Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories by Alice Hegan Rice

A >> Alice Hegan Rice >> Miss Mink\'s Soldier and Other Stories

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8

"Yes, yes," she gasped; "I am Mrs. Lura Doring."

The members of her little party looked at her anxiously and ceased to
laugh. The slide had evidently unsettled her mind.

"Why, this is Miss Perkins--Miss Lucinda Perkins of Locustwood, Ohio,"
explained Dick Benson to the officer, "She's rather upset by her
tobogganing, and didn't understand you."

"I did," declared Miss Lucinda, making mysterious signs to Dick to be
silent. "It's all right; I am Mrs. Doring."

The officer looked suspiciously from one to the other, then consulted
his memorandum: "Small, slender woman, yellow hair, gray eyes, answers
to name of Mrs. Lura Doring. Left Chicago on June 10."

"When did she get to New York?" asked the officer.

"A week ago to-morrow, on the eleventh," said Floss.

"Then I guess I'll have to take her up," said the officer; "she answers
all the requirements. I've got a warrant for her arrest."

"Arrest!" gasped Benson. "What for?"

"For forging her husband's name, and defrauding two hotels in Chicago."

"My husband--" Miss Lucinda staggered to her feet, then, catching sight
of the crowd that had collected, she gave a fluttering cry and fainted
away in the arms of the law.

* * * * *

When Miss Joe Hill arrived in New York, in answer to an urgent telegram,
she went directly to work with her usual executive ability to unravel
the mystery. After obtaining the full facts in the case, she was able to
make a satisfactory explanation to the officers at headquarters. Then
she sent the girls to their respective homes, and turned her full
attention upon Miss Lucinda.

"The barber will be here in half an hour to cut your hair," she
announced on the eve of their departure for the Catskills.

"You ought not to be so good to me!" sobbed Miss Lucinda, who was lying
limply on a couch.

Miss Joe Hill took her hand firmly and said: "Lucinda, error and illness
and disorder are man-made perversions. Let the past week be wiped from
our memories. Once we are in the mountains we will turn the formative
power of our thoughts upon things invisible, and yield ourselves to the
higher harmonies."

The next morning, Miss Lucinda, shorn and penitent, was led forth from
the scene of her recent profligacy. It was her final exit from a world
which for a little space she had loved not wisely but too well.

CUPID GOES SLUMMING

It is a debatable question whether love is a cause or an effect, whether
Adam discovered a heart in the recesses of his anatomy before or after
the appearance of Eve. In the case of Joe Ridder it was distinctly the
former.

At nineteen his knowledge of the tender passion consisted of dynamic
impressions received across the footlights at an angle of forty-five
degrees. Love was something that hovered with the calcium light about
beauty in distress, something that brought the hero from the uttermost
parts of the earth to hurl defiance at the villain and clasp the
swooning maiden in his arms; it was something that sent a fellow down
from his perch in the peanut gallery with his head hot and his hands
cold, and a sort of blissful misery rioting in his soul.

Joe lived in what was known by courtesy as Rear Ninth Street. "Rear
Ninth Street" has a sound of exclusive aristocracy, and the name was a
matter of some pride to the dwellers in the narrow, unpaved alley that
writhed its watery way between two rows of tumble-down cottages, Joe's
family consisted of his father, whose vocation was plumbing, and whose
avocation was driving either in the ambulance or the patrol wagon; his
mother, who had discharged her entire debt to society when she bestowed
nine healthy young citizens upon it; eight young Ridders, and Joe
himself, who had stopped school at twelve to assume the financial
responsibilities of a rapidly increasing family.

Lack of time and the limited opportunities of Rear Ninth Street,
together with an uncontrollable shyness, had brought Joe to his
nineteenth year of broad-shouldered, muscular manhood, with no
acquaintance whatever among the girls. But where a shrine is built for
Cupid and the tapers are kept burning, the devotee is seldom
disappointed.

