“Oh! stop it!” cried the Morning-Glory chokingly, laying hold on Polie’s uplifted arm—although the spectacle was much more savage than she had dreamt of—and hanging on bravely, even, while he launched a sturdy nine-year-old kick at her white skirt and lavender ankle. “Oh! you older boys ought to be ashamed of yourselves—egging them on! Can’t—can’t somebody—stop—it?” for the blue-eyed Lithuanian boy was on his feet again, gory but unconquered.
“Well! I guess somebody will, little lady,” boomed a great voice behind her. “I’d have bore down upon this ‘scrap’ sooner, but for a busted spar!”
The Morning-Glory turned and looked up into a massive face which—thought being very nimble in moments like these—she silently likened all in one gasping instant to two words from a Camp Fire song: “Sheltering Flame!” It was tanned, weathered, and reddened to the florid hue of a red sunset, showing a narrow sky-line of blue, radiating protection, that corresponded to an eye-line.
From that sea-blue eye the girl’s glance involuntarily darted downward to the “busted spar,” a lame pillar of a right leg whose limp was painfully visible even as the newcomer took three hasty strides forward and dropped a powerful hand upon a shoulder of each of the small boys, holding them wide apart in a grip that they might as well try to lift a lighthouse as to break.
The stranger caught her glance and smiled. “Oh! it’s mended now, that damaged spar,” he said, answering her look; “and ’tisn’t a recent injury, anyway. Here, now! You two hop-o’-my-thumb rascals”—shaking the belligerents—“you ease off there an’ don’t get fiery again or, by my word, you’ll both march off this playground to the taste o’ the stick—sore and strong—see?”
There was nothing for them to do but to “see”—see reason—held in that mighty grip. Under a few scathing words from this peacemaker, who was physically, at any rate, a man of weight, for he must have tipped the scale at over two hundred pounds and was ruggedly tall, the ring of applauders melted away into the sunshine like an untimely frost.
“I wish I could ha’ got my hands on them at the same time and given ’em a shaking,” blurted out the flaming peacemaker. “Egging little chaps like these two on!” his gaze traveling back and forth between Polie’s swelling black eye and the nose of Lithuish. “Gosh! they did go at it hard, for young uns. But ’twas only a little sketch of a fight.”
“‘Sketch’? I should call it a—a sanguinary picture,” gasped the girl with a half-hysterical little laugh, pointing to the pug-nose of Lithuish.
“Good for you!” The stranger dropped a smiling look on her from under his bushy, gray eyebrows, pleased at her ready wit. “Well! I guess you can go back to your own folks now with an easy mind,” he suggested. “I’ll keep these butting kids in order,” with a roving glance at the waiting automobile and the group under the fragrant catalpa tree.
“Here’s a playground teacher coming, too,” said Morning-Glory, as a brawny young man, in a dripping khaki shirt and trousers that rained diamonds, approached, hugging a great, wet, white ball. “He’s been away over there evidently teaching some of the children to play water-polo in that shallow bathing-pool.”