The Grub-and-Stakers Pinch a Poke Read online

  “It’s either you or Arethusa, dear. Unless you’d prefer to work as a team?”

  Osbert quit glaring at the cookie and glared at his wife instead. “Dittany, are you trying to be funny?”

  “No, precious. I’m simply trying to lead up gently to the fact that we need a play written rather quickly so that we can win the Jenson Thorbisher-Freep collection for the Architrave.”

  Osbert turned his attention back to the cookie. “What kind of play?”

  “A play about earlier times in Canada.”

  “Which earlier times?”

  “Any earlier times, I guess. It’s supposed to capture the dauntless spirit of our hardy forebears. At least that’s what she’s got written here.”

  “Who has?”

  “Desdemona Portley, an old friend of my mother’s. She’s trying to revive the Traveling Thespians.”

  “Why?”

  “So they can compete in a drama festival over at Scottsbeck. Mr. Thorbisher-Freep’s offering his collection as bait so he can use the ticket money to renovate the old opera house into a center of culture.”

  “What makes him think Scottsbeck wants culture? They’ve already got six barrooms and a high-class cocktail lounge.”

  “That’s why they need culture, darling, so everybody won’t just sit around guzzling beer.”

  “They don’t just sit around guzzling beer. They also guzzle whiskey, gin, vodka, rum, or peppermint schnapps, as the case may be. And they carry on profound intellectual discussions.”

  “About what?”

  “Hockey, mostly. Were you planning to pour me some tea?”

  “Osbert Monk, answer me. Are you planning to write us a play? Or are you going to let Arethusa write it, and find yourself being forced to act the role of a snuff-sniffing, garter-stapping regency buck from Saskatoon?”

  “Dittany, you jest!”

  “Here’s your tea, sweetheart. Finish your cookie and mull it over.”

  Since Minerva, Zilla, Dot, Hazel, and the wife of his bosom were all eyeing him with the breathless expectancy of spectators at a balloon ascension, Osbert did not enjoy his tea. Rather he started out not enjoying it. Then the dreamy expression Dittany had come to know and respect stole over his comely features. His hazel eyes gazed not upon her, not upon the cookie, but toward some far horizon. The cowlick so recently smoothed down popped up again. He finished his cookie, helped himself to another, and began biting off the crinkles with confidence and determination.

  “‘A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon,’” he murmured somewhat crumbily.

  “Hasn’t something along those lines already been done?” Dot Coskoff ventured.

  “That’s exactly the point.” Osbert’s eyes were now alight, his blondish cowlick rampant. “We know what happened to Dan McGrew, but why? Who was that miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty and loaded for bear? How did he know Dan McGrew was a hound of hell, when they hadn’t even been introduced? Why did the lady known as Lou kiss him as he died?”

  “And pinch his poke,” cried Dittany, all agog at this fresh insight into the stirring annals of Canadian literature. “More tea, darling?”

  “Please, darling. Yes, ladies, the shooting of Dan McGrew is one of the great unsolved mysteries of the Yukon Territory. And we, by gum, are going to solve it.”

  *The Grub-and-Stakers Quilt a Bee

  Chapter 2

  NOW THAT HE’D GOT the bit between his teeth, Osbert took off like a one-man stampede. By feminine wiles, Dittany succeeded in getting him to stop for a bite of supper, but he was back to his typewriter at a brisk canter as soon as his plate was empty. He accepted a cup of cocoa at bedtime, but went on typing with one hand even as he quaffed the sustaining beverage.

  “Go ahead up, darling,” he said, giving his wife a cocoa-flavored kiss. “I’ll be along.”

  But he wasn’t. Dittany fell asleep to the clicking of the keys. Come morning, she was relieved to awaken with the head she loved to pat on the pillow beside her. Two heads, in fact. Ethel had sauntered in to drop a hint about breakfast. Dittany strove to quell the whining and tail-thumping on humanitarian grounds.

  “Shh,” she whispered. “Daddy needs his rest.”

  But Daddy was in no resting mood. Dittany had barely got the dog food into the basin and the tea into the pot when Osbert came leaping and bounding down the stairs like a particularly sprightly young mountain goat, grabbed a bundle of semi-legible pages off his typewriter stand, and hurtled into the kitchen.

