Molly Brown's Post-Graduate Days Part 3

"Well, Molly, darling, you must go to bed now, but before you go tell me one thing: do you want Professor Green to come to Chatsworth?"

"Yes, mother, I think I do," and giving her mother a hug that made that lady gasp again and say, "Molly, what a hugger you are," she flew from the room and raced upstairs two steps at a time.

CHAPTER IV.-BURGLARS.

Judy was sitting up in bed, the moon lighting her enough for Molly to see a wild, startled look on her face.

"Molly, Molly, I hear something!"

"You hear me making more noise than I have any business to at this time o' night. I have been having a good old talk with muddy."

"Oh, no, it wasn't that. I knew you were downstairs. I haven't been truly asleep. I was 'possuming.' It is out by the chicken yard, and I am so afraid it is burglars after the pullets Aunt Mary told me she was saving for chicken salad for the wedding supper. Lewis was to kill them to-morrow."

Judy had entered so intensely into the Browns' household affairs that Molly herself was no more interested in the festive preparations than was her guest. Molly drew cautiously to the window and peeped out; she beckoned Judy, and the excited girls saw a sight to freeze the marrow in their chicken-salad-loving bones: the thief had a wheelbarrow, and some great gunny sacks over his arm, and was in the act of boldly opening the chicken-yard gate.

"If we call he will get away, and how else can we let the boys know? The wretch may have those sacks full of chickens even now," moaned Molly.

There was a three-room cottage or "office," as they called it, on the side of the house next the garden where all of the young men slept in summer. The girls feared that, in trying to let them know of the burglar, if they went out of the front door they would startle Mrs.

Brown. And if they should try to go out the back door, in getting to the cottage they would have to run across a broad streak of moonlight in plain view of the thief, and thus give him ample time to get away with his booty before they could arouse the boys.

"Why shouldn't we take the matter in our own hands and make him drop his sacks and run?" said Molly. "I am not afraid, are you?"

"Me afraid? Bless your soul, no. I am only afraid he will get off with the chickens," replied the intrepid Judy. "I have my little revolver in the tray of my trunk, the one papa gave me when we were camping in Arizona. I can load it in a jiffy. But what weapon will you take?"

"I don't see anything but my tennis racket. I'll take that and some b.a.l.l.s, too, in case I have to hit at long range. There is really no danger for us, as a chicken thief has never been known to go armed with anything more dangerous than a bag."

They slipped on their raincoats, as they were darker than their kimonos, and crept softly down the back stairs, out on the back porch, and down the steps into the yard, keeping close in the shadow of the house until they came to an althea hedge. Skirting this, still in the shadow, they got near enough to the chicken-yard gate to have a good look at the burglar. That burly ruffian, instead of bagging the pullets that were peacefully roosting in a dog-wood tree, totally unconscious that they were sleeping the last sleep of the condemned, had taken a spade from his wheelbarrow, carefully spread out his gunny sacks and was digging with great care around the holly-hocks, digging so deep and so far from the roots that he soon got up a great sod without injuring the plants.

This he placed with great care in the barrow, and as he stepped into the broad moonlight the girls recognized Kent. They clutched each other and were silent, except for a little choking noise from Judy which might easily have come from one of the condemned, having premonitory dreams of the morrow.

Kent worked on until his wheelbarrow was full of the lovely flowers.

Then he stuck in the spade and trundled it away toward the garden, the girls silently following, still keeping as well in the shadow as was possible, and holding tight to their weapons, although they no longer had any use for them. On reaching the garden, they realized that Kent must have been working many hours. He had already moved dozens of the stately plants, and they now stood in the garden where they belonged, no doubt glad of the transplanting from their former homely surroundings.

So deeply and well had Kent dug that they were uninjured by the move, and he completed the job by dousing them plentifully with water from a great tub that he had filled at the cistern.

The effect was wonderful, as Judy had known that it would be, but her surprise and pleasure that Kent should be so anxious to gratify her every wish was great. She felt her cheeks glowing with excitement and her heart pit-a-patting as it would not have done, even had Kent proved to be the chicken thief they had imagined him to be.

That young man finished his job, cleaned his spade, shook out the gunny sacks, raked the debris from the walk, and then, giving a tired yawn and stretching himself until he looked even taller than the six feet one he measured in his stocking feet, he said out loud in a perfectly conversational tone:

"Now, Miss Judy, you may have the master mind that can imagine things and see beforehand how they are going to look, but I'll have you know it takes work to create and drudgery to accomplish; and only by the sweat of the brow can we 'give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.'

You and Molly can step out of the bushes and view the landscape."

"Oh, Kent, did you know we were there all the time?"

"Certainly, little Sister, from the time Miss Judy went like a chicken with the gapes, I have known you were with me; but you seemed to be having such a good time I hated to break it up. You might have stepped in and helped a fellow, though."

"Oh, we were doing the head work," retaliated Judy.

Kent laughed, and then he had to tease them about their adventure and their weapons, especially Molly's racket and b.a.l.l.s.

"We had better crawl into the hay now, however. It is getting mighty late at night, or, rather, mighty early in the morning, and where will our beauty be if we don't get to sleep? I'll see you to the back door."

"You needn't," said Molly. "You must be dead tired, and here is the office door open for you. There is no use in your coming any farther. We can slip around the front way and be in the house in no time."

"Well, good morning. I am dead tired, and such brave ladies as you are need no escort. Better luck to you next time you go burglar hunting."

It was a wonderful night, or rather morning, as Kent had indicated. The moon hung low on the horizon ready for bed, as an example to all up-late young ladies. The stars, with their rival retiring, were doing their best to get in a little shine before daylight. Everything was very still. The tree frogs and crickets and Katy-dids had suddenly ceased their incessant noise. There was a feel in the air that meant dawn.

