"Sacred Mother of the Sacred Child!" said the Ossified Man, in Italian.
The sword-swallower, at the megaphone instance of the barker, waggled suddenly into motion, and, flouncing back her bushy knee-skirts and kissing to the four winds, threw back her head and swallowed an eighteen-inch carpenter's saw to the hilt. The crowd flowed up and around her.
Miss Hoag felt on the undershelf of her table for a glass of water, draining it. "Thank God," she said, "another day done!" and began getting together her photographs into a neat packet, tilting the contents of the saucer into a small biscuit-tin and snapping it around with a rubber band.
The Baron de Ross was counting, too, his small hands eager at the task.
"This Island is getting as hard-boiled as an egg," he said.
"It is that," said Miss Hoag, making a pencil insert into a small memorandum-book.
"You!" cried the Baron, the screw lines out again. "You money-bag tied in the middle! I know a tattooed girl worked with you once on the St. Louis World's Fair Pike says you slept on a pillow stuffed with greenbacks."
"You're crazy with the heat," said Miss Hoag. "What I've got out of this business, I've sweated for."
Then the Baron de Ross executed a pirouette of tiny self. "Worth your weight in gold! Worth your weight in gold!"
"If you don't behave yourself, you little peewee, I'll leave you to plow home through the sand alone. If it wasn't for me playing nurse-girl to you, you'd have to be hiring a keeper. You better behave."
"Worth your weight in gold! Blow us to a ice-cream cone. Eh, Ossi?"