One morning in October, as Joe was guiding his rickety wheel around the
mud puddles on his way to the cooper shops, he saw a new sign on the
first cottage after he left the alley--"Mrs. R. Beaver, Modiste & Dress
Maker." In the yard and on the steps were a confusion of household
effects, and in their midst a girl with a pink shawl over her head.

So absorbed was Joe in open-mouthed wonder over the "Modiste," that he
failed to see the girl, until a laughing exclamation made him look up.

"Watch out!"

"What's the matter?" asked Joe, coming to a halt.

"I thought maybe you didn't know your wheels was going 'round!" the girl
said audaciously, then fled into the house and slammed the door.

All day at the shops Joe worked as in a trance. Every iron rivet that he
drove into a wooden hoop was duly informed of the romantic occurrence of
the morning, and as some four thousand rivets are fastened into four
thousand hoops in the course of one day, it will be seen that the matter
was duly considered. The stray spark from a feminine eye had kindled
such a fierce fire in his heart that by the time the six o'clock
whistle blew the conflagration threw a rosy glow over the entire
landscape.

As he rode home, the girl was sitting on the steps, but she would not
look at him. Joe had formulated a definite course of action, and though
the utter boldness of it nearly cost him his balance, he adhered to it
strictly. When just opposite her gate, without turning his head or his
eyes, he lifted his hat, then rode at a furious pace around the corner.

"What you tidying up so fer, Joe?" asked his mother that night; "you
goin' out?"

"No," said Joe evasively, as he endeavoured in vain to coax back the
shine to an old pair of shoes.

"Well, I'm right glad you ain't. Berney and Dick ain't got up the coal,
and there's all them dishes to wash, and the baby she's got a misery in
her year."

"Has paw turned up?" asked Joe.

"Yes," answered Mrs. Ridder indifferently. "He looked in 'bout three
o'clock. He was tolerable full then, and I 'spec he's been took up by
now. He said he was goin' to buy me a bird-cage with a bird in it, but I
surely hope he won't. Them white mice he brought me on his last spree
chewed a hole in Berney's stocking; besides, I never did care much for
birds. Good lands! what are you goin' to wash yer head for?"

Joe was substituting a basin of water for a small girl in the nearest
kitchen chair, and a howl ensued.

"Shut up, Lottie!" admonished Mrs. Ridder, "you ain't any too good to
set on the floor. It's a good thing this is pay-day, Joe, for the rent's
due and four of the children's got their feet on the ground. You paid up
the grocery last week, didn't you!"

Joe nodded a dripping head.

"Well, I'll jes' git yer money out of yer coat while I think about it,"
she went on as she rummaged in his pocket and brought out nine dollars.

"Leave me a quarter," demanded Joe, gasping beneath his soap-suds.

"All right," said Mrs. Ridder accommodatingly; "now that Bob and Ike
are gitting fifty cents a day, it ain't so hard to make out. I'll be
gittin' a new dress first thing, you know."

"I seen one up at the corner!" said Joe.

"A new dress?"

"Naw, a dressmaker. She's got out her sign."

"What's her name?" asked Mrs. Ridder, keen with interest.

"Mrs. R. Beaver, Modiste," repeated Joe from the sign that floated in
letters of gold in his memory.

"I knowed a Mrs. Beaver wunst, up on Eleventh Street--a big, fat woman
that got in a fuss with the preacher and smacked his jaws."

"Did she have any children?" asked Joe.

"Seems like there was one, a pretty little tow-headed girl."

"That's her," announced Joe conclusively. "What was her name?"

"Lawsee, I don't know. I never would 'a' ricollected Mrs. Beaver 'cepten
she was such a tarnashious woman, always a-tearin' up stumps, and never
happy unless she was rippitin' 'bout somethin'. _What_ you want? A
needle and thread to mend your coat? Why, what struck you? You been
wearin' it that a-way for a month. You better leave it be 'til I git
time to fix it."

