“I’ll pay you up, miss,” said Sarah, when she had recovered from her astonishment, and she and Hattie threw down their brooms and left the room in high wrath.
Some way Patty did not enjoy her half hour play that morning; she was fearful that she might not be able to get her mother’s broom back into the house without being discovered, and Sarah’s threat troubled her; what means Sarah would take to get her into trouble she could not imagine.
That evening as Patty sat at home, swinging back and forth in her little rocking-chair, who should come to make her a visit but Sarah; that hypocritical young woman was as smiling and as amiable as possible, but she declined all of Patty’s invitations to “go out and play;” this made Patty uneasy, she wished Sarah would go home. Pretty soon Patty’s mother came in and sat down, and Sarah immediately began talking about school and Miss Kelsey’s plans for the sweeping. Patty grew still more uneasy and made another effort to get Sarah out of doors, but when Sarah said—
“My mother said she thought it was so queer that Mrs. Curtis should let Patty take a new broom from home to sweep that dirty school-house with,”—then Patty resigned herself to her fate.
“Patty Curtis! you don’t mean to say that you took my best broom to the school-house,” said Mrs. Curtis, dropping her knitting in her astonishment.
“Yes I did,” said Patty; “but I wouldn’t, if that mean thing there hadn’t hid the brooms.”
“And I,” said Sarah, “wouldn’t have hid ’em, if you hadn’t been so stingy as to want all the play-times yourself.”
“There, that will do for you both,” said Mrs. Curtis. “Patty, you may get yourself a bowl of bread and milk for your supper, and go to bed immediately.”
This, Mrs. Curtis considered a very light punishment; it would have been much heavier if her motherly indignation had not been a little stirred against Sarah for playing informer; but to Patty it was hard enough, for she had intended going out on the common with the girls, late in the evening, for a game of “black man” by the light of the rising moon; and as she eat her bread and milk, crying quietly to herself, she heard Sarah’s taunting voice under the window:
“Don’t you wish you’d let me sweep, so you could play ‘black man’ to-night?”