“Centavo, mees! Centavo, mees [A penny, miss! A penny, miss]!” they cried, holding up dirty, scrawny little hands to them.
“Oh, Florence!” begged Jo Ann. “Let’s stop and give them something.”
“If we stopped now, we’d never be able to start again.” Florence explained quickly. “They’d climb all over us. Let’s throw some pennies out the windows.”
Hurriedly they emptied their purses of all the pennies they could find and threw them far into the street.
Such shouting and scrambling as followed! The children fought and knocked each other down in their effort to find the pennies, the tiniest ones crying because they could get nothing.
“It’s pitiful—heartrending—these children fighting over pennies as starved little animals over a bone,” thought Jo Ann. How was it possible for such things to exist, almost at your very door, and yet to be absolutely unseen and unknown? Was this really a part of the beautiful city they had enjoyed seeing such a short time ago?
Felipe could scarcely drive without hitting some of the children, yet he dared not stop. He had not wanted to bring the girls down here, as he felt sure Dr. Blackwell would object, but since they were here he must take care of them. While the children were busily searching for the scattered pennies, Felipe managed to escape the crowd. Quickly he drove to the end of the street and turned down an old, dry, rocky river bed, the car bumping and swaying as it sped along over the rough cobblestones.
“Florence!” shouted Jo Ann above the noise as she clung to the side of the car to keep from falling over on Florence. “I take back everything—I said—about you coming down—here alone. I understand—a lot that I thought foolish—before I saw this with my very own eyes.”
“We won’t have to go far—on this rough river bed,” Florence called back a moment later. “We’ll turn—at the next corner.”
“This is the—widest river bed I ever saw—to have so little water in it,” put in Peggy above the noise.