Back in her room she emptied her pocketbook on the bed, and counted her express checks and lire. But the frame was hopeless. She just couldn’t manage it, not even if she asked the shop keeper to come down in his price. The price was fair, Cynthia felt that it was even more than that, and one couldn’t ask a fellow artist to cheapen his wares.
“I’m afraid, Chick darling,” she told the photograph propped between the mirror and the hair brush, “you’ll just have to go as you are. Maybe a little later ...”
For the future looked very bright indeed. Cynthia had already received two letters from advertising firms who were interested in her covers on Little One’s Magazine, and she had an idea for a new series for that same publication, once she was back in the States. But at the moment, in a strange country, with no friend nearer than Nancy and her Mother in Brittany, Cynthia didn’t dare risk fifteen of her precious dollars. Oh dear, it was difficult to be poor, ’specially when Chick needed a frame!
Where at she planted a cautious kiss on the pictured countenance of Mr. Charles Dalton.
The Palio race was due to start at five that afternoon. Cynthia took her sketch book and her portfolio to use as a lap-rest and went off early to find the seat she had purchased three days before. She could spend the time in sketching the crowd—you never could tell; some day she might be called on to illustrate a story about Siena and then her foresight and her sketches would come in handy.
For days the workmen of Siena had been preparing the Piazza del Campo for this event. In the center was a walled off space known as the Dog’s Box, where the poorer people might stand. The race course itself came between this and the tiers of seats raised against the housefronts that faced the piazza; hard, narrow little seats like the bleachers of a ball park. But Cynthia was lucky, for she was on the shady side, and was so interested that she didn’t much care how long she sat there.
Her neighbors were mostly tourists, French, Italians from the south, Germans, a few Austrians, and one or two Americans. Small boys sold bags of nuts, and programs in five languages while the shadow of the bell tower slowly crept across the Dog’s Box and the hard packed earth of the race course. Cynthia noted the mattresses strapped against the bare walls at the four corners of the course, presumably that the horses or riders might not be injured in the scramble around these dangerous places, and learned from her pink leafed program that many of the horses did daily duty through Siena’s streets, pulled cabs, or fruit carts during the year and their owners each belonged to the contrada from which they were chosen to race.
At last the sound of a mortar. The crowd which had been strolling leisurely about the course began to squeeze in under the fence to their places in the box, or scramble, goat-like up the steep tiers of wooden seats. Urged on by the carabinieri, those delightful, self-contained, tweedledum and tweedledee police of Italy, loiterers were soon cleared from the course and way was made for a group of little men, like blue clad gnomes. These, pushing tiny wheelbarrows, swarmed along the roadway. Their job seemed to be to cover with earth any places where the original paving stones might show through.
Then again the sound of the mortar. And here they come!
First the Ensign Bearer of Siena, with the simple black and white flag of the city. Then the Palace Trumpets, the picturesque long trumpets with their pendent banners carried by youthful pages in jaunty velvet caps, slashed doublet and sleekly silken hose. Then the musicians, all in costume and the crossbowmen with their ancient weapons and at last a group from each contrada. In each group a drummer, two flag bearers, a Lord or Captain on horseback in gorgeous armor, of silver, or bronze, or steel beautifully inlaid with gold that glittered in the sunlight. Behind him his squires, his ensign bearers, and on the race horse, the jockey who would ride later, in the race.