The Sin of Monsieur Pettipon Part 21

"_Patriot, scholar, king of hors.e.m.e.n,_"

Agnes scratched herself heartily on a property rock.

"_Speed ye, speed ye, speed ye onward!_"

The business of the scene called for a spirited exit by Paul Revere, waving his c.o.c.ked hat. But Agnes had other plans. She liked the taste of scenery. She did not budge. In vain did the scion of the Gulicks beat with frantic heels upon her flat flanks.

"Speed ye onward, or we'll be late," he improvised cleverly.

She masticated a canvas leaf from a convenient shrub and did not speed onward.

"Gid-ap, Agnes," shrilled the boy in the gallery. "The folks is waitin'

for their milk."

The audience grew indecorous.

Even his ruddy make-up could not conceal the fact that Mr. Wendell Gulick, Junior, was very red in the face, and that his lips were forming words not in that, or any other pageant. His leathern heels boomed hollowly on Agnes's barrel of body. To ring down the curtain was impossible; Agnes had taken her place directly beneath it.

Paul Revere turned a pa.s.sionate face to the wings,

"Hey, Pottle," he bellowed, "why don't you do something instead of standing there grinning like a baboon?"

Thus charged, Mr. Pottle's toga-clad figure came nimbly from the wings, to great applause, and seized Agnes by the bridle. Pottle tugged l.u.s.tily. Agnes smiled and did not give way an inch.

"Send for Matt Runkle," hissed Mr. Gulick, Junior.

"Send for Matt Runkle," echoed Mr. Pottle.

"Send for Matt Runkle," cried voices in the audience.

"He's home in bed," wailed Mrs. Pottle from the wings.

"Get one of the Runkle kids," shouted Mr. Pottle, seeking to arouse Agnes with kicks of his sandal-shod feet.

Little Etta Runkle, partly clad in the tinsel and cheese-cloth of a violet, and partly in her everyday underwear, was fetched from a dressing room. She was a bright child and sensed the situation as soon as it had been explained to her twice.

"Oh," she said, "Pa always says Agnes won't start unless you clink two milk bottles together."

The audience was calling forth suggestions to Paul Revere, astride, and Pottle, on foot. They included a bonfire beneath Agnes, and dynamite.

Even the rock-bound face of old Felix Winterbottom, in the depths of the box, showed the vestige of a crease that might, with a little imagination, be considered the start of a smile.

A fevered search back stage netted two bottles, dusty and smelling of turpentine and gin, respectively. Mr. Pottle grasped their necks and clinked them together with resounding clinks. The effect on Agnes was electrical. From utter immobility she started with a startled hop. The unready Mr. Gulick, Junior, after one mad grasp at her mane, rolled ignominiously from her broad back, and landed on the stage in a position that was undignified for a Revere and positively painful for a Gulick.

Agnes bolted to the wings. The curtain darted down.

The audience seemed to take this occurrence in a spirit of levity, but not so Mrs. Pottle. Hot tears gathered in her eyes.

"That wretch would have a white horse," she said. "They would put Paul Revere's Ride in. Now look. Now look!"

"There, there, honey," said Mr. Pottle, between sympathetic teeth.

"We'll fix 'em."

The pageant pursued its more or less majestic way, but as the history of Granville was unfolded, scene upon scene, it became all too apparent to Mrs. Pottle that her poetic opus could not recapture the first serious mood of the audience. It positively jeered when Miss Eltruda Gulick announced that she was the Spirit of the Bogardus Ca.n.a.l. But it grew more interested as the curtain slid up on the battle scene. This, Mrs.

