"That's just it. His bathing trunks are there."
"Well, he won't go far WITHOUT them!"
"He's gone so far I can't locate him."
I heard Mrs. Beecher get up.
"Are you in ernest, Will?" she said. "Do you mean that he has gone
without a Stich of clothes, and can't be found?"
Mrs. Patten gave a sort of screach.
"You don't think--oh Will, he's so tempermental. You don't think he's
drowned himself?"
"No such luck," said Mrs. Beecher, in a cold tone. I hated her for it.
True, he had decieved me. He was not as I had thought him. In our to
conversations he had not mentioned his wife, leaveing me to beleive him
free to love "where he listed," as the poet says.
"There are a few clues," said Mr. Patten. "He got out by means of a wire
hairpin, for one thing. And he took the manuscript with him, which he'd
hardly have done if he meant to drown himself. Or even if, as we fear,
he had no Pockets. He has smoked a lot of cigarettes out of a candy box,
which I did not supply him, and he left behind a bath towle that does
not, I think, belong to us."
"I should think he would have worn it," said Mrs. Beecher, in a
scornfull tone.
"Here's the bath towle," Mr. Patten went on. "You may recognize the
initials. I don't."
"B. P. A.," said Mrs. Beecher. "Look here, don't they call that--that
fliberty-gibbet next door `Barbara'?"
"The little devil!" said Mr. Patten, in a raging tone. "She let him out,
and of course he's done no work on the Play or anything. I'd like to
choke her."
Nobody spoke then, and my heart beat fast and hard. I leave it to
anybody, how they'd like to be shut in a closet and threatened with a
violent Death from without. Would or would they not ever be the same
person afterwards?
"I'll tell you what I'd do," said the Beecher woman. "I'd climb up the
back of father, next door, and tell him what his little Daughter has
done, Because I know she's mixed up in it, towle or no towle. Reg is
always sappy when they're seventeen. And she's been looking moon-eyed at
him for days."
Well, the Pattens went away, and Mrs. Beecher manacured her Nails,--I
could hear her fileing them--and sang around and was not much concerned,
although for all she knew he was in the briney deep, a corpse. How true
it is that "the paths of glory lead but to the grave."