Adventure stories; Automobile travel -- Fiction; Inheritance and succession -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
Utterly confounded by the unexpected sight of a tall young man who was
cooking a fish over the fire, Aunt Agatha gurgled fearfully and backed
precipitately into the nearest tree, whence the ill-natured hand bag
forcibly opened a grinning mouth, leaped into space and disgorged a
flying shower of nickels and dimes, smelling salts and hairpins and a
variety of fussy contrivances of sentimental value.
"God bless my soul!" bleated Aunt Agatha with round, affrighted eyes,
"there's a dime in the fish! And I do beg your pardon, young man, but
will you be so good as to poke the smelling salts out of the fire
before they explode."
There was little likelihood of the final catastrophe, but Mr. Poynter
obeyed. Laughing a little as he collected the scattered cargo, he
good-humoredly suggested that he was not nearly so dangerous as Aunt
Agatha's petrified gaze suggested, and that possibly she might remember
him--his name was Poynter--and that Miss Westfall's camp lay a little
farther to the east.
Aunt Agatha departed, greatly impressed by his gallantry and common
sense. Arriving in the camp of her niece, she roused an alarming
commotion by halting unobserved among the trees, staring hard at her
niece's back-hair, dropping her hand bag, and bursting into tears that
brought the startled campers to her side in a twinkling.
"Great Scott, Johnny!" exclaimed Diane, aghast. "It's Aunt Agatha!"
Aunt Agatha dangerously motioned them away with the hand bag Johnny had
returned.
"I'll be all right in a minute!" she sniffed tearfully. "Mamma was
that way, too--mamma was. Tears would burst right out of her,
especially when she grew so stout. I can't help it! When I think of
all I've gone through with you off in the Green-glades or the
Never-glades or whatever they are--and worrying all the time about your
scalp and alligators--and you sitting there so peaceful, Diane, with
your hair still on--I've got to cry--I just have and I will. And
Carl's mysteriously disappeared--Heaven knows where! I've not seen him
for weeks. Nor did he condescend to write me--as I must say you
did--and very good of you too!" Whether Aunt Agatha was crying because
her mother was stout and eruptively lachrymose, or because Diane's hair
was still where it belonged, or because Carl was missing, Diane could
not be sure.
Aunt Agatha puffed presently to a seat by the fire, with hair and hat
awry, and dropped her hand bag.
"Johnny," she said severely, "don't stare so. I'm sorry of course that
I made you drop the kettle when I came, I am indeed, but I'm here and
there's the kettle--and that's all there is to it."
"Of course it is!" exclaimed Diane, kissing her heartily. "And I'm
mighty glad to see you, Aunt Agatha, tears and all!"
There was some little difficulty in persuading Aunt Agatha of the truth
of this, but she presently removed her hat, narrowly escaped dropping
it into the fire, and consigned it, along with the athletic hand bag,
to Johnny.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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