Cape Cod (Mass.) -- Fiction; Short stories, American
Tucker leaned away down--he's always suffering from a rush of funniness
to the face--and he whispers, awful solemn: “For heaven's sake, whatever
you do, don't open 'em. You might find out.” Then he threw off his
main-hatch and “haw-hawed” like a loon.
To tell you the truth, we hadn't thought of opening 'em--not yet--so
that was kind of one on us, as you might say. But Jonadab ain't so slow
but he can catch up with a hearse if the horses stop to drink, and he
comes back quick.
“Ily,” he says, looking troubled, “you ought to sew reef-points on your
mouth. 'Tain't safe to open the whole of it on a windy night like this.
First thing you know you'll carry away the top of your head.”
Well, we felt consider'ble better after that--having held our own on
the tack, so to speak--and we walked out of the post-office and up to my
room in the Travellers' Rest, where we could be alone. Then we opened up
the envelopes, both at the same time. Inside of each of 'em was another
envelope, slick and smooth as a mack'rel's back, and inside of THAT was
a letter, printed, but looking like the kind of writing that used to
be in the copybook at school. It said that Ebenezer Dillaway begged the
honor of our presence at the marriage of his daughter, Belle, to Peter
Theodosius Brown, at Dillamead House, Cashmere-on-the-Hudson, February
three, nineteen hundred and so forth.
We were surprised, of course, and pleased in one way, but in another we
wa'n't real tickled to death. You see, 'twas a good while sence Jonadab
and me had been to a wedding, and we know there'd be mostly young folks
there and a good many big-bugs, we presumed likely, and 'twas going to
cost consider'ble to get rigged--not to mention the price of passage,
and one thing a' 'nother. But Ebenezer had took the trouble to write
us, and so we felt 'twas our duty not to disappoint him, and especially
Peter, who had done so much for us, managing the Old Home House.
The Old Home House was our summer hotel at Wellmouth Port. How me and
Jonadab come to be in the summer boarding trade is another story and
it's too long to tell now. We never would have been in it, anyway, I
cal'late, if it hadn't been for Peter. He made a howling success of our
first season and likewise helped himself along by getting engaged to the
star boarder, rich old Dillaway's daughter--Ebenezer Dillaway, of the
Consolidated Cash Stores.
Well, we see 'twas our duty to go, so we went. I had a new Sunday
cutaway and light pants to go with it, so I figgered that I was pretty
well found, but Cap'n Jonadab had to pry himself loose from considerable
money, and every cent hurt as if 'twas nailed on. Then he had chilblains
that winter, and all the way over in the Fall River boat he was fuming
about them chilblains, and adding up on a piece of paper how much cash
he'd spent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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