More Tish | Page 2

left
elbow as Aggie tried to duck by her; "but she left positive orders to
admit nobody. Of course if she had known you were coming--but she
didn't."
"What are you making, Miss Letitia?" Aggie asked sweetly. "Summer
clothes?"
"Yes. Some little thin things--it's getting so hot!"
"Humph! I see you are making them with an upholsterer's needle!" said
Aggie, and marched down the hall with her head up.

I was quite bewildered. For even if Tish had decided on a walking tour
I couldn't imagine what an upholsterer's needle had to do with it, unless
she meant to upholster the donkey.
We got down to the entrance before Aggie spoke again. Then:
"What did I tell you?" she demanded. "That woman's making her a----"
But at that very instant there was a thud under our feet and something
came "ping" through the floor not six inches from my toe, and lodged
in the ceiling. Aggie and I stood looking up. It had made a small round
hole over our heads, and a little cloud of plaster dust hung round it.
"Somebody shot at us!" declared Aggie, clutching my arm. "That was a
bullet!"
I stooped down and felt the floor. There was a hole in it, and from
somewhere below I thought I heard voices. It was not very comfortable,
standing there on top of Heaven knows what; but we were divided
between fear and outrage, and our indignation won. With hardly a word
we went back to the rear staircase and so to the cellar. Halfway down
the stairs both of us remembered the same thing--that it was Tish's day
to use the basement laundry, and that perhaps----
Tish was not in the laundry, nor was Hannah, her maid. But Tish's
blue-and-white dressing sacque was on the line, and the blue had run,
as I had said it would when she bought it. In the furnace room beyond
we heard voices, and Aggie opened the door.
Tish and Hannah were both there. They had not heard us.
"Nonsense!" Tish was saying. "If anybody had been hit we'd have
heard a scream; or if they were killed we'd have heard 'em fall."
"I heard a sort of yell," said poor Hannah. "I don't like it, Miss Tish.
The time before you just missed me."
"Why did you stick your arm out?" demanded Tish. "Now take that

broomstick and we'll start again. Did you score that?"
"How'll I score it?" asked Hannah. "Hit or miss?" She went to the cellar
wall and stood waiting, with a piece of charcoal in her hand. The
whitewashed wall was marked with rows of X's and ciphers. The
ciphers predominated.
"Mark it a miss."
"But I heard a yell----"
"Fiddle-de-dee! Are you ready?" Tish had lifted a small rifle into
position and was standing, with her feet apart, pointing it at a white
target hanging by a string from a rafter. As she gave the signal. Hannah
sighed, and, picking up a broomhandle, started the target to swaying,
pendulum fashion; Tish followed it with the gun.
I thought things had gone far enough, so I stepped into the cellar and
spoke in ringing tones.
"Letitia Carberry!" I said sternly.
Tish pulled the trigger at that moment and the bullet went into the
furnace pipe. It was absurd, of course, for Tish to blame me for it, but
she turned on me in a rage.
"Look what you made me do!" she snapped. "Can't a person have a
moment's privacy?"
"What I think you need," I retorted, "is six months' complete seclusion
in a sanitarium."
"You nearly shot us in the upper hall," Aggie put in warmly.
"Well, as long as I didn't shoot you in the upper hall or any other place,
I guess you needn't fuss," said Tish. "Ready, Hannah."
This time she shot Hannah in the broomhandle, and practically put her
hors de combat; but the shot immediately after was what Tish

triumphantly called a clean bull's-eye--that is, it hit the center of the
target.
That is the time to stop, when one has made a bull's-eye in any sort of
achievement, I take it. And Tish is nobody's fool. She took off her
spectacles and wiped the perspiration and gunpowder streaks from her
face. She was immediately in high good humor.
"Every unprotected female should know how to handle a weapon," she
said oracularly, and, sitting down on the edge of the coal-bin,
proceeded to swab out the gun with a wad of cotton on the end of a
stick.
"The poker has been good enough for you for fifty years," I retorted.
"And if you think you look sporty, or anything but idiotic, sitting there
in a flowered kimono and swabbing out the throat of that gun----?"
Just then the janitor came down,