"Did he?" says Sadie. "I wouldn"t have thought it of Pinckney. Well, just to show him that he was wrong, I would put this affair off until you can have a regular church wedding; with invitations, and ushers, and pretty flower girls. And you ought to have a gray-silk wedding-gown--you"d look perfectly stunning in gray silk, you know.

Wouldn"t all that be much nicer than running off like this, as though you were ashamed of something?"

Say, it was a slick game of talk that Sadie handed out then, for she was playin" for time. But Aunt Tillie was no come-on.

"Mulli doesn"t want to wait another day," says she, "and neither do I, so that settles it. And here comes the rector, now."

"Looks like we"d played out our hand, don"t it?" I whispered to Sadie.

"Wait!" says she. "I want to get a good look at the man."

He was trailin" along after the minister, and it wa"n"t until he was within six feet of me that I saw who it was.

"h.e.l.lo, Doc!" says I. "So you"re the dear Mulli, are you?"

He near jumped through his collar, Pinphoodle did, when he gets his lamps on me. It only lasted a minute, though, for he was a quick recoverer.

"Why, professor!" says he. "This is an unexpected pleasure."

"I guess some of that"s right," says I.

And say, but he was dressed for the joyful bridegroom part--striped trousers, frock coat, white puff tie, and white gloves! He"d had a close shave and a shampoo, and the ma.s.sage artist had rubbed out some of the swellin" from under his eyes. Didn"t look much like the has-been that done the dive under the couch at the Studio.

"Well, well!" says I. "This is where the private cinch comes in, eh?

Doc, you"ve got a head like a horse."

"I should think he"d be ashamed of himself," says Sadie, "running off with a silly old woman who might be his mother."

The Sullivan temper had got the best of her. After that the deep lard was all over the cook stove. Aunt Tillie throws four cat-fits to the minute, and lets loose on Sadie with all kinds of polite jabs that she can lay her tongue to. Then Doc steps up, puts a manly arm half-way round her belt line, and lets her weep on the silk facing of his Sunday coat.

By this time the preacher was all broke up. He was a nice healthy-lookin" young chap, one of the strawb"ry-blond kind, with pink and white cheeks, and hair as soft as a toy spaniel"s. It turns out that he was new to the job, and this was his first call to spiel off the splicin" service.

"I trust," says he, "that there is nothing--er--that no one has any valid objection to the uniting of this couple?"

"I will convince you of that," says Doc Pinphoodle, speakin" up brisk and c.o.c.ky, "by putting to this young lady a few pertinent questions."

Well, he did. As a cross-examiner for the defense he was a regular Joe Choate. Inside of two minutes he"d made torn mosquito netting of Sadie"s kick, shown her up for a rank outsider, and put us both through the ropes.

"Now," says he, with a kind of calm, satisfied I"ve-swallowed-the-canary smile, "we will proceed with the ceremony."

Sadie was near cryin with the mad in her, she bein" a hard loser at any game. "You"re an old fraud, that"s what you are!" she spits out. "And you"re just marrying Pinckney"s silly old aunt to get her money."

But that rolls off Doc like a damage suit off"m a corporation. He just smiles back at her, and goes to chirkin" up Aunt Tillie. Doc was it, and knew where he stood. He had us down and out. In five minutes more he"d have a two-hundred-pound wife and a fifty-thousand-dollar income.

"It strikes me," says he, over his shoulder, "that if I had got hold of a fortune in the way you got yours, young woman, I wouldn"t make any comments about mercenary marriages."

Well, say, up to that time I had a half-baked idea that maybe I wasn"t called on to block his little game, but when he begins to rub it into Sadie I sours on Doc right away. And it always does take one or two good punches to warm me up to a sc.r.a.p. I begins to do some swift thinkin".

"Hold on there, Doc," says I. "I"ll give in that you"ve got our case quashed as it stood. But maybe there"s someone else that"s got an interest in these doin"s."

"Ah!" says he. "And who might that be?"

"Mrs. Montgomery Smith," says I.

It was a chance shot, but it rung the bell. Doc goes as limp as a straw hat that"s been hooked up after a dip in the bay, and his eyes took on that shifty look they had the first time I ever saw him.

"Why," says he, swallowin" hard, and doing his best to get back the stiff front he"d been puttin" up--"why, there"s no such person."

"No?" says I. "How about the one that calls you Monty and runs you under the couch?"

"It"s a lie!" says he. "She"s nothing to me, nothing at all."

"Oh, well," says I, "that"s between you and her. She says different.

Anyway, she"s come clear up here to put in her bid; so it"s no more"n fair to give her a show. I"ll just bring her in."

As I starts towards the front door Doc gives me one look, to see if I mean business. Then, Sadie says, he turns the color of pie-crust, drops Aunt Tillie as if she was a live wire, and jumps through the back door like he"d been kicked by a mule. I got back just in time to see him hurdle a five-foot hedge without stirrin" a leaf, and the last glimpse we got of him he was headin" for a stretch of woods up Connecticut way.

"Looks like you"d just missed a.s.sistin" at a case of bigamy," says I to the young preacher, as we was bringin" Aunt Tillie out of her faint.

"Shocking!" says he. "Shocking!" as he fans himself with a hymn book. He was takin" it hard.

Aunt Tillie wouldn"t speak to any of us, and as we bundled her into her carriage and sent her home she looked as mad as a settin" hen with her feet tied.

"Shorty," says Sadie, on the way back, "that was an elegant bluff you put up."

"Lucky my hand wa"n"t called," says I. "But it was rough on the preacher chap, wa"n"t it? He had his mouth all made up to marry some one. Blamed if I didn"t want to offer him a job myself."

"And who would you have picked out, Shorty?" says she.

"Well," says I, lookin" her over wishful, "there ain"t never been but one girl that I"d choose for a side partner, and she"s out of my cla.s.s now."

"Was her name Sullivan once?" says she.

"It was," says I.

She didn"t say anything more for a spell after that, and I didn"t; but there"s times when conversation don"t fit in. All I know is that you can sit just as close on the back seat of one of them big benzine carts as you can on a parlor sofa; and with Sadie snuggled up against me I felt like it was always goin" to be summer, with Sousa"s band playin"

somewhere behind the rubber trees.

First thing I knows we fetches up at my shack in Primrose Park, and I was standin" on the horse block, alongside the bubble. Sadie"d dropped both hands on my shoulders and was turnin" them eyes of hers on me at close range. Francois was lookin" straight ahead, and there wasn"t anyone in sight. So I just took a good look into that pair of Irish blues.

"What a chump you are, Shorty!" she whispers.

"Ah, quit your kiddin"," says I. But I didn"t make any move, and she didn"t.

"Well, good-by," says she, lettin" out a long breath.

"By-by, Sadie," says I, and off she goes.

Say, I don"t know how it was, but I"ve been feelin" ever since that I"d missed somethin" that was comin" to me. Maybe it was that bull pup I forgot to buy.