  “What do you think of my play, dear?”

  “I’ll know better when I’ve read it,” Dittany replied. “You don’t mean to tell me you’ve finished the whole thing?”

  “Well, not exactly finished, but the rough draft will give you a general idea. Shall I pour the tea?”

  “Do. And you might butter the muffins while you’re about it.”

  Dittany could see she wouldn’t be allowed to do anything else until she’d dealt with the latest flare-up of Osbert’s inspirational fires. She was a fast reader, but not quick enough to suit Osbert.

  “Notice how I build up suspense about the miner, dear?” he urged. “I never call him by name.”

  “Not even in front of his loving wife and tiny golden-haired daughter? I never knew he had a family.”

  “I don’t suppose anybody did until now, except maybe Robert W. Service; and he never said. You understand, darling, we’ve got to probe deep into the background to grasp the complexity of the characterizations. Besides,” Osbert admitted, “the poem as it stands wouldn’t stretch to more than a five-minute skit. So anyway, I’m starting back in the halcyon days when he’s head feedbag man on the horsecars.”

  “What’s so halcyon about feedbags?”

  “Oh, his is actually a sort of junior executive position. He has to make sure all the feedbags are kept in perfect munching order, he’s responsible for oat procurement, and a lot of important stuff. He also makes sure every horse on the line gets a carrot with its breakfast, for the vitamins.”

  “Darling, I’m not sure they had vitamins in those days,” Dittany objected. “I mean I don’t know whether they knew they did.”

  “Ah, but the miner—I mean the feedbag man who becomes the miner—is a man ahead of his time. He hypothesizes vitamins. Anyway, all is serene on page one in the cozy flat where he lives with his loving wife and tiny tot, whom he’s teaching to play the piano. He’s a gifted pianist himself, though of course his heart is in the feedbags. I’m calling the daughter Evangeline. The wife, of course, is Louisa.”

  “Darling, you don’t mean—”

  Osbert nodded his head sadly. “I’m afraid that’s the way it has to be, dear. Louisa is more to be pitied than censured, though. We make that plain as the gripping drama unfolds.”

  “That’s a load off my mind.” Dittany took a bite of her muffin. “So how do you manage the unfoldment?”

  “I start by revealing that the feedbag man has a hated rival who’s after his job. The rival stages an oat robbery and lays the blame on the feedbag man.”

  “How dastardly!”

  “Oh, it’s all that and then some,” Osbert agreed. “The boss, who’s none other than Dan McGrew, fires the feedbag man and blackens his reputation so that nobody else will hire him. This is before unemployment insurance, remember, so the family’s financial situation soon becomes desperate. One dark and stormy night, the ex-feedbag man scrapes together what money he has and leaves it in a pathetic little heap on the washstand, along with a note explaining that he’s going to the Yukon to seek his fortune in the gold fields and will return to his loved ones as soon as he’s panned out his pile.”

  “How brave, and how sad,” sighed Dittany.

  “Cheer up, darling, it gets worse. McGrew, who has long lusted in his black heart after the beauteous Louisa, starts putting the moves on. Needless to say, Louisa spurns his caddish advances, so he has to resort to sinister wiles.”

  “He would.” Dittany
fluttered a few more pages. “He sounds to me like just the type.”

  “Oh, McGrew’s a Grade A rotter, no question about that. Do you know what he does next?”

  Dittany might have taken a shrewd guess, but she wasn’t about to stem the flow of Osbert’s creative juices. “No dear, what?”

  “He sells his horsecar business to the hated rival, who has by now repented of his wickedness and vows henceforth to make sure the horses get their daily carrots, which he had quit giving them under McGrew’s evil influence. Then McGrew promises Louisa he’ll take her to the Yukon to find her beloved husband.”

  “And she falls for this fiendish ruse?”

  “Consider her position, darling. She’s spent her pittance to buy bread and milk for her sweet little daughter. They’ve had to sell Evangeline’s piano and the landlady’s threatening to turn them out in the snow. I thought Zilla Trott might be good as the landlady. It’s a cameo role but one Zilla could really sink her teeth into. So anyway, Louisa unravels her best flannel petticoat to knit Evangeline a warm cap and mittens, and off they go to the Yukon.”

