“What! did he once belong to the fire department?” Sesooā was stroking the black mane very gently just now.
“Yes, the city sold him to a livery stable when he got too old to hit the pace with the other horses when a fire alarm was turned in an’ when he was too worn-out to look spry in a hack, the liveryman bargained him back on to the city; now he’s playing the fool carting round a piano for ‘Pop Goes the Weasel!’” The youthful driver snorted between laughter and commiseration.
“Oh! the poor old fellow; perhaps he mistook the singing of the children—it was shrill enough to beat the band—and the popping music behind him for some new-fangled kind of alarm invented since his day; so he just bolted—and danced when he found he couldn’t make it—couldn’t climb the hill dragging the cart and piano, with the pianist playing still! There now! you old hero of a worn-out fire-horse, aren’t you glad you didn’t end your days in disgrace by killing somebody?” cooed the Camp Fire Girl to the aged rebel whose black nose was now nuzzling her waist in friendly fashion.
“Yes, I ought to have stopped playing directly he began to dance,” confessed the girl-musician, “but I simply lost presence of mind. It got on my nerves this morning driving round these poor parts of the city, perched up in front of the cart beside the driver, like an organ-grinder’s wife.”
“Well, you won’t have to do it after this week probably,” comforted the other schoolteacher who led the dances; “the supervisor of playgrounds says that he’s going to station a graphophone on every playground where there isn’t a piano in a schoolhouse close by. You see the playground system is only newly established here in Clevedon and they haven’t got it running very well yet. Hello! Jacob, so your ‘babee’ didn’t get hurt, eh; you’ll have to thank this lady for stopping the horse before he trampled the sand-pile where the tiny children were.” So she addressed the raven-haired small boy in a dingy little hanging blouse of red velvet, whose foreign cries had topped the tumult.
“How old are you, Jacob?” questioned the heroine of the moment, sparing the child and his broken English an attempt at compliance.
Jacob Kominski, Polish Jew, struck a dramatic attitude and blinked at her solemnly.
“‘Old’!” he echoed. “Yes’day I be s-six; next day to-mow-wow I be seven,” speculatively leaning his head to one side; “som’day to-day I’s five—I is all de olds in de world!” passionately.
“Somehow he looks it, doesn’t he?” broke in another girlish voice with a laugh in it and a tender note, too, tender as the dawn, a very morning-glory note, that came well from under the lavender Tam O’Shanter, as the girl in the silken smock frock, the subject of conversation earlier, linked her arm through Sally’s. “Come here, Jacob! Aren’t they ‘cunning,’ these playground children? We used to have such lots of fun with them last year—not here, of course! Oh, Sally, you’re the—bravest—thing!”
“Am I?” breathed Sally, nestling close to the lavender smock; the Glory-girl, as her Camp Fire Sisters had a trick of calling Jessica, was not only the oldest member of their organized circle, not only wore upon the little finger of her left hand the silver fagot ring, symbol of membership—as Sally did upon hers which had caught the horse’s reins—but she was on the verge of attaining higher rank in her society, of becoming a “Fire Maker”; in a word, she was regarded as the flower, not in name alone, of the Morning-Glory Camp Fire, the tribe that was her namesake, in a way.