Here was a thunderclap, indeed, which shook the sands under the girls’ feet; neither of them knew much about poisons, but this sounded deadly.
“Yes, I guess I’m done for. If you can’t do anything for me, don’t stand staring down at me! I want to make my will in peace.” The fat fingers which held the stubby pencil waved it solemnly and then began to write again in the little grey book which had a vivid colored picture on the cover.
“If I’m to go”—the youthful testator looked up with something like a sob of self-admiration—“if I have to go, I want to die like a plucky—Scout.”
“Ho! He’s a Boy Scout.” Penelope caught her breath. She squeezed Olive’s hand in a convulsive grip. She rose to tiptoe on the sand-peak. Something was rising up in Penelope, stretching itself like a body of fire within her own frame so that she felt it in every extremity of her actual body, something was queening it within her, the motherly impulse, the mothering impulse fed and fostered by the care of three younger brothers.
This fat Scout called himself a “goner.” His puffy cheeks looked pale, too, in the waning golden light; so did the double chin bent over the pencil.
But just so, a year ago, had her thirteen-year-old brother Jim moaned that he was a “goner” when he fell fifteen feet from a tin roof that he was painting and broke his arm in three places.
Jim’s father was away, his deaf mother could not hear the doctor’s requests—the doctor whom Pen hastily summoned; it was Penelope, herself, not then fifteen, who had waited upon the surgeon, furnished safety-pins, etc., while he manipulated his ether bottle and bandages.
It was Penelope who had shrunk into a corner and sobbed and prayed while Jim was taking the ether, but it was Penelope, too, who, when that surgeon needed further help, had stumbled forth from her corner, had bravely stretched herself on the bed beside Jim and held the ether pad to his nostrils and mouth, sticking to the task even when she felt her own senses reeling off into dizzy sickness.
And it was Penelope, now, who tossed Olive’s arm which was around her away, as if it were a lifeless limb of juniper, who in another moment was crouching by the clump of basswood, beside the boy who had made up his mind that he had to “go” and was scribbling his boyish bequests.
Fiercely she grasped his arm in its khaki uniform and shook it!