e you
your needings." She followed me to the house.

On the west porch, when she had exchanged the laced boots, khaki riding
breeches, and army shirt for a most absurdly feminine house gown, we had
tea. Her nose was powdered, and her slippers were bronzed leather and
monstrous small. She mingled Scotch whiskey with the tea and drank her
first cupful from a capacious saucer.

"That fresh bunch of campers!" she began. "What you reckon they did last
night? Cut my wire fence in two places over on the west flat--yes,
sir!--had a pair of wire clippers in the whip socket. What I didn't give
'em! Say, ain't it a downright wonder I still retain my girlish
laughter?"

But then, after she had refused my made cigarette for one of her own
deft handiwork, she spoke as I wished her to:

"Yes; three years ago. Me visiting a week at the home of Mrs. W.B.
Hemingway and her husband, just outside of Yonkers, back in York State.
A very nice swell home, with a nice front yard and everything. And also
Mrs. W.B.'s sister and her little boy, visiting her from Albany, the
sister's name being Mrs. L.H. Cummins, and the boy being nine years old
and named Rupert Cummins, Junior; and very junior he was for his age,
too--I will say that. He was a perfectly handsome little boy; but you
might call him a blubberhead if you wanted to, him always being scared
silly and pestered and rough-housed out of his senses by his little girl
cousin, Margery Hemingway--Mrs. W.B.'s little girl, you understand--and
her only seven, or two years younger than Junior, but leading him round
into all kinds of musses till his own mother was that demoralized after
a couple of days she said if that Margery child was hers she'd have her
put away in some good institution.

"Of course she only told that to me, not to Margery's mother. I don't
know--mebbe she would of put her away, she was that frightened little
Margery would get Junior killed off in some horrible manner, like the
time she got him to see how high he dast jump out of the apple tree
from, or like the time she told him, one ironing day, that if he drank a
whole bowlful of starch it would make him have whiskers like his pa in
fifteen minutes. Things like that--not fatal, mebbe, but wearing.

"Well, this day come a telegram about nine A.M. for Mrs. W.B., that her
aunt, with money, is very sick in New Jersey, which is near Yonkers; so
she and Mrs. L.H. Cummins, her sister, must go to see about this
aunt--and would