“Now, then,” said Charlie Sands, “out
with it! What have you been up to this time?”
Tish returned his gaze calmly. “We have
been in the Maine woods in the holy calm,” she
said. “As for those furs, I suppose a body
may buy a set of furs if she likes.” This,
of course, was not a lie. “As for that
card, it’s a mistake.” Which it was
indeed.
“But—Dorothea!” persisted Charlie
Sands.
“Never in my life knew anybody named Dorothea.
Did you, Aggie?”
“Never,” said Aggie firmly.
Charlie Sands apologized and looked thoughtful.
On Tish’s remaining rather injured, he asked
us all out to dinner that night, and almost the first
thing he ordered was frogs’ legs. Aggie
got rather white about the lips.
“I—I think I’ll not take any,”
she said feebly. “I—I keep thinking
of Tish tickling their throats with the hairpin, and
how Percy—”
We glared at her, but it was too late. Charlie
Sands drew up his chair and rested his elbows on the
table.
“So there was a Percy as well as a Dorothea!”
he said cheerfully. “I might have known
it. Now we’ll have the story!”
THE ADVENTURE OF THE RED-HEADED DETECTIVE, THE LADY
CHAUFFEUR, AND THE MAN WHO COULD NOT TELL THE TRUTH
It is easy enough, of course, to look back on our
Canadian experience and see where we went wrong.
What I particularly resent is the attitude of Charlie
Sands.
I am writing this for his benefit. It seems to
me that a clean statement of the case is due to Tish,
and, in less degree, to Aggie and myself.
It goes back long before the mysterious cipher.
Even the incident of our abducting the girl in the
pink tam-o’-shanter was, after all, the inevitable
result of the series of occurrences that preceded it.
It is my intention to give this series of occurrences
in their proper order and without bias. Herbert
Spencer says that every act of one’s life is
the unavoidable result of every act that has preceded
it.
Naturally, therefore, I begin with the engagement
by Tish of a girl as chauffeur; but even before that
there were contributing causes. There was the
faulty rearing of the McDonald youth, for instance,
and Tish’s aesthetic dancing. And afterward
there was Aggie’s hay fever, which made her
sneeze and let go of a rope at a critical moment.
Indeed, Aggie’s hay fever may be said to be
one of the fundamental causes, being the reason we
went to Canada.
It was like this: Along in June of the year before
last, Aggie suddenly announced that she was going
to spend the summer in Canada.
“It’s the best thing in the world for
hay fever,” she said, avoiding Tish’s
eye. “Mrs. Ostermaier says she never sneezed
once last year. The Northern Lights fill the
air with ozone, or something like that.”
