position and was standing, with her feet apart, pointing it at a white
target hanging by a string from a rafter. As she gave the signal. Hannah
sighed, and, picking up a broomhandle, started the target to swaying,
pendulum fashion; Tish followed it with the gun.

I thought things had gone far enough, so I stepped into the cellar and
spoke in ringing tones.

"Letitia Carberry!" I said sternly.

Tish pulled the trigger at that moment and the bullet went into the
furnace pipe. It was absurd, of course, for Tish to blame me for it, but
she turned on me in a rage.

"Look what you made me do!" she snapped. "Can't a person have a moment's
privacy?"

"What I think you need," I retorted, "is six months' complete seclusion
in a sanitarium."

"You nearly shot us in the upper hall," Aggie put in warmly.

"Well, as long as I didn't shoot you in the upper hall or any other
place, I guess you needn't fuss," said Tish. "Ready, Hannah."

This time she shot Hannah in the broomhandle, and practically put her
_hors de combat_; but the shot immediately after was what Tish
triumphantly called a clean bull's-eye--that is, it hit the center of
the target.

That is the time to stop, when one has made a bull's-eye in any sort of
achievement, I take it. And Tish is nobody's fool. She took off her
spectacles and wiped the perspiration and gunpowder streaks from her
face. She was immediately in high good humor.

"Every unprotected female should know how to handle a weapon," she said
oracularly, and, sitting down on the edge of the coal-bin, proceeded to
swab out the gun with a wad of cotton on the end of a stick.

"The poker has been good enough for you for fifty years," I retorted.
"And if you think you look sporty, or anything but idiotic, sitting
there in a flowered kimono and swabbing out the throat of that gun----?"

Just then the janitor came down, and Tish gave him a dollar for the use
of the cellar and did not mention the furnace pipe. Aggie and I glanced
at each other. Tish's demoralization had begun. From that minute, to the
long and entirely false story she told the red-bearded man in Thunder
Cloud Glen several days later, she trod, as Aggie truthfully said, the
downward path of mendacity, bringing up in the county jail and
hysterics.

We went upstairs, Tish ahead and Aggie and I two flights behind,
believing that Tish with an unloaded gun was a thousand times more
dangerous than any outlaw with an entire arsenal loaded t