Where There's a Will by Mary Rinehart

Author:Mary Rinehart [Rinehart, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aeterna Classics
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XVI

STOP, THIEF!

I was pretty nervous when I took charge of the news stand that evening. Amanda King had an appointment with the dentist and had left everything topsyturvey. I was still straightening up when people began to come down to dinner.

Miss Cobb walked over to the news stand, and she'd cut the white yoke out of her purple silk. She looked very dressy, although somewhat thin.

"Everybody has dressed for dinner to-night, Minnie," she informed me. "We didn't want Mr. von Inwald to have a wrong idea of American society, especially after Mr. Carter's ridiculous conduct this afternoon, and I wonder if you'll be sweet enough to start the phonograph in the orchestra gallery as we go in—something with dignity, you know—the wedding march, or the overture from Aida."

"Aida's cracked," I said shortly, "and as far as I'm concerned, Mr. von Inwald can walk in to his meals without music, or starve to death waiting for the band."

But she got the phonograph, anyhow, and put the elevator boy in the gallery with it. She picked out some things by Caruso and Tetrazzini and piled them on a chair, but James had things to himself up there, and played The Spring Chicken through three times during dinner, with Miss Cobb glaring at the gallery until the back of her neck ached, and the dining-room girls waltzing in with the dishes and polka-ing out.

Mr. Moody came out when dinner was over in a fearful rage and made for the news stand.

"One of your ideas, I suppose," he asserted. "What sort of a night am I going to have after chewing my food to rag-time, with my jaws doing a skirt-dance? Why in heaven's name couldn't you have had something slow, like Handel's Largo, if you've got to have music?"

But dinner was over fifteen minutes sooner than usual. James cake-walked everybody out to My Ann Elizer, and Miss Cobb was mortified to death.

Two or three things happened that night. For one, I got a good look at Miss Julia Summers. She was light-haired and well-fleshed, with an ugly face but a pleasant smile. She wore a low-necked dress that made Miss Cobb's with the yoke out look like a storm collar, and if she had a broken heart she didn't show it.

"Hello," she cried, looking at my hair, "are you selling tobacco here or are you the cigar-lighter?"

"Neither," I answered, looking over her head. "I am employed as the extinguisher of gay guests."

"Good," she said, smiling. "I'm something fine at that myself. Suppose I stay here and help. If I watch that line of knitting women I'll be crotcheting Arabella's wool in my sleep to-night."

Well, she was too cheerful to be angry with. So she stayed around for a while, and it was amazing how much tobacco I sold that evening. Men who usually bought tobies bought the best cigars, and when Mr. Jennings came up, scowling, and I handed him the brand he'd smoked for years, she took one, clipped the end of it as neat as a finger nail and gave it to him, holding up the lighter.

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