“She leaned over the railing and said to me, ‘Them little boys will be sick if they eat that crab.’ ‘What crab and what little boys?’ I asked, quite innocently, and she answered, ‘Them little boys in the vacant lot!’ Then I turned and saw Benito and Miguel squatting in the grass among the tomato cans and fragments of the daily press, with a crab that they were breaking up between them, a crab about as big as a cart-wheel.”
“We found it there,” said Benito. “It were just lying there.”
“‘If they eat that crab,’ the lady continued, ‘they’ll be sick. It ain’t no good. I threw it out myself. And I’ve been hollerin’ to them to stop, and that little one with the curls, just turned round on me and says, “Oh, you go to the devil!”’”
The complainant paused, looked at Mariposa with an eye in which she saw laughter dancing, and said:
“That’s rather a startling way for a gentleman to speak to a lady, isn’t it?”
Though the language used by the accused was hard to associate with his cherubic appearance, and had somewhat shocked Mariposa’s affection, she could hardly repress a smile. Benito grinning, as if with pride at the prowess he had shown in the encounter with the strange female, looked at his brother and emitted an explosive laugh. Miguel, however, had more clearly guessed the seriousness of the offense, and looked uneasy. Barron was regarding the younger boy with unmoved and angry gravity. Mariposa saw that the man was not in the least inclined to treat the matter humorously.
“Did you really say that, Benito?” he said.
“Well,” said Benito, swaying his body from side to side, and fastening his eyes on a knife he had carelessly extracted from his pocket, “I didn’t see what she had to do with that crab. It was all alone in the vacant lot. How was we to know it was her crab?”
“But,” to Miguel, “she told you before not to touch it, that it was bad, didn’t she?”
“Yes,” returned the elder boy, exceedingly uncomfortable. “She come and leaned over the railing and hollered at us not to touch it, that it was bad and it ’ud make us sick. Then I stopped ’cause I didn’t want to get sick. But Ben wouldn’t, and she hollered again, and then he told her to go to the devil, and Mr. Pierpont came along just then, and she told him, and Ben got skairt and stopped.”