"I don't believe he can have been ill," she said, at the top of her voice;
"if he'd been ill he wouldn't have had the strength to hit the cab driver
so hard."
"I don't blame him for hittin' the cab driver," said Aunt Mary warmly. "As
near as I can recollect, I've often wanted to do that myself. But I can't
make out where he got the man to hit, or why he was there to hit him. I
can't make rhyme or reason out of it. I wish we knew more. Well, I presume
we will, later."
Her surmise was correct. They knew much more later. They knew more from
Mr. Stebbins, and they knew profusely more from the evening papers.
"I think our boy'd better have come home for his Easter," Aunt Mary
remarked, with a species of angry undertow threading the current of her
speech. "There's no sayin' what this will cost before we're done with it."
Arethusa choked; it was all so very terrible to her.
"What is it that the cabman wants, anyhow?" her aunt demanded presently.
"He doesn't want anything," yelled the unhappy sister. "He's going to
die."
"Well, who is going to sue me, then?"
"It's his wife; she wants five thousand dollars damages."
Aunt Mary's lips tightened.
"Five thousand dollars!" she said, with a bitter patience. "I can see that
this is goin' to be an awful business. Five thousand dollars! Dear, dear!
I must say that that wife sets a pretty high price on her husband--at
least, a'cordin' to my order of thinkin', she does. From what I've seen of
cabmen, I'd undertake to get her another just as good for a tenth of the
money, any day.
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