ry a slacker.

MR. C. (furiously angry and glaring at her): You know better than that!

MYRTLE: Not at all. Can you deny that you haven't registered yet?

MR. C.: What's that got to do with it? I daresay I'm losing my mind. It
wouldn't be much wonder if I have. When I think of the way I've suffered
lately--look at me!

MYRTLE (in a somewhat softened voice): Have you really suffered?

MR. C.: I? Good Lord, Myrtle--why, I haven't slept for weeks. I----

But here he stopped, with his eyes fixed on the roof overhead.

"Watch out!" he yelled. "Get back. Myrtle, she'll fall on you."

"Not at all," said Tish's calm voice from overhead. There was a rasping
sound, and then a long wire fell past the window. "Now," she called
triumphantly, "let your policeman telephone for the Sheriff and a posse!
That was a party wire, and that farmhouse over there is on it. There
isn't another telephone for ten miles."

Well, I looked around for Myrtle, and she was on the guest room bed,
face down.

"Oh," she groaned, "I wouldn't have missed it for a trip to Europe. And
his face! Miss Lizzie, did you see his face?" She then got up suddenly
and put her arms around me. "I'm simply madly happy, Miss Lizzie," she
said. "I have to kiss somebody, and since he--may I kiss you?"

Well, of course I allowed her to, but I was surprised. It was not
natural, somehow.

Myrtle came down soon after and said that Mr. Culver was bringing some
water from the well, and would he be allowed to come in with it? But
Tish was firm on this point. She gave her consent, however, to his
leaving the pail on the porch and then retiring to the chestnut tree. He
did so, whistling to signify that he was at a safe distance, and I then
carried it in.

"I say," he called to me when he saw me, "this situation is getting on
my nerves. I carried off that policeman, for one thing. He was on duty."

"You needn't stay here."

"I daresay not," he replied rather bitterly. "But what I want to ask is
this: Won't it be deucedly unpleasant for you three, when I report that
you deliberately put my car out of commission so I could not get back by
nine o'clock to register? Of course," he went on, "a box of tacks may
have spilled itself on the road, but I never heard of a barbed wire
fence trying to crawl across a road and getting run over, like a snake."

I reported this to Tish, and I saw that she was uneasy, although she
merely remarked that he still had two legs, and that she