“Crawl up to the end o’ the bar, George,” the bald-headed man said hoarsely. “When she comes out from behind it, jump and grab her wrist.”
“Think I’m deef?” the little woman inquired raucously. “George’s got a fat chance to grab my wrist!”
Then her eyes, somewhat inflamed, fell upon Daisy and Elsie. “Well, what—what—what——” she said.
Daisy stepped toward the counter, for she felt that she had indeed delayed her business long enough.
“We’d like to look at some nice unb’eached muslin,” she said, “an’ some of your very best orstrich feathers.”
The subsequent commotions, as well as the preceding ones, were indistinctly audible to the mystified person who waited upon the sidewalk outside the place. Finding that his eyes revealed nothing of the interior, he had placed his ear against the window, and the muffled reports, mistaken for firecrackers by Daisy and Elsie, were similarly interpreted by Laurence; but he supposed Daisy and Elsie to have a direct connection with the sounds. A thought of the Fourth of July entered his mind, as it had Daisy’s, but it solved nothing for him: the Fourth was long past; this was not the sort of store that promised firecrackers; and even if Daisy and Elsie had taken firecrackers with them, how had it happened that they were allowed to explode them indoors? As for an “ottomatick” or a “revolaver,” he knew that neither maiden would touch such a thing, for he had heard them express their aversion to the antics of Robert Eliot, on an occasion when Master Eliot had surreptitiously borrowed his father’s “good ole six-shooter” to disport himself with in the Threamers’ garage.
Nothing could have been more evident than that Daisy and Elsie had definite affairs to transact in this café; the air with which they entered it was a conclusive demonstration of that. But the firecrackers made guessing at the nature of those affairs even more hopeless than when the pair had visited the barber-shop and the harness-shop. Then, as a closer report sounded, Laurence jumped. “Giant firecracker!” he exclaimed huskily, and his eyes still widened; for now vague noises of tumult and altercation could be heard.
“Well, my go-o-od-nuss!” he said.
Two pedestrians halted near him.
“Say, listen,” one of them said. “What’s goin’ on in there?”