable saloon. Far up in the hills was the Judson Centre Sanitarium, a worthy inst.i.tution of some years standing, where every human ailment from tuberculosis to fits was more or less successfully treated.

Upon the inmates of the sanitarium the inhabitants of Judson Centre lived, both materially and mentally. Few of them had ever been nearer to it than the back door, but tales of dark doings were widely prevalent throughout the community, and mothers were wont to frighten their young offspring into obedience with threats of the "san-tor-i-yum."

"Now what do you reckon ails _him_?" asked the blacksmith of the stage-driver, as Harlan went into the village store.

"Wouldn't reckon nothin' ailed him to look at him, would you?" queried the driver, in reply.

Indeed, no one looking at Mr. Carr would have suspected him of an "ailment." He was tall and broad-shouldered and well set up, with clear grey eyes and a rosy, smooth-shaven, boyish face which had given him the nickname of "The Cherub" all along Newspaper Row. In his bearing there was a suggestion of boundless energy, which needed only proper direction to accomplish wonders.

"You can't never tell," continued the driver, s.h.i.+fting his quid. "Now, I've took folks up there goin' on ten year now, an' some I've took up looked considerable more healthy than I be when I took 'em up. Comin'

back, howsumever, it was different. One young feller rode up with me in the rain one night, a-singin' an' a-whistlin' to beat the band, an' when I took him back, a month or so arterward, he had a striped nurse on one side of him an' a doctor on t' other, an' was wearin' a shawl. Couldn't hardly set up, but he was a-tryin' to joke just the same. 'Hank,' says he, when we got a little way off from the place, 'my book of life has been edited by the librarians an' the entire appendix removed.' Them's his very words.

'An',' says he, 'the time to have the appendix took out is before it does much of anythin' to your table of contents.'

"The doctor shut him up then, an' I didn't hear no more, but I remembered the language, an' arterwards, when I got a chanst, I looked in the school-teacher's dictionary. It said as how the appendix was sunthin'

appended or added to, but I couldn't get no more about it. I've hearn tell of a 'devil child' with a tail to it what was travellin' with the circus one year, an' I've surmised as how mebbe a tail had begun to grow on this young feller an' it was took off."

"You don't say!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the blacksmith.

By reason of his professional connection with the sanitarium, Mr. Henry Blake was, in a sense, the oracle of Judson Centre, and he enjoyed his proud distinction to the full. Ordinarily, he was taciturn, but the present hour found him in a conversational mood.

"He's married," he went on, returning to the original subject. "I took him an' his wife up to the Jack-o'-Lantern last night. Come in on the nine forty-seven from the Junction. Reckon they're goin' to stay a spell, 'cause they've got trunks--one of a reasonable size, an' 'nother that looks like a dog-house. Box, too, that's got lead in it."

"Books, maybe," suggested the blacksmith, with unexpected discernment.

"Schoolteacher boarded to our house wunst an' she had most a car-load of 'em. Educated folks has to have books to keep from losin' their education."

"Don't take much stock in it myself," remarked the driver. "It spiles most folks. As soon as they get some, they begin to pine an' hanker for more. I knowed a feller wunst that begun with one book dropped on the road near the sanitarium, an' he never stopped till he was plum through college. An'

a woman up there sent my darter a book wunst, an' I took it right back to her. 'My darter's got a book,' says I, 'an' she ain't a-needin' of no duplicates. Keep it,' says I, 'fer somebody that ain't got no book."