“But if we leave her alone, she’ll plunge around, and as likely as not she’ll be stung to death.”
“I’m going with you. Perhaps I can keep the hornets off while you untie her. What can I fight them with? Oh, look! This box cover will be just the thing.”
“I’m going, too,” said Priscilla quietly. Claire uttered a stifled shriek and caught her friend’s arm protestingly. Priscilla shook her off.
“Don’t be silly,” she said sharply. “Do let me alone, Claire. Now where’s that other box cover?” She snatched it up and ran in pursuit of the intrepid pair advancing toward the animated scene under the maple-tree.
“I really think we ought to get further away,” said Ruth in alarm. “Oh, hush, Dorothy!” For Dorothy who had felt the contagion of the general excitement, and whose fears were complicated by a harrowing uncertainty as to whether a hornet might not be distantly related to a bear, had burst into noisy weeping.
The desirability of retreat had presented itself forcefully to the others. Claire, in spite of her anxiety over Priscilla’s fate, was not averse to getting further away from the scene of the combat, and Aunt Abigail was already hurrying toward the woods, with an agility which discredited her claim to having long passed the prescribed three-score years and ten.
“Aren’t you coming, Amy?” Ruth cried, seizing the weeping Dorothy by the hand. “What are you waiting for?” She turned her head, and for a moment stood transfixed, as if astonishment had produced a temporary paralysis.
“Amy Lassell,” she choked, “I–I think you’re just heartless.”
Instead of joining in the retreat, or lending aid to the attacking party, Amy had snatched up her camera, and was bending over the finder in an absorption which rendered her quite oblivious to Ruth’s denunciation. She was, indeed, excusable for thinking that the scene under the maple would make a spirited and unusual photograph. Old Bess was rearing and plunging with a coltish animation quite inconsistent with the dignity of her twenty-three years. Priscilla and Peggy, armed with the tin covers of the boxes which had contained the cake and sandwiches, were striking wildly at the advance guard of the hornet army. And Lucy, in her efforts to get at the halter, without coming in contact with Bess’s heels or being seriously stung, was dodging about in a fashion calculated to awaken despair in the breast of a photographer.
“If only they would stand still a minute,” groaned Amy, too absorbed in her undertaking seriously to consider the consequences of a literal fulfilment of her wish. But apparently nothing was further from the thought of those participating in the pantomime than standing still. The hornets, stirred to activity by Bess’s incautious stamping close to their quarters, were rising like sparks from a bonfire. Bess was making a spectacular though not altogether successful effort to stand on her head, while the agility displayed by Peggy and Priscilla would have gratified their teacher of gymnastics in the high school, had she been present to witness the performance.