But Joe had determined to work out the salvation of his own wardrobe.
Late in the evening after the family had retired, he sat before the
stove with back humped and knees drawn up trying to coax a coarse thread
through a small needle. Surely no rich man need have any fear about
entering the kingdom of heaven since Joe Ridder managed to get that
particular thread through the eye of that particular needle!

But when a boy is put at a work-bench at twelve years of age and does
the same thing day in and day out for seven long years, he may have lost
all of the things that youth holds dear, but one thing he is apt to have
learned, a dogged, plodding, unquestioning patience that shoves silently
along at the appointed task until the work is done.

By midnight all the rents were mended and a large new patch adorned
each elbow. The patches, to be sure, were blue, and the coat was black,
but the stitches were set with mechanical regularity. Joe straightened
his aching shoulders and held the garment at arm's length with a smile.
It was his first votive offering at the shrine of love.

The effect of Joe's efforts were prompt and satisfactory. The next day
being Sunday, he spent the major part of it in passing and repassing the
house on the corner, only going home between times to remove the mud
from his shoes and give an extra brush to his hair. The girl, meanwhile,
was devoting her day to sweeping off the front pavement, a scant three
feet of pathway from her steps to the wooden gate. Every time Joe passed
she looked up and smiled, and every time she smiled Joe suffered all the
symptoms of locomotor ataxia!

By afternoon his emotional nature had reached the saturation point.
Without any conscious volition on his part, his feet carried him to the
gate and refused to carry him farther. His voice then decided to speak
for itself, and in strange, hollow tones he heard himself saying--

"Say, do you wanter go to the show with me?"

"Sure," said the pink fascinator. "When?"

"I don't care," said Joe, too much embarrassed to remember the days of
the week.

"To-morrer night?" prompted the girl.

"I don't care," said Joe, and the conversation seeming to lauguish, he
moved on.

After countless eons of time the next night arrived. It found Joe and
his girl cosily squeezed in between two fat women in the gallery of the
People's Theatre. Joe had to sit sideways and double his feet up, but he
would willingly have endured a rack of torture for the privilege of
looking down on that fluffy, blond pompadour under its large bow, and of
receiving the sparkling glances that were flashed up at him from time to
time.

"I ain't ever gone with a feller that I didn't know his name before!"
she confided before the curtain rose.

"It's Joe," he said, "Joe Ridder, What's your front name?"

"Miss Beaver," she said mischievously. "What do you think it is?"

Joe could not guess.

"Say," she went on, "I knew who you was all right even if I didn't know
yer name. I seen you over to the hall when they had the boxin' match."

"The last one?"

"Yes, when you and Ben Schenk was fightin'. Say, you didn't do a thing
to him!"

The surest of all antidotes to masculine shyness was not without its
immediate effect. Joe straightened his shoulders and smiled
complacently.

"Didn't I massacre him?" he said. "That there was a half-Nelson holt I
give him. It put him out of business all right, all right. Say, I never
knowed you was there!"

"You bet I was," said his companion in honest admiration; "that was when
I got stuck on you!"

Before he could fully comprehend the significance of this confession,
the curtain rose, and love itself had to make way for the tragic and
absorbing career of "The Widowed Bride." By the end of the third act
Joe's emotions were so wrought upon by the unhappy fate of the heroine,
that he rose abruptly and, muttering something about "gittin' some gum,"
fled to the rear. When he returned and squeezed his way back to his seat
he found "Miss Beaver" with red eyes and a dejected mien.

"What's the matter with you?" he asked banteringly.

"My shoe hurts me," said Miss Beaver evasively.

"What you givin' me?" asked Joe, with fine superiority. "These here
kinds of play never hurts my feelin's none. Catch me cryin' at a show!"

But Miss Beaver was too much moved to recover herself at once. She sat
in limp dejection and surreptitiously dabbed her eyes with her moist
ball of a handkerchief.

