Free The Grub-And-Stakers Move a Mountain by Charlotte MacLeod, Alisa Craig Page A

well-ventilated sneakers. Oblivious of these facts, she sat licking orange coconut icing off her cake fork. Hazel forbore to comment.
    “Besides,” Dittany added, laying down the now totally de-iced fork with obvious regret, “I’m a marked woman. The more I go barging around making noises in public, the sooner Andy McNasty’s going to identify me as the old bag from the Conservation Committee. I’d have to fly the coop or blow the scene or whatever the correct procedure is in such cases and you’d still be without a candidate. What we need is somebody stately and dignified and poised yet forceful like-“
    “Samantha Burberry!” cried Hazel.
    “Precisely the name I was about to utter. Come on, eh, let’s get cracking.”
    “You mean right this minute? Dittany, we can’t simply pick up our heels and go Uppity-lipping over to the Burberrys’.”
    “Why can’t we?”
    “Well,” floundered Hazel, overcome by shyness and not wishing to admit it, “Joshua will be home.”
    “So what? He’s a registered voter, isn’t he? We’ll appeal to his sense of civic responsibility and sign him up as a sponsor.”
    “But he’s a college professor!”
    “Is there something in the election rules about college professors not being sponsors? Hazel, you’re not by any chance weaseling out on me, are you? Think of the Climbing Fumitory.
    Think of the Hairy Beardtongue. Think of Andy McNasty up on top of the Enchanted Mountain sticking plastic flamingos all over his brand-new Astroturf lawn.”
    “Dittany, he wouldn’t!”
    But Hazel knew in her heart of hearts that he would. Sighing, she put on her coat, picked up her house keys, and followed Dittany Henbit out into the night.

CHAPTER 7
    “Wouldn’t you like to stop at your house before we go on to the Burberrys’?” Hazel suggested gently.
    “What for?” asked Dittany.
    “Well, for one thing, your eyelashes are molting.”
    “Oh. I expect I could do with a little titivating, eh?” Dittany picked off a small twig that had somehow worked its way through one of the holes in her right sneaker. “Poor Joshua must get enough sartorial shocks in the course of a day without my adding another. Samantha says he almost cried when he heard a rumor that miniskirts were coming back into fashion. He told her there’s nothing in the world so depressing as walking into a class at half past seven on a nasty November morning and finding one’s self staring down at a roomful of panty girdles.”
    “Nobody would believe what teachers go through,” Hazel agreed somberly. “I taught two years before I was married, and I’d rather scrub floors any day.”
    “Speaking of scrubbing floors,” Dittany mused, “I expect I ought to get these keys back to Mrs. Poppy. All things considered, it might not be a particularly brilliant idea for McNaster to find out I have them.”
    “I think it would be an abysmally rotten idea,” Hazel concurred.
    “Is there any hope whatever of persuading Mrs. Poppy to keep quiet about your having gone in her place?”
    “I can’t imagine Mrs. Poppy’s keeping quiet about anything whatsoever. Besides, her family already know. At least her daughter does, the one who came to the door.”
    “Then you’ll have to appeal to their better natures and you’d better do it right away.”
    “Before I wash my face?”
    “No, after. By all means after.”
    Once they’d ridden the short distance to her own house and she’d got a look at herself in the bathroom mirror, Dittany recognized the wisdom of Hazel’s suggestion. She slathered on a large gob of the former Mrs. Henbit’s Lady Godiva Take It All Off Makeup Remover, disentangled her eyelid from the remaining lashes, and got her face back to what the late U. S. President Warren G. Harding would have termed normalcy. She changed out of the tent dress and sweatshirt into a trim corduroy outfit as befitted a lady of serious purpose and, at Hazel’s prompting, discarded the maroon knee socks and