“No,” replied Eve, laughing at him. “I am smart in the first place, or I would not go. And don’t I help mother just as much—and milk—and feed the pigs and chickens—and all that? Wait till you see me put the shot. I am going to win a whole point for the school if I am champion shot-putter.”
“Ach! It is beyond me,” declared Otto, walking off to attend to his work.
The family—plain Swiss folk as they were—thought Eve quite mad over these “foolish athletics.” They had no such things in the schools at home—in the old country. Yet Father and Mother Sitz were secretly proud of their big and handsome daughter. She was growing up “American.” That was something to be achieved. They had come of peasant stock, and hoped that their girl, at least, would mix with a more highly educated class of young folk in this new country.
So, if Eve thought that the tasks which usually fell to her nights and mornings, and on Saturdays, were not sufficient to keep her in what she called “condition,” her parents made no objection to her throwing baseballs, or jumping, or taking long walks, or riding on the old gray mare’s back over the North pasture.
And it was upon one of these rides that she fell upon her second adventure that Spring with the Gypsies—or, at least, with one of the tribe.
It occurred on the Saturday morning following Miss Carrington’s meeting with Jim Varey, husband of the Gypsy queen. Of course, Bobby Hargrew had said nothing about this mysterious connection of the martinet teacher with the roving band of “Egyptians”; it was not her secret, and although Bobby might be an innocent gossip, she was no tale-bearer.
Eve finished her morning’s work, “pegged” the baseball at the target she had marked with a brush on the sheep fold fence, managing to scare all the woolly muttons out of at least half of their senses, and then grabbed up a bridle and ran down to the pasture bars and whistled for the mare.
The old horse came cantering across the field. Eve never failed to have a lump of sugar in her pocket, and the old girl nuzzled around for it and would not be content until she had munched it. Meanwhile Eve slipped on the bridle and sprang upon the creature’s back.
Hester Grimes, and Lily Pendleton, and some of the wealthier girls who went to Central High, rode horseback in the parks. They went to a riding school and cantered around a tanbark ring, and then rode, very demurely, two and two, upon old broken-kneed hacks through the bridle-paths. Mrs. Case approved of horseback exercise for girls, either astride or side-saddle, as they pleased; but she certainly would have held her breath in fear had she seen Eve Sitz career down the rocky pasture upon her mount on this keen-aired morning.
It had rained over night and the bushes were still dripping. Every time a sharp hoof of the unshod mare tore up a clod as she cantered, Eve got the scent of the wet earth in her nostrils, and drank it in with long and deep inhalations. She rode the mare with a loose rein and let her take her head.