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

anyway? Arethusa, do you have any bright ideas about the campaign?”
    Arethusa pondered, her alabaster brow resting lightly on one shapely hand in an Elizabeth Barrett Browning attitude. For a long moment she sat and continued to ponder. At last she looked up, astonished. “Do you know, Dittany, for the first time in my life I can’t think of a thing. Can you?”
    “Well, it did cross my mind that you might like to give a donation since you’re the only person I know who has any spare cash lying around. We’ll need a fair amount of capital to run any sort of campaign and make a passable show of fixing up the mountain before election day.”
    “Gadzooks, yes. I’ll endow a trash basket in loving memory of the Hunneker brothers or whatever. And you may use my name on your press releases for what that’s worth. In sober retrospect, it might be worth a fair amount. I’ll tell you what, I’ll give that society editor who’s always bugging me for an interview a call first thing tomorrow morning and bend her ear about how I go up to the Enchanted Mountain in the clear, cold light of dawn to seek my inspiration and how delighted I am that our distinguished social leader Zilla Trott-or did you say it was Minerva Oakes?”
    “It’s Samantha Burberry.”
    “Stap me! Write it down and pin it to my cloak so I shan’t fluff my lines, will you? Anyway, I’ll burble on about how my dear friend Samantha-you did say Samantha?-has been prevailed upon by a group of concerned citizens to lend her presence for the furtherance of a-oh, rats, I’ll have to work it out on paper. Then Samantha will have to do the interview instead of me. Od’s blood, I knew I’d think of something.”
    Arethusa tossed off the rest of her sherry, flung her cloak about her in a wide purple swirl, and vanished into the night.
    Dittany heaved a sigh of relief, but the sigh was premature. Before she could get the door latched Arethusa was back.
    “I just thought of something else. I’ll go to work on Osbert.”
    Before Dittany could ask, “Who’s Osbert?” she was gone again.

CHAPTER 9
    Dittany rather expected Arethusa to make at least one more dramatic reappearance, but she didn’t. That enigmatic utterance about Osbert must have been her swan song for the night. And who was Osbert, anyway? Was he some actual being of flesh and blood who might be induced to hand out a few leaflets or hack a few trails, or was he but an Osbert of the mind, a false creation proceeding from the plot-oppressed brain? Knowing Arethusa as she did, Dittany was inclined to the latter assumption. Sometime around the middle of August, like as not, she would come across Osbert in a heap of mangled copy paper. The prospect gave her no pleasure.
    By now it was well past midnight and she was ready to drop in her tracks, had she been making any at the moment. Upstairs her comfortable bed was waiting. She yearned for that bed as Osbert would no doubt be yearning for some chaste but voluptuous knucklehead a few months from now. Yet the thought of climbing the stairs to get at it was, she might as well admit, one she did not care to entertain by herself.
    There was only one thing to do, and Dittany did it. She put on her heavy storm coat, took a thick woolen muffler for reasons other than warmth. Then, somewhat embarrassedly picking up Gramp Henbit’s silver-knobbed blackthorn cane in passing, she slipped out the back door again.
    Avoiding the road in which some minion of Andy McNasty’s might even now be lurking with evil intent, she flitted from forsythia to weigela, from Euonymus atropurpureus to Philadelphus coronarius until she reached the biggest doghouse in Lobelia Falls. Within those massively reinforced walls, confined not in durance vile but simply to keep the inhabitant from chasing skunks during the wee hours, lay deliverance. Fumbling in the dark, Dittany managed to release the heavy-duty clasp. “Ethel,”
    she whispered. “Come on, old buddy.”
    Ethel came. She