“Take excelsior,” advised Gladys. “Dear me, who’s screeching like that downstairs?”
They all crowded down the ladder at the sound of a lusty yell from below and found Sahwah hanging head downward from a heavy hook in the wall. She had improved a moment’s leisure to climb up to the top of the window with a spray of bittersweet to see how it would look, and in descending had caught her skirt on the hook and lost her footing. The skirt tore through until the stout serge hem was reached and that offered successful resistance, and Sahwah hung, as Nyoda remarked, like a lamb on the spit.
“I got an idea hanging upside down,” were the first words she gasped as they restored her to the perpendicular and revived her with peanuts.
“It’s the only way you ever would get an idea,” said Hinpoha.
“Is that so?” returned Sahwah, with spirit “Who thought up the Chair-iot Race, I’d like to know?”
“Stop bickering and tell us your idea,” said Nyoda.
“Why, it’s this,” said Sahwah. “Sell hot cocoa with marshmallows in it after the show. Everybody’ll be cold sitting around. We can make almost as much money that way as with the circus.”
“A lake of hot cocoa with an island of marshmallows in it is my dream of heaven,” said Hinpoha, clasping her hands in ecstasy. “Sahwah, you’re a genius. I yield the palm to you without a struggle. You have a ‘head in your mind,’ as absent-minded old Fuzzytop used to say. There’s nothing in the whole world that’ll separate a nickel from its owner like a cup of hot cocoa with a marshmallow floating in it on a cold day.”
“Another innovation,” said Nyoda. “We’ll have that instead of circus lemonade. See to getting the supplies, will you, Sahwah dear? I have so many details to look after now that I simply cannot be responsible for another thing, or my head will burst and out will come everything that’s safely packed in now. Come in, Captain. What’s on your mind?”
“Slim,” said the Captain, with a look of comical despair, as he sat down among the girls. “I’m afraid he won’t do for a Better Baby. He’s smashed three perambulators and a high chair and we can’t get any more. And the biggest size white dress we could buy in the store won’t go half-way around him.”