Banning High School - San Gorgonian Yearbook (Banning, CA)

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After he had gone Aunt Matilda put her arms around Betty and kissed her lightly. “Betty, child,’ she said, “please forgive me for the way | have always treated you. [| have been just a stubborn old lady for a good many years and | want this vacation to be one of the jolliest you have ever known. Do you think you could forgive me for my actions toward you?” “Oh, Aunt Matilda,” cried Betty, “Tve been just a horrid— Aunt Matilda interrupted by saying, “The incident of the suit cases brought back to me something very nearly like an accident which happened to me when I was young.” It is needless to say that Betty stayed all the vacation time. Every minute was spent in gay and jolly fun in which Aunt Matilda was always included. Mildred Wenger ‘24. PRIZE ESSAY Steve and Mary The real name of this old couple was Stephenson, but he called her Mary: and ske called him Steve, and we learned to do the same. The first time I saw Mary she was leaning on an old broom with which she had been sweeping the ground around her camp. Whenever you find a woman leaning on » broom, looking idly around, you can be sure she is looking for someone to talk to, and Mary was. She loved to de two things better than anything else—talk and show off her cats. She had three with her on this trip—Minnie Mince, Maudie Mince, and Malty. She said that maybe they would buy a ranch in San Diego some day and that they would keep the cats to catch gophers on it. Steve had made a special box for them to travel in. Half of it was covered with chicken wire—I suppose that this was the living room—and the other part was closed. This half was where the cats slept, and in this box all three rode in state. During the daytime the cats were tied to trees, and at night they slept in their box. There was wild excitement whenever another cat came around. One night the cats got into a fight. Mary called it a ‘riot.’ The “‘riot’’ was started by a big black tom cat who bit poor Malty, and Malty in her excitement bit Steve who was trying to pacify them. Steve had to doctor both himself and Malty. He told me that in the Civil War the soldiers used equal parts of tobacco juice and turpentine well mixed on their wounds, and this was what he put on both his own and Malty’s bites. Steve was an old fellow of about sixty-five years. He wore Page Twenty-two ey ”

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silk shirt, some cigarettes, and other masculine articles. Betty gave a little shriek of horror. Where could she have gotten that terrible traveling bag? Then it flashed through her mind. The young man who had sat opposite her on the train, of course. It was all clear enough now. She had noticed ihat the suit cases were alike, but upon arriving, in her eager- ness to get home she had carelessly, as usual, grabbed up the first thing she saw and this was the result. Convulsed with laughter she rolled over on the bed and laughed and laughed much to Hilda’s astonishment. However, she soon calmed down. What would Aunt Matilda say? Horrors! She would be disgraced for good now. Aunt Matilda would refuse to believe anything but that she had been carrying on some awful flirtation. And too, her new dress was gone. Where? Goodness only knew. But most of all, she was worrying about the disgrace of the suit case and Aunt Matilda. Well, she would have to tell her. She might as well have it over with. Slowly she finished dressing and slowly she descended to the library where her fate awaited her. “Well, Elizabeth,’ her aunt greeted her. ‘What now? And why aren’t you in a suitable dinner frock?”’ Betty poured out the story and the suit case was brough?¢ down to be inspected. Aunt Matilda touched the cigaretes and other articles with the tips of her fingers. But to Betty's surprise and delight and amazement she did not scold ox lec- ture. She merely said they would put a notice in the paper about it and that Betty was a most unfortunate child. And then they had dinner. The next day, which was the day before Thanksgiving, a notice appeared in the paper concerning the suit case. Some- one telephoned and said he had Betty’s suit case and would it be all right to call that afternoon and regain his own posses- sions? Betty answered the telephone and told him it would. It was a very pleasant voice at the other end of the wire and Betty awaited the arrival of its owner with quite an air of expectancy. To her astonishment, on entering the library a little later, she found Aunt Matilda chatting sociably with the young man of the train, quite as if they were old friends. Upon her entrance Aunt Matilda looked at her smilingly and said, “Betty, let me introduce to you Mr. Richard Camerson, a son of an old and dear friend of mine. Imagine my surprise at seeing him. I thought the family was in California, Richard, this is my niece, Elizabeth Blythe.”’ Mr. Camerson made quite a lengthy call. They had tea and laughed long over the suit cases. Betty found herself big-eyed with surprise several times at Aunt Matilda. She laughed and chatted as gaily as anyone and when Richard left invited him for Thanksgiving dinner. Page Twenty-one

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= an ancient cowboy hat which he told me he kept for senti- mental reasons as it was forty years old the third of April. Steve wasn’t far behind Mary when it came to talking and he did love to tell fish stories. If he once got started you couldn't tell whether he would catch a halibut or a man-eating shark next. Steve had a suit case full of fishing tackle with which to catch anything from minnows to swordfish. He would pull out some hook and get reminiscent and launch into a story telling of the largest fish that he had ever caught on that par- ticular hook. ‘‘Here’s one,’ he said while showing them to me one morning, “‘with which | caught four hundred pounds of halibut in three hours on the Santa Monica Pier.” Steve and I went fishing one day but neither of us caught anything. After all the fish stories he had told me | expected to see him catch all the fish that we both could carry. As we were going home we saw some contented looking cats lying around on the wharf, and Steve remarked that they probably lived high there. When we got back to camp, Mary, in great excitement related to us a story that some woman had to!d her abcut a l ot of starving cats down on the wharf. Nothing that Steve or I could tell her would keep her from taking a can of roast beef which she had opened and found slightly tainted down to feed those cats. This meat Mary had intended to use for dinner in making what she called “elegant stew,’ but it was a little too much spoiled for that. She said that there were lots of people who would like to have it; for instance the Armenians, but since she couldn't get it to them she would give it to the cats—‘‘poor things,” she knew it wouldn't hurt them. She dressed up in her best khaki suit and hat, put the meat in an old suit case, and started for the wharf which was nearly three quarters of a mile away. In about two hours she came back mad as a hornet. She said she had walked all around that pier, around the piles and everywhere, and could not find a single cat. Steve told her that those “‘blickety blank cats didn’t wade around in the water, but stayed on top of the pier and anyway the cats weren't starving. Never before or afterward did I hear Steve use such language. I didn’t know that he had such words in his vocabulary. Even after all this Mary said, “‘I’ll not be foiled, I'll go back tomorrow.” In one of my talks with Steve he told me about losing his glasses and how he finally found them. He had hunted high and low for them but couldn’t find them anywhere. He pulled all the blankets out of his pup tent, looked into the cook tent, searched under the seat of the Ford, and even got Mary to join in the hunt. Steve had told me how religious Mary was and so when she said “‘Steve, you’']l have to pray to find those specs,’ he was not surprised. Then Steve prayed that he Page Twenty-three