"That's all right," I put in, "they were clowns just the same. They go round with the circus doin' that. I saw 'em do somethin' like that last summer, only there wasn't but one countryman, an' they drove 'em off in a wagon with donkeys."
"They weren't clowns!" Susy stamped her foot. "Clowns have white faces, an' funny clothes, an' there were two real clowns helpin' get these men out, they stopped bein' funny an' were awful scared 'cos the p'liceman couldn't swim, an' he floated round on top of the water, an' when he got hold of the rope he was so heavy the clowns couldn't pull him out an' they fell in, too."
"That's so," said Charley Carter, with a serious countenance, as he recalled the catastrophe; "an' a man that sat in front of me said he knew the first countryman,—the one with the umbreller—he lives over in Rowley."
There was a ring of truth about this which made Ed and me subside, and as Charley Carter had attracted the attention of the assemblage, he tried to hold the floor.
"When they got the perliceman out—" But Susy had no intention to let any one else tell the story. She took it up at that point.
"—he was all drownded, an' they put him down on the ground, an' begun to roll him round, an' one of the countrymen went an' got a big pop-squirt, oh, ten times bigger than any you ever saw, an' filled it with water, an' squirted it right in the p'liceman's face, an' that made him mad, an' he jumped up an' chased the countryman round the tent with his stick, an' at last the countryman ran out through the place where the horses an' riders come in, an' I don't know whether he caught him or not."
"What did the other countryman do?" asked Flossie Mason.
"I don't know; the chariots came by then, an' I didn't see 'em after that."