Pottle felt, was her dramatic masterpiece. There lay the peaceful pioneer settlement--artfully fashioned from paste-board--while the simple but virile settlers strolled up and down the embryo Main Street and exchanged couplets. The chief settler, an adipose young man with a lisp, was Mr. Gurnee Gulick, until then noted as the most adept pract.i.tioner of the modern dance-steps in that part of Ohio. Through a beard, he announced, falsetto,

"_I give thee greeting, neighbor Gulick, Upon this blossom-burgeoning morning, I trust 'tis not the wily red-skin I just heard whooping in the forest._"

His trust was misplaced. It was, indeed, the wily red-skin in the persons of Mr. Edward Brannigan--known to intimates as "Beansy," and nine of his fellow horseshoe makers who had been hired to impersonate red-men, in rather loose-fitting brown cotton skins. Mr. Brannigan and fellow red-skins had done their part dutifully at rehearsals, and had permitted themselves to be knocked down, cuffed about a bit, and finally put to inglorious rout by the settlers. But on the fateful night of the pageant, while waiting for their turn to appear, they had pa.s.sed the moments with a jug of cider that was standing with reluctant feet at that high point in its career where it has ceased to be sweet and has not yet become vinegar. That was no reason why they should not do their part, for it was not an intricate one. They were to rush on, with whoops, be annihilated, and retire in confusion.

They did rush on with whoops that left nothing to be desired from the standpoint of realism. Mrs. Pottle, tense in the wings, was congratulating herself that one scene at least had dramatic strength. It was at this moment that Mr. Brannigan, as Chief Winipasuki, sachem of the Algonquins, encountered Mr. Gulick, the princ.i.p.al settler. In his enthusiasm, Mr. Gulick over-acted his part. He smote the red-skin warrior so earnestly on the ear that Mr. Brannigan described a parabola and dented a papier-mache rock with his hundred and seventy pounds of muscular body. His part called for him to lie there, p.r.o.ne and impotent, while the settlers drove off his band.

It may have been a sudden rebellion of a proud spirit. It may have been the wraith of history in protest; it may have been an inherently perverse nature; or it may have been the cider. In any event, Chief Winipasuki got to his feet, war-whooped, and knocked the princ.i.p.al settler through the paste-board wall of the block-house. Those in the audience who were fond of realism enjoyed what ensued immensely. The settlers of the town, who were the nice young men, and the Indians, who were not so nice but were strong and willing, had at one another, and although they had only nature's weapons, the battle, as it waged up and down and back and through the shattered scenery, was stirring enough.

When the curtain was at last brought down, Chief Winipasuki had a half-nelson on Settler Gulick, who was calling in a loud penetrating voice for the police.

In all the hub-bub and confusion, in all the delirium of the audience, Mr. Pottle remained calm enough to note that a miracle had taken place; Mr. Felix Winterbottom was chuckling. It was a dry, unpracticed chuckle at best, but it was a chuckle, nevertheless. Mr. Pottle was observing the phenomenon with wide eyes when he felt his elbow angrily plucked.

"You're to blame for this, Pottle," rasped a voice. It was Gurnee Gulick's irate father.

"Me?" sputtered Mr. Pottle.

"Yes. You. You knew those ruffians had been drinking."

"I did not."

"Don't contradict me, you miserable little hair-cutting fool."

"What? How dare you----" began Mr. Pottle.

"Bah. You wart!" said Mr. Gulick, and turned his square yard of fat back on the incensed little man.

Mr. Pottle was taking a step after him as if he intended to leap up and sink his teeth into the back of Mr. Gulick's overflowing neck, when another hand clutched him. It was his wife.

Her face was white and tear-stained, her lip quivering.

"They've ruined it, they've ruined it," she exclaimed. "I warned that simpleton Gurnee Gulick not to be rough with those horseshoe boys. Oh, dear, oh, dear." She pillowed her br.i.m.m.i.n.g eyes in his toga-draped shoulder.

"You've got to go out, now," she sobbed, "and give the historical epilogue."

"Never," said Mr. Pottle. "A thousand nevers."

"Please, Ambrose. We've got to end it, somehow."

"Very well," announced Mr. Pottle. "I'll go. But mind you, Blossom Pottle, I won't be responsible for what I say."

"Neither will I," sobbed his spouse.

Mr. Pottle hitched his toga about him, and strode out on the stage.

There was some applause, but more t.i.tters. He held up his hand for silence, as orators do, and glared so fiercely at his audience that the theater grew comparatively quiet. At the top of his voice, he began,

"_Who am I, oh list'ning peoples?_"