She pointed to a broad, artificial sheet of water fed by city hydrants, with a rainbowed fountain in the center.
“Gee whiz! they’d need a score o’ teachers here to direct all these children’s play—it’s a large an’ crowded playground,” remarked the captor of Polie and Lithuish, now interposing his massive body between them. “An’ great kingdom!”—looking around him with a gust of laughter—“there’s more foreign spice on this playground than ever old King Solomon collected in his ships from the four quarters of the earth.”
“You mean that these little foreigners have lots of hot ‘pep’ in them, eh?” flashed Sally, who had just come up, liking to air a little slang.
“Sure, that’s what I do mean!” The lame peacemaker lifted a nautical-looking cap from his grizzled hair in fatherly farewell to the girls as they moved off. “So long!” he said kindly. “Maybe we’ll run across each other again.”
“Maybe we will!” Morning-Glory, otherwise Jessica, threw him a backward smile over her lavender shoulder. “I’m sure he’s a sea-captain—or was,” she said, retracing her way toward the catalpa tree between Sally and Arline. “I’m interested in sea-captains because my great-grandfather was one; I have a little old miniature of him painted on ivory which belonged to Mother; she—she left it to me,” with a catch of the breath. “He has brown hair an’ bluish eyes the color of mine; somewhere about seventy or eighty years ago he commanded a big ship and sailed out of Newburyport—the only Newburyport in the United States.... Oh, if only he could be alive now, then I’d really belong to somebody, not just be thrust on to people who aren’t any relatives at all, no matter how kind they are!” she added under her breath—so low that neither Sally nor Arline heard—with a passionate quiver of the lip and a glance at the Deering automobile flashing in gray and silver, with a faultless chauffeur on the front seat.
“Well! I’m a Camp Fire Girl, anyway.” So she silently caught herself up with a return of the morning-glory look, slightly bedewed. “And ‘Whoso standeth by that Fire, flame-fanned, shall never stand alone!’ What! that plucky pianist is really beginning on ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ again,” she exclaimed, as renewed strains from the elevated piano floated over the playground.
“Let us hope the weasel will pop to a finish this time!” laughed Arline, as they reached the catalpa tree and stood once more, grouped with Olive, Sybil, and their chaperoning cousin, under its fanning, heart-shaped leaves. “Now! I wonder to what nationality that little girl in the coarse gray frock belongs?” went on the Rainbow, sweeping with her glance the sets of skipping children again being marshaled for the folk-dance.
“Do you mean the one with the big, patient, purple eyes—eyes like a wood anemone?” asked Jessica; she who had taken for her Camp Fire name a climbing flower loved flowers of all kinds, especially wild ones.
“Yes, and with a toe sticking out through her old shoe! And she can’t keep her mouth shut, although, apparently, no words come from it. I do believe it was her queer croaking gasps that I heard with the foreign babel and the shrill ‘Oh’s’ and ‘Ah’s’ of all the other children, when I ran to stop the horse!” bleated Sally.
“I wonder if there’s anything wrong with her; whether she’s—what-d’you-call-it—defective in any way?” came in languid speculation from Olive.