The Water Goats, and Other TroublesButler, Ellis Parker
General
The Water Goats, and Other Troubles
Butler, Ellis Parker
Fiction; Humorous stories; Short stories, American
“My father,” she said, “has been insisting that I marry a man I do not
love, and things have come to such a point that I must either accede or
take things into my own hands. I agreed to elope this evening with the
man I love, for he had long wished me to elope with him. I was to meet
him outside his house at exactly one-fifteen o'clock, and I told him
that if I was not there promptly he might know I had changed my mind.
When the time came for me to hasten to him in my automobile, which was
then to hurry us to a waiting minister, my automobile was not here.
Unfortunately I did not know my lover's address, for I had left it in
the card pocket in this automobile. I knew not what to do. As the time
passed and my automobile did not appear I knew that my lover had decided
that I was not coming, and had gone away into his house. Now I cannot go
home, for I have no home. I cannot so lower my pride as to ring the bell
of his house and say I wish to be forgiven and married even yet. What
shall I do?”
For answer I felt in the card pocket of the automobile and drew out the
address of her lover, and without hesitation I gave the address to the
chauffeur. In a few minutes we were there. Leaving the young woman in
the car with the poor woman, I got out and surveyed the house. It was
unpromising. Evidently all the family but the young man were away for
the summer, and the doors and windows were all boarded up. There was not
a bell to ring. I pounded on the boards that covered the door, but it
was unavailing. The young woman called to me that the young man lived
in the front room of the topmost floor, and could not hear me, and I
glanced up and saw that one window alone of all those in the house was
not boarded up. Instantly I hopped upon the seat beside the driver and
said, “Central Park.”
We dashed up Fifth Avenue and into the Park at full speed, and when we
were what I considered far enough in I ordered him to stop, and hurrying
up a low bank I began to grope among the leaves of last year under
the trees. I was right. In a few minutes I had filled my pockets with
acorns, was back in the car, and we were hurrying toward the house
of the lover, when I saw standing on a corner a figure I instantly
recognized as Lemuel, the elevator boy, and at the same time I
remembered that Lemuel spent his holidays pitching for a ball nine, He
was just the man I needed, and I stopped and made him get into the car.
In a minute more we were before the house again, and I handed Lemuel
a fistful of acorns. He drew back and threw them with all his strength
toward the upper window.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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