“A quarrel between two little boys who are pommeling each other black and blue, I suppose,” she went on with tremulous anxiety. “Where—where’s the playground teacher?”
“The one who leads the dances is comforting the shaken pianist before she begins to play again—telling the driver to move the cart and piano to a shady spot. Her back’s turned,” gasped Arline.
“Never mind! If it’s a fight between two little boys, I guess I can stop it—these foreign children, some of them, are dreadful for quarreling—I’ve settled playground fights before,” broke in a sudden, quivering cry from Morning-Glory, whose Indian name was Welatáwesit.
“Now, maybe, she’ll be pommeled herself; they may rain blows on her if she gets between them!” wailed Olive in a tone which showed her fondness for Jessica.
“Yes, and it seems so—so low-down to mix all up in a squealing fight between two dirty little foreigners!” Sybil Deering, two years younger than her sister, and rather fluffy in appearance from her present, superficial pout to her loose, light hair and diaphanous frills, wrinkled up a pert little nose that was inclined to point toward Heaven.
“Well! what would you have her do?” challenged Sesooā rather savagely; “let them fight on, until their eyes are all ‘bunged up’ and you could hardly tell their faces from a rubber ball, smeared with red paint, eh? There’s no fear of her!” Sally nodded toward the back of the lavender, flower-like figure making toward that mushroom ring of human applaudists which a fight, or the rumor of a fight, can collect quicker than anything else on this mortal earth. “You needn’t worry about her; she has received an honor for patriotism—a red, white, and blue honor-bead—for work she did on a public playground last year. I’m off to back her up!”
And Sesooā, again the orange-smocked flame, started in the wake of the lavender patriot, Arline, too, asking questions as they sped over the grass of a seven-year-old American boy who was not quite so keen about the pugilistic display as his companions.
“It’s Polie an’ Lithuish,” he not very lucidly explained. “Lithuish he was trying to climb the steel ladder of the ‘stride,’” pointing toward that giant piece of the apparatus of play. “Polie he pulled him down, an’ trod on his toe an’ Lithuish went for him. I guess the Polander boy, he’s the strongest; he’s got ‘Lithie’ down once a’ready!”
He had thrown him again as the girlish patriot in the lavender smock saw, when she darted through the loose ring of older boys, swelled by a bored loafer or two, arrived at so-called man’s estate, who were enjoying the fight and telling them to “Go to it!”
Pole and Lithuanian, sprigs of neighboring foreign races, dwelling next to each other in Europe, they were fighting like small wild things, tooth and claw! Polie of the flashing dark eyes, red lips and round seal-brown head had the better of it; he had flung the taller, fair Lithuanian boy into a bed of flowering canna, where his bleeding nose sowed an extra crop of ruddy blossoms.