  “Osbert,” cried Dittany, “I never fully realized the depth of your creative genius. This positively tears at the heartstrings.”

  “Do you really think so, darling?” Osbert’s self-satisfied smirk indicated that he thought so, too. “So that’s the first scene. Or maybe the first and second. Don’t you think it might be a fine dramatic touch to drop the curtain after the feedbag man writes his pathetic note, kisses his fair wife and winsome wee one as they sleep, and staggers off, grief-stricken but resolute, into the night?”

  “Terrific, darling. And you could begin the second scene with the as yet unrepentant rival taunting the poor, tired horses by eating a carrot in front of them and not giving them any.”

  “I’m not quite sure we ought to bring in the horses, precious. I’ve got to shove in all that attempted seduction business, remember, and the landlady giving Louisa and Evangeline the heave-ho and McGrew twirling his big black mustache in a villainous and lustful manner while he promises to take them to the Yukon. Then there’s the gripping moment while they’re packing up their few remaining bits and pieces and saying good-bye to the landlady’s cat.”

  “Why the landlady’s cat? Couldn’t they have a faithful dog who’s their one stay and comfort throughout their tragic ordeal?”

  “You mean Ethel?” Osbert pondered. “I was sort of planning to powder her fur and use her for a polar bear when we get to the Yukon. But your idea’s better, darling. The feedbag man can shake Ethel’s paw in the parting scene and have a wrenching little chat with her about guarding his loved ones while he slogs through the frozen wastes in quest of the precious metal that will restore their ruined fortunes. Only mightn’t Ethel bite Dan McGrew while he’s striving to force his unwelcome attentions on Louisa?”

  “She won’t realize what Dan’s up to because she has such a guileless, trusting nature. Ethel’s not terribly b-r-i-g-h-t about some things, you have to admit.”

  Dittany spelled out the word because Ethel happened to be taking a postprandial snooze under their feet at this very moment, and she wouldn’t for anything have hurt the stay and comfort’s feelings.

  “That’s true enough,” Osbert conceded. “Any dog that could manage to fall in love with a—”

  “Shh. Don’t reopen old wounds.”

  They’d gone through a painful month or so last summer when Ethel had formed an ill-conceived and unreciprocated tendresse for a woodchuck. That was all behind her now and best forgotten.

  “So what happens next to Louisa and Evangeline?” Dittany went on briskly. “Do you show them riding in the train or the oxcart or whatever?”

  “No, we flash directly to the Malamute saloon, of which Dan McGrew is now the proprietor. He’s seated stage left, rear, cheating himself at solitaire. Watching him is the feedbag man’s wife, still chaste and loyal but gaudily painted and bedizened and contemptuously referred to as Lou by the roistering miners clustered about the bar. And dear little Evangeline, the erstwhile darling of her vanished father’s heart, whom he may even now be envisioning in their once happy home playing ‘I’ll Be With You When the Roses Bloom Again’ is perched at the tinpanny old piano, hitting a jag-time tune.”

  “She’s the kid that handles the music box!” cried Dittany. “Osbert dearest, is there no limit to your powers of invention?”

  “There hadn’t better be, pardner,” Osbert replied soberly, “or you may wind up rattling the music box over at Andy McNaster’s inn.”

  Dittany started, and looked up at the big old school-house clock that hung since long before she could remember over the black iron stove. “Speaking of that moderately unpleasant subject, dearest, what time are we supposed to pick up your Aunt Arethusa?”

  Dittany’s question was less irrelevant than might appear. Ever since the previous August, and it was now the succeeding December, the once most hated man in Lobelia Falls had been laying siege to Arethusa Monk’s affections. So far McNaster had made little headway and that little only because Arethusa, after her long steeping in the field of roguish regency romance, was a sucker for a reformed rake.

  Andrew McNaster did seem to be sincere in his efforts to clean up his act, as Desdemona Portley might have expressed it. He was still showering endless benefactions in the way of free carpentry and plumbing repairs on the Aralia Polyphema Architrave Museum. According to informed sources like Roger Munson, who always knew everything, Andy had quit cutting corners in both his contracting business and his innkeeping and was running both enterprises in strict conformity with every code and regulation he could find to conform to.

