There came a gurgling chuckle from amid the piled-up bales.
The girl stood, listening. “Come out of that!” she cried. But there was never another sound—the chuckling had ceased.
She skirmished down a by-alley, and stormed a kopje of rugs and linoleums; but found nothing except the store tom-cat in hiding on the top. Having climbed down the further side, she found herself in a difficult country of enamelled ware and wooden buckets, but successfully extricating herself from this entanglement she ascended a spur of carpet-rolls, and triumphantly crowned the summit of the lofty mountain of wool-bales. The country round lay at her feet, and half-concealed behind a barrel of Portland cement she saw the crouching form of the enemy.
Her head was up among the timbers of the roof, and hanging to nails in the cross-beams were countless twisted lengths of clothesline, and with these dangerous projectiles she began to harass the foe. Amid the hail of hempen missiles the white flag was hoisted, and the enemy surrendered.
“Rachel! Rachel! Come down, my girl. You’ll break your peautiful neck. Packett, what you stand there for like a wooden verandah-post? Go up, and help Miss Varnhagen down. Take care!—my ’tear Rachel!—look out for that bucket!—mind that coil of rubber-belting! Pe careful! That bale of hops is ofer! My ’tear child, stand still, I tell you; wait till I get the ladder.”
With Packett in a position to cut off retreat, and the precipice of wool-bales in front, Rachel sat down and shook with laughter.
Varnhagen naturally argued that his pretty daughter’s foot, now that the tables were so suddenly turned upon her, would with the storeman’s assistance be quickly set upon the top rung of the ladder which was now in position. But he had not yet learned all Rachel’s stratagems.
“No!” she cried. “I think I’ll stay here.”
“My child, my Rachel, you will fall!”
“Oh, dear, no: it’s as firm as a rock. No, Packett, you can go down. I shall stay here.”