“It’s the little idiot that sits down on my trade that will be likely to smell of the powdered beauties,” laughed Fons sardonically.
“Have a care, youngster. You can’t cut up here as you can in the city without having it known.”
“O! it’s only a little scare I’ll treat him to. Boys like to be scared, you know. That’s the secret of success in the money end of the Pyrotechnic business.”
Before he got back to the Cornwallis lot, he saw the baggage-man coming up the hill.
“Heigho,” he exclaimed, slapping his leg—“just in the nick of time! Providence permits! Now I will have some fun. Stop a bit, Dan. I want an assortment of that patriotic fervor. I am going to have a little picnic with some boys right here if nothing happens.”
After he had selected the things he wanted, he slipped a dollar into Dan’s hand, saying, “you may go on now, but you’d better stay up with us today, you and your nag, and help us celebrate. The women folks didn’t come and you haven’t any of those ‘pull backs,’ Schwarmer tells me, so we can have a very free time.”
Dan laughed and moved on. Fons carried his boxes to a shady nook on the steep bank just opposite the lot where Laurens Cornwallis was still flying his kite. After he had arranged them he stopped and looked at them with a satisfied air. Then he selected a thing with spiral stripes of red, white and blue.
“This will take the boy’s eye at once,” he said to himself as he climbed the hill to go to the Cornwallis lot. “I must have invented it for his kind of eye—a sort of Aaron’s rod—yes, that’s what I’ll name it—a bible name. That will be ahead of King Pang’s ‘Sacred Mandarin.’ It’s just the ticker for a little Sunday school chub like Laurens.”
When he got to the fence he saw that Laurens was having trouble with his kite.
“Providence permits again,” he muttered as he jumped over into the lot.