  Whether anybody in Lobelia Falls believed McNaster had actually turned over a new leaf or was merely laying down a smoke screen to cover some piece of chicanery even more devious and dire than his previous coups depended on how seriously the townsfolk took their personal commitments to peace on earth and goodwill toward men. Osbert at this juncture was not disposed to pass judgment on his aunt’s unlikely swain one way or the other. He was merely looking stricken.

  “Dittany, did you have to bring up Aunt Arethusa just when I’m in the midst of writing my first play?”

  “But you have the plot all worked out, dearest. All you have to do now is get the feedbag man into the saloon and hold the shootout.”

  “You talk as if it were a mere bagatelle. Don’t you realize creative writing is the hardest work there is?”

  “Yes, love,” said Dittany, “you’ve told me lots of times. That’s why I think you ought to take a break. Would you mind looking in your little notebook and seeing what flight Arethusa’s coming in on? You wrote it down when we took her to the airport, remember?”

  “But if I tell you when she’s coming, you’ll start agitating to meet the plane,” Osbert protested.

  “You did promise we’d pick her up,” his wife reminded him.

  “That was when I was temporarily dazzled by the prospect of being rid of her for a week. Promises made in a state of euphoric delirium don’t count.”

  “All right, dear,” she said. “If you really don’t want to, I’ll go myself.”

  “Drive alone for hours and hours along a lonely road on a dark and gloomy night with a blizzard coming on?” he howled. “Not by a jugful you won’t.”

  “Darling, it’s ten o’clock in the morning and clear as a bell. The highway’s dry, the airport’s precisely two hours and three minutes away, and we haven’t seen a snowflake for a week.”

  “Then the weather’s due for a change and you’re not going without me. That’s final.”

  “But we can’t leave Arethusa stranded.”

  “In my opinion, it’s the only sensible thing to do.”

  Of course Osbert didn’t mean that. After a certain amount of searching for his notebook, which turned up at last in the pocket of his beaded buckskin vest, he found the page where he’d written down that his aunt’s plane was due in at thirteen minutes past one o�
��clock, and even squandered a long distance call to make sure the flight was on time. It probably wouldn’t be, but there wasn’t much he could do about that.

  There wasn’t all that much time to get ready, either. Dittany put on her new blue-green suit that matched her blue-green eyes, her camel-hair coat and beret that went so well with her blond-brown hair, and the high-heeled boots she never got to wear much around Lobelia Falls because Lobelia Falls wasn’t that kind of place. Osbert would have liked to wear the Stetson hat and cowboy boots Arethusa hated; but they weren’t comfortable to drive in so he settled for his clomping-around boots, his buckskin jacket with the six-inch thrums, and a multicolored Laplander hat that came up to little horns fore and aft.

  “I wish I had time to grow a beard,” he said fretfully.

  “You can grow a beard tomorrow.” Dittany straightened his horns for him. “There, you look just lovely. We really ought to get started. Have you any money in case Arethusa wants lunch? She’ll be starved after that long flight, don’t you think? Or will they have fed her on the plane?”

  “She’ll be hungry anyway,” snarled Osbert. “She’s always hungry. Come on, Ethel, let’s find something smelly for you to roll in. Then you can sit next to dear old Auntie.”

  “Ethel, you know better even if Daddy doesn’t,” Dittany chided. “Wipe your paws before you get into the car, that’s a good girl. Do you want to drive, Osbert, or would you rather curl up in the back seat and have a good cry?”

  “Oh, I’ll do it. I don’t know why people go around saying it’s always the woman who suffers.” He flung himself into the driver’s seat, untangled his car keys from his thrums, and started the motor.

  The Monks had a brand-new ranch wagon, purchased less than two weeks ago to celebrate Osbert’s having sold a book to the movies. Maverick Malamute (to be released as Pulsing Passion) was a gripping tale of the frozen north in which Ethel, thinly disguised as a dauntless sled dog, rounded up a gang of yak rustlers virtually single-pawed after her temporarily snowblind master fell into a seal hole and froze his mukluks.