The effect was so feverishly funny that Sally, who had the oriole’s gay spirit within her orange-smocked breast, vented a shriek as loud as any, to swell the confusion, automatically clapping her fingers to her ears.
The voices of some fourscore children had popped explosively from song and shout to scare-note and shriek, a conglomerate shriek, strengthened by every foreign accent under the sun (any cry ever hurled from the crumbling Tower of Babel was nothing to it!), a shriek that hung, sustained, in air together with the rasping, squelching notes of that unfinished musical measure which seemed to tatter the air itself.
“Ouch! My s-soul!” murmured Sally under her breath. “The horse! It’s the—horse. He is bolting, with the piano lashed to the cart behind him. And the—poor—pianist!”
It needed no more. She saw the girl-musician’s left arm waving, imploring, saw her rock upon the light cane chair before the instrument that was not lashed to the rocking cart; she heard the horse’s mutinous snort, heard it strangely echoed in dumb fashion by a pair of parted childish lips near her; crowning all, she caught the terrified shriek of a small boy who clutched at his raven-black hair and what English he could muster as he started toward a sand-pile ahead, yelling, “Mine babee—mine babee! Horse he go kill her; she—she go all—deaded!”
And like the flame from the cloud leaped the answering fire in Sesooā—little Camp Fire Girl!
“The driver—the boy driver—he ought to be shot; he’s umpiring a baseball game,” was the first distinct thought that leaped to her mind as, like an oriole on the wing, she sped across the sunlit grass in the wake of the still rocking cart, the fiendishly howling piano, the screaming, swaying pianist. The second lightning conviction was: “It’s up-hill and the horse can’t really run very fast with that absurd piano behind him! He’s dancing all over the place, rather than wildly running, now!... Rolie showed me—has told me so often—how to stop a runaway!”
Rolie was her Boy Scout brother and that gallant fourteen-year-old Scout seemed to run neck and neck with her in this crisis, whispering heart into her, advising her movements.
The firefly in her eyes, soaring, golden, above consternation, has lit now upon the horse’s quivering haunch—on his black mane.
“After all, he’s only a horse; I’ve not alone ridden one, but, as a Camp Fire Girl, have saddled and bridled and fed an’ currycombed it, too, every day for the past month!” whizzed thought, darting ahead of her as with another springy step or two her right hand has seized the cart’s shaft to hold on and prevent herself from falling in the supreme effort she is about to make.
Her left hand, attached to a strong little wrist for a girl not yet sixteen, has snatched at the dragging reins, holding them short, is trying to pull the horse’s head down, turn it toward her!