“Shoot up a good cook, will you?” said the lady grimly.  “I’ll give 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 I stay and look after the two kids and not let them get poisoned or killed or anything serious?  And they might have to stay overnight, because the aunt was eccentric and often thought she was sick; but this time she might be right.  She was worth all the way from three to four hundred thousand dollars.