I dropped my head on the window-sill and cried out the tears that scalded my lids at the unexpected touch of sympathy. Then I fell to thinking and with a purpose.

I went down to dinner with a tolerably composed countenance, a good appet.i.te, and a well-digested scheme of vengeance in my mind. Uncle Ike was my only co-conspirator. I think I can see him now as he rolled back against the garden fence to laugh as I unfolded my design.

"Ef you ain't the _beater_!" he chuckled, his pepper-and-salt poll tilted to one shoulder, and eyeing me with undisguised admiration. "An'

you say n.o.body ain' put it into your hade?"

"I haven't said a word about it to anybody else, Uncle Ike. You'll help me,--won't you?"

He doubled himself up like a dyspeptic jack-knife, the ingenuity of the plot gaining upon his imagination.

I pressed my advantage:--

"And don't tell Mam' Chloe--please! She'll think it is cruel. But it isn't. It's just only justice. And it can't bring _them_ back."

I clenched my fists, and my eyes filled.

"That's so, Miss Molly, that's so," sobering instantly. "It is mighty hard on you--powerful hard."

"And, Uncle Ike,"--hurrying to get it out lest my voice should fail,--"please don't let anybody give me any more old hares, or any 'live things to keep. They'll just die, or be murdered by other folks'

cats--or something. It's no use making myself happy for a little while just to be sorry for ever and ever so long afterward."

With which epigram I ran away, afraid to try to utter another word.

That evening we were all on the front porch. The air was breezeless, the moon as yellow as bra.s.s through sultry fogs. My mother, in a white dress, lay back in her rocking-chair and fanned herself languidly. My father smoked his Powhatan pipe upon the steps, leaning against one pillar of the roof. Mary 'Liza in pale-blue lawn, occupied the other end of the step. Her hands were in her lap. Cinderella dozed upon a fold of her skirt. Dorinda had been undressed and rocked to sleep at sunset.

Preciosa had gone upstairs at the same time. I saw her lying upon the foot of our bed after supper, her eyes narrowed to slender slits with sleep or slyness. I had a shrewd impression that if I were to go upstairs now I should not find her in the same place. Instead of verifying the surmise in this way I stole noiselessly out of the family group, sauntering along carelessly until I turned the corner of the house, after which I ran like a lapwing to the garden gate, the rendezvous agreed upon between Uncle Ike and myself.

He was there with the various "properties" I had ordered.

_Imprimis_, a big dish-pan; _second_, a monstrous black pot from which steam arose into the hot night; _third_, a stout twine, to one end of which was attached a brick; a lump of raw liver dangled at the other. By my directions the pan was balanced upon the shelf where the cottage had stood, so that a slight pull would overset it, the brick was laid in the bottom, the string with the liver attachment hanging over the side.

Lastly, Uncle Ike mounted upon the stool I was wont to use when I visited my murdered dears, and filled the pan from the pot. All being ready, we conspirators withdrew to the unlighted dining room, and stationed ourselves at a window.

Our watch was not tedious. I was the first to discern a moving speck in the dim vista of the walk leading from the gate far down the garden. It enlarged and a.s.sumed a definite form, slowly. Evidently it was a scout, and the advance a reconnoissance. Feline artifice was in every line and motion. A ray of misty moonlight lay athwart the entrance to the garden.

The gate was propped open. As the cat crossed it, we recognized a wily and wicked old Tom from the stable, a disreputable plebeian prowler, never tolerated in the house grounds. I hardly smothered an e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n as dainty Preciosa glided into the illuminated area and took part in the furtive inspection of the preparations made for the reception of last night's marauders. A third, and yet a fourth, miscreant joined the first two, and heads were laid together in a council of war.

The liver hung high. Tom rose upon his hind feet, clawed the air futilely and came down sheepishly upon all fours. Next, a small, nimble black cat jumped and fell short of the bait. Uncle Ike snickered, and I drew in my breath excitedly, as the pampered exquisite, My Lady Preciosa, tripped mincingly into the open. The moon shone out obligingly to let us see her fall into position, her head upraised toward the tempting morsel--(pig's liver, and none too fresh at that)--her crouching body thrown well back upon the haunches, her tail, enlarged to double the usual size, waving sinuously from side to side in leisurely calculation of distance and chances. Suddenly she launched her supple body into s.p.a.ce like a catapult, caught the meat between her claws, swung in the air for a victorious half-second--and then, the deluge!

A chorus of screeches, a frantic stampede in all directions, and the arena was clear of all except the home-made infernal machine,--the empty dish-pan upside down on the ground, the brick, the string, and the raw meat lying under it.

The caterwauling, Uncle Ike's "ky-yi!" and my scream of laughter, brought the porch-party to the spot. By previous agreement neither of us mentioned Preciosa's name. I had to pinch myself violently to contain the unseemly mirth bottled up in my wicked soul when Mary 'Liza was "so glad the horrible creatures were punished," and "hoped" gently "that Molly was convinced, now, that poor, dear Preciosa was innocent."