What was it that greeted the ears of the tired Kent? Old tennis player that he was, it sounded to him like the tw.a.n.g of a racket in the hands of a determined server who means to drive a ball that the champion himself could not return. Then came the dull thud of the ball, a groan, a scream; then the sharp crack of a pistol, more screams from inside the house; lights, doors opening, all the household awake, and Paul and John and Crit, who had spent the night at Chatsworth, tumbling out of the office almost before Kent could get around the house. There he found Judy fallen in a little heap on the gra.s.s, and Molly carefully and coolly aiming a second tennis ball, this time at a real burglar.

The man climbing from the upper gallery of the house had been surprised by the girls as they came from the garden. At Molly's first ball he had dropped to the ground, and Judy had caught him on the fly, as it were.

The second tennis ball got him square on the jaw, but he was already down and out. Kent declared afterward, when the smoke of battle had cleared away, that it was not like Molly to hit a fellow when he was down. She had always been a good sport until now.

Mrs. Woodsmall, it seems, had talked too much about the weight of Mildred's silver, and had dwelt too long on the recklessness of the Browns in having all of those fine things in the little hall room with the window opening on the upper gallery, where anybody with any limberness could climb up that twisted wisteria vine and get away with anything he had a mind to. A tramp, hanging around the postoffice window, had overheard her and, having more limberness than any other commodity, had endeavored to help himself.

Dr. John came with first aid to the injured, and found the man more scared than hurt. It was hard to tell which ball had done most damage; certainly Molly's was the more effective in appearance. Her first she had served straight at his nose, so disfiguring that member that the rogues' gallery officials would have had difficulty in identifying him.

The second found his jaw and gave him so much pain that John feared a fracture. Judy's little pistol had done good work. A flesh wound on the arm was the verdict for her.

The ground was strewn with silver in every kind of fancy novelty that a bride is supposed by her dear friends to need-or why else do they give them to her?

Then Crittenden Rutledge opened his mouth and spoke. As usual when he did such a thing it was worth getting up before dawn to hear him.

"Don't you think, Mildred, darling, we might give the poor fellow three or four cheese scoops and several b.u.t.ter knives and a card tray or two?

A young couple could easily make out for a while with one of each, and if he will promise to go back to Indiana and stay-- You did come from Indiana, didn't you?" The man gave a grin and nodded. "Well, if you promise to go back and never put your foot in Kentucky again, I'll go wrap up Aunt Clay's vases for you."

Mrs. Brown, thankful that her brood was safe and no more damage done the poor, wicked tramp than a sore shoulder, a swollen nose and a fractured jaw, sent them all to bed with instructions to sleep late, and told Molly and Judy to stay in bed for breakfast. The burglar was put in the smokehouse for safekeeping until sun-up, when John and Paul expected to take him to Louisville, swear out a warrant against him and land him in jail. When the time came, however, to transfer their prisoner from smokehouse to jail, they found the door open, the man gone and a fine old ham missing.

"An' they ain't a single pusson in the whole er Indianny what knows how ter cook a ham, either," bewailed Aunt Mary.

"To think the ungrateful wretch went off without Aunt Clay's vases,"

muttered Crittenden Rutledge.

CHAPTER V.-THE WEDDING.

The wedding came off so exactly as Judy had planned it that it seemed to her to be a proof of the theory of transmigration of the soul, and that in a previous incarnation she had been to just such a wedding. The eldest brother, Ernest, arrived from the far West just in time to change his clothes and give the bride away. There were three understudies for his part, so there was not much concern over his non-arrival until he got there with a blood-curdling tale of wrecks and wash-outs that had delayed him twenty-four hours. Then all of them got very much concerned and Mrs. Brown reproached herself for being so taken up with Mildred's wedding that she had forgotten to worry about the absent one for the time being. Ernest resembled Sue more than any of the rest of them, and had a good deal of her poise and dignity. "But I'll wager that he is not as serious as he seems," thought Judy, detecting a twinkle in the corner of his sober eyes.

Mildred looked lovely, and she had such a sweet, trusting look in her eyes as she came down the steps and up the tan-bark walk on Ernest's arm, that Crittenden Rutledge, waiting for her at the end of the walk, broke away from his best man and went forward several yards to meet his bride. Sue and Molly brought up the rear; Sue, composed and calm with her sweet dignity; but Molly, so deeply moved by this beloved sister's marriage and the break in their ranks, the very first, that she felt her knees trembling and wondered if it could be possible that she was going to ruin everything and burst into tears or fall in a faint or do something terrible. But she didn't. The familiar voice of their old minister in the opening lines of the Episcopal marriage service brought her to her senses, and she was able to follow the ritual in her mind, but she dared not trust herself to look up. She kept her eyes glued to her bouquet of "love-in-the-mist," that Miss Lizzie Monday had brought her that morning, picked from her own old-fashioned garden.

"I know the groom will send the bridesmaids flowers, but somehow, Molly, I don't want you to carry hothouse flowers. These 'love-in-the-mists'

will look just right with your dress and your eyes and your ways."

So Molly carried Miss Lizzie's "bokay" and put the flowers that the groom sent her in a vase in the parlor. But Molly was not thinking of her dress or her eyes, except to try to keep the tears in them, since come they would, and not let them run out on her cheeks. Mildred's responses were inaudible except to dear old Dr. Peters, the minister, but Crittenden's were so loud and clear and resonant that it was almost like chanting, and Judy had to smile when she could not help thinking of the stammering man's "Your house is on fire, tra la, tra la."