Joe was at a loss to know how to meet the situation until his hand,
quite by chance, touched hers as it lay on the arm of her chair. He
withdrew it as quickly as if he had received an electric shock, but the
next moment, like a lodestone following a magnet, it traveled slowly
back to hers.

From that time on Joe sat staring straight ahead of him in embarrassed
ecstasy, while Miss Beaver, thus comforted, was able to pass through the
tragic finale of the last act with remarkable composure.

When the time came to say "Good night" at the Beavers' door, all Joe's
reticence and awkwardness returned. He watched her let herself in and
waited until she lit a candle. Then he found himself out on the pavement
in the dark feeling as if the curtain had gone down on the best show be
had ever seen. Suddenly a side window was raised cautiously and he heard
his name called softly. He had turned the corner, but he went back to
the fence.

"Say!" whispered the voice at the window, "I forgot to tell you--It's
Mittie."

The course of true love thus auspiciously started might have flowed on
to blissful fulfilment had it not encountered the inevitable barrier in
the formidable person of Mrs. Beaver. Not that she disapproved of Mittie
receiving attention; on the contrary, it was her oft-repeated boast that
"Mittie had been keepin' company with the boys ever since she was six,
and she 'spected she'd keep right on till she was sixty." It was not
attention in the abstract that she objected to, it was rather the
threatening of "a steady," and that steady, the big, awkward, shy Joe
Ridder. With serpentine wisdom she instituted a counter-attraction.

Under her skilful manipulation, Ben Schenk, the son of the
saloon-keeper, soon developed into a rival suitor. Ben was engaged at a
down-town pool-room, and wore collars on a weekday without any apparent
discomfort. The style of his garments, together with his easy air of
sophistication, entirely captivated Mrs. Beaver, while Ben on his part
found it increasingly pleasant to lounge in the Beavers' best parlour
chair and recount to a credulous audience the prominent part which he
was taking in all the affairs of the day.

Matters reached a climax one night when, after some close financing,
Joe Ridder took Mittie to the Skating Rink. An unexpected run on the tin
savings bank at the Ridders' had caused a temporary embarrassment, and
by the closest calculation Joe could do no better than pay for two
entrance-tickets and hire one pair of skates. He therefore found it
necessary to develop a sprained ankle, which grew rapidly worse as they
neared the rink.

"I don't think you orter skate on it, Joe!" said Mittie sympathetically.

"Oh, I reckon I kin manage it all O.K.," said Joe.

"But I ain't agoin' to let you!" she declared with divine authority. "We
can just set down and rubber at the rest of them."

"Naw, you don't," said Joe; "you kin go on an' skate, and I'll watch
you."

The arrangement proved entirely satisfactory so long as Mittie paused on
every other round to rest or to get him to adjust a strap, or to hold
her hat, but when Ben Schenk arrived on the scene, the situation was
materially changed.

It was sufficiently irritating to see Ben go through an exhaustive
exhibition of his accomplishments under the admiring glances of Mittie,
but when he condescended to ask her to skate, and even offered to teach
her some new figures, Joe's irritation rose to ire. In vain he tried to
catch her eye; she was laughing and clinging to Ben and giving all her
attention to his instructions.

Joe sat sullen and indignant, savagely biting his nails. He would have
parted with everything he had in the world at that moment for three
paltry nickels!

On and on went the skaters, and on and on went the music, and Joe turned
his face to the wall and doggedly waited. When at last Mittie came to
him flushed and radiant, he had no word of greeting for her.

"Did you see all the new steps Mr. Ben learnt me?" she asked.

"Naw," said Joe.

"Does yer foot hurt you, Joe?"

"Naw," said Joe.

Mittie was too versed in masculine moods to press the subject. She
waited until they were out under the starlight in the clear stretch of
common near home. Then she slipped her hand through his arm and said
coaxingly--

"Say now, Joe, what you kickin' 'bout?"