"By the way, where _is_ Preciosa?" asked my father.

"She seemed so sleepy that I gave her her supper, and put her to bed, when I took Dorinda upstairs," said her surety.

Perhaps my father partly interpreted the gleam in my eyes and the quivering muscles about my uncontrollable mouth, for he glanced keenly at me and made as if he would let the inquiry drop. Not so my mother.

She bade Mary 'Liza run upstairs and make sure that Preciosa was there.

"I want my dear little girl to be entirely satisfied that her cousin was right, and that she did the cat an injustice," she said with judicial mildness.

Preciosa was not in our room, and she stayed out all night, greatly to her owner's alarm and distress. Her habits were so regular, her deportment was always so impeccable that the circ.u.mstance a.s.sumed the proportions of an Event by breakfast time. My mother was anxious, Mary 'Liza sorrowful, and my father shook his head more gravely than the occasion seemed to warrant.

"Molly may not have been so far wrong after all," he observed to my mother, "in spite of the array of circ.u.mstantial evidence against her."

My mother was unconvinced.

"Previous good behavior should count for much in such a case," she urged. "And our little Molly is too apt to jump at conclusions. We cannot be too careful how we accuse others of sins which they may never have committed."

I understood what they said perfectly. They never talked down to us.

That was one reason we were called "old-fashioned" and "precocious" by people who had one set of words for their own use, and another for children. My parents considered, and I think rightly, that the best and most correct forms of speech should be taught to mere infants, that it is as easy to train a child to be grammatical as to let it lapse into all sorts of slovenly inaccuracies that must be unlearned at school, and in society. So, when they talked of "circ.u.mstantial evidence" I had a fair inkling of what the phrase conveyed. Preciosa was upon trial for misdemeanor, and I for backbiting.

I ate away industriously to keep from "answering back,"--a cardinal offence in nursery government. Mary 'Liza had no appet.i.te, but she, also, remained silent, and there was moisture under her eyelids.

"We will suspend judgment--" began my father, and interrupted himself to ask--"What _have_ you got there, Ike?"

The butler grinned from ear to ear, and broke into uncontrollable cachinnations in depositing his burden upon the floor.

"One of the stable-boys foun' it in the lof', suh."

He could say no more, and would not have been heard had he gone on, for my father roared, my mother fairly shrieked with laughter, and I went into hysterics, while Mam' Chloe and Gilbert joined in the general racket from the doorway.

An abject nondescript cringed at Mary 'Liza's feet, whimpering piteously. The devil's broth concocted by Uncle Ike, according to my receipt, was warm starch, made blue with indigo. A few red peppers were boiled in it to dissuade the cats from licking it off before it could dry. It adhered to every individual hair of Preciosa's body. She looked like an azure porcupine. I had thought, at first, of using soot as coloring matter, but the thought of the blue appealed to my sense of the congruous ridiculous. I was more than content with the result. Why a blue cat should be more mirth-provoking than a yellow may not be explicable, but the fact remains. Even Mary 'Liza shrank from contact with the absurd object, and the moisture condensed into falling drops.

"Oh, Aunt Mary! do you think it _can_ be Preciosa? It looks like a--_monster_!"

With tears running down his cheeks, and his sides shaking with gusts of merriment, my father took me upon his knee, and gave me the funniest kiss I ever had--a jerky kiss, as if a bee had bobbed against my mouth.

"You'll be the death of me yet, child!" And after another series of side-shakings--"So much for circ.u.mstantial evidence!"

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Chapter XI

Frankenstein

The morning was biting cold. A northwest wind had been busy for hours sweeping and dusting the sky until, now that it was resting from its labors, the blue vault was as clean and bright as our mahogany dining-table after Uncle Ike had polished it with beeswax and rosin.

At the breakfast-table the b.u.t.ter splintered off under the knife, and the milk was frozen so hard that Mary 'Liza and I sugared it and made believe it was ice-cream. When Gilbert, the under dining-room servant, brought in the buckwheat cakes and waffles from the kitchen, he had to cover them with a hot plate, and then run as hard as he could go across the yard to the house, to keep them from chilling on the way.

There are no buckwheat cakes nowadays, like those that Aunt 'Ritta made--glossy brown, all of a size, and porous as a sponge. It was great fun to b.u.t.ter them, and then press them with the flat of a knife-blade, to see spurts and spouts rise from the surface like so many hot oil geysers.

That was the morning when I made the eight-cakes-and-one-sausage speech that pa.s.sed into a family proverb. The night before I had thrown a candle-end, four inches long, into the fire, and my mother had told me it was a Christian duty to be economical, defining the word for me.

Bent, as usual, upon practising what I learned, I divided my sausage into eight bits, and ate one with each cake.

Cousin Molly Belle and Cousin Frank Morton had stayed all night with us, and the talk at table was so lively that n.o.body noticed what I was about. We were not allowed to chatter during meals when others than the family were present, or, indeed, at any other time if grown people were talking, until invited by them to take part in the conversation. So I waited for a lull in the chat to say aside to my mother at whose left hand I sat:--