Nell Speed - Molly Brown's Post-Graduate Days

“Oh, Kent, did you know we were there all the time?”

“Certainly, little Sister, from the time Miss Judy went like a chicken with the gapes, I have known you were with me; but you seemed to be having such a good time I hated to break it up. You might have stepped in and helped a fellow, though.”

“Oh, we were doing the head work,” retaliated Judy.

Kent laughed, and then he had to tease them about their adventure and their weapons, especially Molly’s racket and balls.

“We had better crawl into the hay now, however. It is getting mighty late at night, or, rather, mighty early in the morning, and where will our beauty be if we don’t get to sleep? I’ll see you to the back door.”

“You needn’t,” said Molly. “You must be dead tired, and here is the office door open for you. There is no use in your coming any farther. We can slip around the front way and be in the house in no time.”

“Well, good morning. I am dead tired, and such brave ladies as you are need no escort. Better luck to you next time you go burglar hunting.”

It was a wonderful night, or rather morning, as Kent had indicated. The moon hung low on the horizon ready for bed, as an example to all up-late young ladies. The stars, with their rival retiring, were doing their best to get in a little shine before daylight. Everything was very still. The tree frogs and crickets and Katy-dids had suddenly ceased their incessant noise. There was a feel in the air that meant dawn.

What was it that greeted the ears of the tired Kent? Old tennis player that he was, it sounded to him like the twang of a racket in the hands of a determined server who means to drive a ball that the champion himself could not return. Then came the dull thud of the ball, a groan, a scream; then the sharp crack of a pistol, more screams from inside the house; lights, doors opening, all the household awake, and Paul and John and Crit, who had spent the night at Chatsworth, tumbling out of the office almost before Kent could get around the house. There he found Judy fallen in a little heap on the grass, and Molly carefully and coolly aiming a second tennis ball, this time at a real burglar.

The man climbing from the upper gallery of the house had been surprised by the girls as they came from the garden. At Molly’s first ball he had dropped to the ground, and Judy had caught him on the fly, as it were. The second tennis ball got him square on the jaw, but he was already down and out. Kent declared afterward, when the smoke of battle had cleared away, that it was not like Molly to hit a fellow when he was down. She had always been a good sport until now.

Mrs. Woodsmall, it seems, had talked too much about the weight of Mildred’s silver, and had dwelt too long on the recklessness of the Browns in having all of those fine things in the little hall room with the window opening on the upper gallery, where anybody with any limberness could climb up that twisted wisteria vine and get away with anything he had a mind to. A tramp, hanging around the postoffice window, had overheard her and, having more limberness than any other commodity, had endeavored to help himself.

Dr. John came with first aid to the injured, and found the man more scared than hurt. It was hard to tell which ball had done most damage; certainly Molly’s was the more effective in appearance. Her first she had served straight at his nose, so disfiguring that member that the rogues’ gallery officials would have had difficulty in identifying him. The second found his jaw and gave him so much pain that John feared a fracture. Judy’s little pistol had done good work. A flesh wound on the arm was the verdict for her.

The ground was strewn with silver in every kind of fancy novelty that a bride is supposed by her dear friends to need – or why else do they give them to her?

Then Crittenden Rutledge opened his mouth and spoke. As usual when he did such a thing it was worth getting up before dawn to hear him.

“Don’t you think, Mildred, darling, we might give the poor fellow three or four cheese scoops and several butter knives and a card tray or two? A young couple could easily make out for a while with one of each, and if he will promise to go back to Indiana and stay – You did come from Indiana, didn’t you?” The man gave a grin and nodded. “Well, if you promise to go back and never put your foot in Kentucky again, I’ll go wrap up Aunt Clay’s vases for you.”

Mrs. Brown, thankful that her brood was safe and no more damage done the poor, wicked tramp than a sore shoulder, a swollen nose and a fractured jaw, sent them all to bed with instructions to sleep late, and told Molly and Judy to stay in bed for breakfast. The burglar was put in the smokehouse for safekeeping until sun-up, when John and Paul expected to take him to Louisville, swear out a warrant against him and land him in jail. When the time came, however, to transfer their prisoner from smokehouse to jail, they found the door open, the man gone and a fine old ham missing.

“An’ they ain’t a single pusson in the whole er Indianny what knows how ter cook a ham, either,” bewailed Aunt Mary.

“To think the ungrateful wretch went off without Aunt Clay’s vases,” muttered Crittenden Rutledge.

The wedding came off so exactly as Judy had planned it that it seemed to her to be a proof of the theory of transmigration of the soul, and that in a previous incarnation she had been to just such a wedding. The eldest brother, Ernest, arrived from the far West just in time to change his clothes and give the bride away. There were three understudies for his part, so there was not much concern over his non-arrival until he got there with a blood-curdling tale of wrecks and wash-outs that had delayed him twenty-four hours. Then all of them got very much concerned and Mrs. Brown reproached herself for being so taken up with Mildred’s wedding that she had forgotten to worry about the absent one for the time being. Ernest resembled Sue more than any of the rest of them, and had a good deal of her poise and dignity. “But I’ll wager that he is not as serious as he seems,” thought Judy, detecting a twinkle in the corner of his sober eyes.

Mildred looked lovely, and she had such a sweet, trusting look in her eyes as she came down the steps and up the tan-bark walk on Ernest’s arm, that Crittenden Rutledge, waiting for her at the end of the walk, broke away from his best man and went forward several yards to meet his bride. Sue and Molly brought up the rear; Sue, composed and calm with her sweet dignity; but Molly, so deeply moved by this beloved sister’s marriage and the break in their ranks, the very first, that she felt her knees trembling and wondered if it could be possible that she was going to ruin everything and burst into tears or fall in a faint or do something terrible. But she didn’t. The familiar voice of their old minister in the opening lines of the Episcopal marriage service brought her to her senses, and she was able to follow the ritual in her mind, but she dared not trust herself to look up. She kept her eyes glued to her bouquet of “love-in-the-mist,” that Miss Lizzie Monday had brought her that morning, picked from her own old-fashioned garden.

“I know the groom will send the bridesmaids flowers, but somehow, Molly, I don’t want you to carry hothouse flowers. These ‘love-in-the-mists’ will look just right with your dress and your eyes and your ways.”

So Molly carried Miss Lizzie’s “bokay” and put the flowers that the groom sent her in a vase in the parlor. But Molly was not thinking of her dress or her eyes, except to try to keep the tears in them, since come they would, and not let them run out on her cheeks. Mildred’s responses were inaudible except to dear old Dr. Peters, the minister, but Crittenden’s were so loud and clear and resonant that it was almost like chanting, and Judy had to smile when she could not help thinking of the stammering man’s “Your house is on fire, tra la, tra la.”