"Him," said Joe comprehensively.

"Mr. Ben? Why, he's one of our best friends. Maw likes him better'n
anybody I ever kept company with. What have all you fellers got against
him?"

"He was black marveled at the hall all right," said Joe grimly.

"What for?"

"It ain't none of my business to tell what for," said Joe, though his
lips ached to tell what he knew.

"Maw says all you fellows are jealous 'cause he talks so pretty and
wears such stylish clothes."

"We might, too, if we got 'em like he done," Joe began, then checked
himself. "Say, Mittie, why don't yer maw like me?"

"She says you haven't got any school education and don't talk good
grammar."

"Don't I talk good grammar?" asked Joe anxiously.

"I don't know," said Mittie; "that's what she says. How long did you go
to school?"

"Me? Oh, off and on 'bout two year. The old man was always poorly, and
Maw, she had to work out, till me an' the boys done got big enough to
work. 'Fore that I had to stay home and mind the kids. Don't I talk like
other fellers, Mittie?"

"You talk better than some," said Mittie loyally.

After he left her, Joe reviewed the matter carefully. He thought of the
few educated people he knew--the boss at the shops, the preacher up on
Twelfth Street, the doctor who sewed up his head after he stopped a
runaway team, even Ben Schenk, who had gone through the eighth grade.
Yes, there was a difference. Being clean and wearing good clothes were
not the only things.

When he got home, he tiptoed into the front room, and picking his way
around the various beds and pallets, took Berney's school satchel from
the top of the wardrobe. Retracing his steps, he returned to the
kitchen, and with his hat still on and his coat collar turned up, he
began to take an inventory of his mental stock.

One after another of the dog-eared, grimy books he pondered over, and
one after another he laid aside, with a puzzled, distressed look
deepening in his face.

"Berney she ain't but fourteen an' she gits on to 'em," he said to
himself; "looks like I orter."

Once more he seized the nearest book, and with the courage of despair
repeated the sentences again and again to himself.

"That you, Joe?" asked Mrs. Ridder from the next room an hour later. "I
didn't know you'd come. Yer paw sent word by old man Jackson that he was
at Hank's Exchange way down on Market Street, and fer you to come git
him."

"It's twelve o'clock," remonstrated Joe.

"I know it," said Mrs. Ridder, yawning, "but I reckon you better go. The
old man always gits the rheumatiz when he lays out all night, and that
there rheumatiz medicine cost sixty-five cents a bottle!"

"All right," said Joe with a resignation born of experience, "but don't
you go and put no more of the kids in my bed. Jack and Gus kick the
stuffin' out of me now."

And with this parting injunction he went wearily out into the night,
giving up his struggle with Minerva, only to begin the next round with
Bacchus.

The seeds of ambition, though sown late, grew steadily, and Joe became
so desirous of proving worthy of the consideration of Mrs. Beaver that
he took the boss of the shops partially into his confidence.

"It's a first-rate idea, Joe," said the boss, a big, capable fellow who
had worked his way up from the bottom. "I could move you right along the
line if you had a better education. I have a good offer up in Chicago
next year; if you can get more book sense in your head, I will take you
along."

"Where can I get it at?" asked Joe, somewhat dubious of his own power
of achievement.

"Night school," said the boss. "I know a man that teaches in the
Settlement over on Burk Street. I'll put you in there if you like."

Now, the prospect of going to school to a man who had been head of a
family for seven years, who had been the champion scrapper of the South
End, who was in the midst of a critical love affair, was trebly
humiliating. But Joe was game, and while he determined to keep the
matter as secret as possible, he agreed to the boss's proposition.

"You're mighty stingy with yourself these days!" said Mittie Beaver one
night a month later, when he stopped on his way to school.

Joe grinned somewhat foolishly. "I come every evenin'," he said.

