“I’m a Camp Fire Girl. I ought to have my wits about me!”
Sesooā threw back her head and let them see the flame in her eyes, the flame kindled at that new-born Fire whose divine essence is to “Give Service!”
Suddenly that flame cowered and ran to hide in the tremble that swept over her from head to foot, a sick shudder that carried with it, also, the heroine’s grateful ecstasy as she looked ahead, only six short feet, at a raven-haired small boy flinging himself with a jumble of foreign cries and broken English at a playground sand-box, where, amid other tiny tots, a black-haired baby of eighteen months crawled safely like an insect, at the heart of the silvery pile.
CHAPTER II
PLAYGROUND PEACEMAKERS
The pianist had been helped from her cane perch by a grown-up girl, a young school-teacher who led the playground dances and who had run a close race with Sesooā to the rescue; although, as she frankly blurted out now, it was doubtful whether she would have had the courage and skill to stop the runaway in good form, as cleverly as the Camp Fire Girl had done.
It all hinged upon this, as Sally knew, that a black-maned, fifteen or sixteen hands high equine dancer, with a howling piano behind him, presents an infinitely more paralyzing spectacle to the maid, young or old, who has never come to close quarters with a horse in his stable than it would to one who had bridled and unbridled, harnessed and unharnessed him, fed, cared for and petted him intimately—even though the incentive to such laborious care might be partly a decorative one, the reward of another red honor-bead to string upon her Camp Fire Girl’s necklace.
There was one thing to which the orange-smocked maid had not become accustomed, however; that was to sterilizing the flame of her little tongue, lest it should materially hurt anybody, when hot fire was kindled within her from good cause.
“You ought to be shot,” she told the schoolboy driver who had deserted temporarily from the horse’s head; “you ought—ought to be shut up in jail for a month! What sort of stuff have you got in you”—breathlessly—“skedaddling off to a ball game, instead of looking after the cart and piano? Suppose he had killed her?” pointing to the shaken pianist who had sunk upon a bench beneath a beautiful, circular catalpa tree just bursting into flower.
“Oh, Kafoozalem! I didn’t think that old fire-horse would run even if there was a charging battery behind him; he’s as old as Methusaleh,” muttered the boy rather sulkily.