He mistook their meaning, as he discovered immediately. “Ping! Ping! Ping!” a shrill voice cried out from the ground just behind his chair—another machine-gun, or else an “ottomatick.”
“Pingity, pingity, ping. Ur-r-r-r-r-ping!”
The voice was that of Renfrew’s nine-year-old sister Daisy; and looking round and down, he discovered her crouching low behind his chair, firing continuously. Renfrew perceived that he was a fortification of some sort; for although the presence of a grown person has naturally a stultifying effect upon children, they readily forget him if he remains in his own sphere; then he becomes but part of their landscape; they will use him as a castle, or perhaps as a distant Indian. Renfrew was now a log cabin.
“Ping! Ping! Pingety ur-r-r-r-r-ping!” Daisy shrieked from behind him. “You’re all dead! Lay down!”
“You’re dead yourself,” Robert Eliot retorted. “I guess all us four filled you fuller o’ wounds than you did us, didn’t we? Lay down yourself!”
“I won’t!” And Daisy, rising, began to argue the question vehemently. “I saw you all the time when you came around the house. I shot you first, didn’t I? Wasn’t I sayin’ ‘Ping,’ before ever any one of you said ‘Bang?’ ”
“No, you wasn’t,” Laurence Coy hotly replied. “Why, if we’d of had real guns, they wouldn’t be enough left o’ you to bury in a hen’s nest.”
“They would, too!” Daisy shouted. “If I’d had a real gun, they wouldn’t be enough left of you to bury in half a hen’s nest!”
“They would, too!” Laurence retorted, and his comrades in arms loudly echoed him. “They would, too!” they shouted.
“You’re dead!” Daisy insisted. “You got to all four lay down. You got to!”