"For 'bout ten minutes," said Mittie, with a toss of her voluminous
pompadour; "there's some wants more'n ten minutes."

"Ben Schenk?" asked Joe, alert with jealousy.

"I ain't sayin'," went on Mittie. "What do you do of nights, hang around
the hall?"

"Naw," said Joe indignantly. "There ain't nobody can say they've sawn
me around the hall sence I've went with you!"

"Well, where do you go?"

"I'm trainin'," said Joe evasively.

"I don't believe you like me as much as you used to," said Mittie
plaintively.

Joe looked at her dumbly. His one thought from the time he cooked his
own early breakfast, down to the moment when he undressed in the cold
and dropped into his place in bed between Gussie and Dick, was of her.
The love of her made his back stop aching as he bent hour after hour
over the machine; it made all the problems and hard words and new ideas
at night school come straight at last; it made the whole sordid, ugly
day swing round the glorious ten minutes that they spent together in the
twilight.

"Yes, I like you all right," he said, twisting his big, grease-stained
hands in embarrassment. "You're the onliest girl I ever could care
about. Besides, I couldn't go with no other girl if I wanted to, 'cause
I don't know none."

Is it small wonder that Ben Schenk's glib protestations, reinforced by
Mrs. Beaver's own zealous approval, should have in time outclassed the
humble Joe? The blow fell just when the second term of night school was
over, and Joe was looking forward to long summer evenings of unlimited
joy.

He had bought two tickets for a river excursion, and was hurrying into
the Beavers' when he encountered a stolid bulwark in the form of Mrs.
Beaver, whose portly person seemed permanently wedged into the narrow
aperture of the front door. She sat in silent majesty, her hands just
succeeding in clasping each other around her ample waist. Had she closed
her eyes, she might have passed for a placid, amiable person, whose
angles of disposition had also become curves. But Mrs. Beaver did not
close her eyes. She opened them as widely as the geography of her face
would permit, and coldly surveyed Joe Ridder.

Mrs. Beaver was a born manager; she had managed her husband into an
untimely grave, she had managed her daughter from the hour she was
born, she had dismissed three preachers, induced two women to leave
their husbands, and now dogmatically announced herself arbiter of
fashions and conduct in Rear Ninth Street.

"No, she can't see you," she said firmly in reply to Joe's question.
"She's going out to a dance party with Mr. Schenk."

"Where at?" demanded Joe, who still trembled in her presence.

"Somewheres down town," said Mrs. Beaver, "to a real swell party."

"He oughtn't to take her to no down-town dance," said Joe, his
indignation getting the better of his shyness. "I don't want her to go,
and I'm going to tell her so."

"In-deed!" said Mrs. Beaver in scorn. "And what have you got to say
about it? I guess Mr. Schenk's got the right to take her anywhere he
wants to!"

"What right?" demanded Joe, getting suddenly a bit dizzy.

"'Cause he's got engaged to her. He's going to give her a real handsome
turquoise ring, fourteen-carat gold."

"Didn't Mittie send me no word?" faltered Joe.

"No," said Mrs. Beaver unhesitatingly, though she had in her pocket a
note for him from the unhappy Mittie.

Joe fumbled for his hat. "I guess I better be goin'," he said, a lump
rising ominously in his throat. He got the gate open and made his way
half dazed around the corner. As he did so, he saw a procession of small
Ridders bearing joyously down upon him.

"Joe!" shrieked Lottie, arriving first, "Maw says hurry on home; we got
another new baby to our house."

During the weeks that followed, Rear Ninth Street was greatly thrilled
over the unusual event of a home wedding. The reticence of the groom was
more than made up for by the bulletins of news issued daily by Mrs.
Beaver. To use that worthy lady's own words, "she was in her elements!"
She organised various committees--on decoration, on refreshment, and
even on the bride's trousseau, tactfully permitting each assistant to
contribute in some way to the general grandeur of the occasion.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8