“I hear that there will be two Boy Scout troops in that camp,” discoursed Betty again, “one from the neighborhood of this city and one from that wild tidal river an’ bay region where we’re going; the Scoutmasters are cousins. Well! here we are at the playground now.”
“Tired, Olive?” Jessica linked her arm tenderly through Olive Deering’s; that library scene had drawn them very close together.
“No-o,” answered Olive absent-mindedly, hardly hearing her own monosyllable because of the swish of that teeter-ladder of indecision in her brain, now seesawing at a gallop: “If that tingling Penelope should join the Morning-Glory Camp Fire and go with these other girls to the camp on the Sugarloaf dunes, I sha’n’t; Sybil and I will go to that big, beautiful hotel and simply amuse ourselves!” So thought said. And so she left it, with the hotel swinging on high, a dizzy castle in the air.
“Oh! here’s that funny little Jacob, who’s ‘all de olds in de world,’ running to meet us,” cried Morning-Glory meanwhile. “I hope we’ll find poor little silent ’Becca as easily; ’twill be such fun to dress her up and ‘make her over’ before the teachers get back to the playground, after dinner, and the afternoon dancing begins!” hugging her tissue-paper parcel, containing the white frock in which every stitch had been set by her own patient fingers, together with the buckled shoes, Olive’s gift.
Jacob of the raven locks seemed almost as much excited as when the horse bolted with the playground piano: his small brown fingers clutched the hem of his hanging blouse.
“Ha! we haf de big fire las’ night to our house,” he proclaimed. “My babee”—pointing to the insect-like infant whom Sally had saved from being trampled by stopping the playground horse—“my babee she get a match an’ de pape’ an’ she wipe dem on de wall an’ de fire come. An’ w’en de big mans w’at make de fire out shay: ‘Who make dis fire?’ my babee she shay: ‘Me! Me! Me!’”
“What a depraved little ‘firebug’—isn’t that the police word? Sorry I saved her!” exclaimed Sally.
Jessica did not linger for Jacob’s dramatic recital; she was walking on over the broad public playground, past the Silver Twins and the flowering catalpa tree on the edge of whose island of shade she had called the Bluebird through a dumb child’s window, on toward the great, gleaming bathing-pool—that artificial sheet of shallow water—in an eager search for little ’Becca.
By her side ran a self-constituted escort, a strange, foreign child whom she had not seen before, catching with elfin fingers at the silver bracelet, the Fire Maker’s bracelet, last night received, on Jessica’s wrist.
“Ach! you haf de prit-ty br-racelet,” murmured the little foreigner’s guttural accents. “I haf de br-racelet-te, too, to my home. I haf de gol’ necklace to my home. I haf de pink silk stocking; I haf de blue silk stocking”—thrusting forward, first, one thin leg, then the other, in coarse and faded cotton. “I haf de lots of ice-cr-ream to my home!”