“Oh! yes, indeed, you were very brave. However did you screw up courage to do it, to run beside the cart and catch the horse’s head? I’d have been afraid of being knocked down—trampled!”
“So would I! And I! Or of having the cart go over me!” Such was the duet of applause which followed on the heels of Jessica’s praise from still two other pairs of girlish lips; namely from the two girls in white who had been seated in the automobile against whom the little spitfire flame of Sally’s tongue had been launched, a little while ago, when she scathingly pronounced them “all fluff and stuff!”
The nobler flame which had burned in her during her late heroic act had altogether consumed petty jealousies and criticisms for the time being; she took their congratulations well and gratefully, while Arline, her dearest chum and Camp Fire Sister with whom she had exchanged memories under the Twins, fondled her upon the side that was not in possession of Jessica.
“The pianist is braver than I was, for, see there! she’s going to mount the cart and play again,” suggested Sesooā presently, growing a little tired of being “fussed over.” “She is gritty, if you like it!”
“So she is!” acquiesced the older of the two Deering girls who owned the luxurious motorcar in waiting upon the playground avenue; her name was Olive; to the unprejudiced eye she did not seem to be composed of super-light and “fluffy” stuff; at sixteen and a half, nearly the same age as Jessica, she was already a beauty, from the glossy, ringlet curl—as black as Jacob Kominski’s locks, but so silkily fine that it did not seem to belong to the same category of human hair—tucked behind her small ear, to the toe of her seven-dollar shoe. “And it must be so perfectly horrid driving round in front of that piano and cart!” added Olive of the blue-black curl, throwing a glance at the mounting pianist from her dark, girlishly dreamy, Southern eyes.
“You may be sure she doesn’t play organ-grinder for fun!” laughed Arline. “She’s a young school-teacher who has to support her mother, so the playground teacher who leads the dances says, and she adds to her salary by playing for the children’s singing games and folk-dances during the playground season. Now! if only one girl who’s a member of our Camp Fire were here—Ruth Marley, who aims at a musical career and plays for our Camp Fire songs and dances, how nicely she could help her out by mounting the cart and pounding away at ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ (I wonder if they’re going to begin that again?) instead of her.”
“Tooraloo! Somebody seems to be beginning something—stirring up a new fuss—over there!” suddenly suggested Sally, who was preening her orange and black plumage, anxiously smoothing it to make sure there was no mark where the penitent old fire-horse had caressed her. “Goody! what’s up now: a battle, an earthquake—or merely somebody drowning in that two-foot-and-a-half-deep bathing pool—or some other playground trifle?”
“It’s a—a fight, I think” quavered a new voice whose staid quality dripped sedately upon the laughing girlish sarcasm.
“A fight! A fight between two boys—two small boys! Where is it? Over there—d’you see—at the foot of the giant stride—beyond those seesawing teeter-ladders!” All the five maidens in summer Tams and Panamas were breathlessly exclaiming together, now, directing their gaze across half-an-acre of playground at a piece of athletic apparatus glittering rather like a tall steel gibbet against the blue and white sky, up whose skeleton ladders juvenile athletes were one by one climbing to try their prowess at sliding or jumping down; at the foot of this “giant stride” a ring of boys, with even one or two men among them, had sprung up as mysteriously as the growth of corn on a hot night.
“Yes, I’m sure it’s a fight between some of the playground children,” said the sedate voice again, coming from the middle-aged woman who had sat in the automobile with the two Deering girls before the escapade of the horse, whom Olive and Sybil—yes, and Jessica Holley, too—called Cousin Anne.