“Well then, she shouldn’t tease so beautifully,” Laura retorted, as, relenting, she slipped Teddy’s gift back into Billie’s pocket.
At that moment they were startled by a fearful racket—a sound as if all the South Sea pirates that had ever been born had gathered together and were all quarreling at once.
There was a great craning of necks as startled passengers tried to see what it was all about and the girls fairly jumped from their seats—for the racket sounded in their very ears.
Across the aisle from them there was a parrot—a great green and red parrot that at that moment was hanging by its claws to the roof of its cage and was still emitting the raucous squawks that sounded like the talking of a hundred pirates all rolled into one.
An elderly woman who looked as if she might be a spinster of the type generally known as “old maid” was doing her best to silence the bird while she fished wildly in her bag for something.
She found what she was looking for—a heavy black cloth, and, with a sigh of relief, flung it across the cage. Immediately the parrot’s uproar subsided to a muttering and a moment later stopped altogether.
Passengers who had craned their necks dropped back in their seats chuckling, picked up magazines or papers or whatever they had been reading where they had left off, and peace settled over the car again. For all save the girls, that is.
For the elderly woman—who most certainly was an old maid—had been terribly embarrassed over the bird’s outbreak and began explaining to the girls how she happened to have it in her possession, what troubles she had already had with it, how glad she would be when she delivered the bird to her brother, who was its rightful owner, and so on until the girls became desperate enough to throw things at her.
“Isn’t there some way we can stop her!” whispered Vi in Connie’s ear, while Billie and Laura were listening to the woman’s chatter with forced smiles and polite “yeses and nos.” “If I have to listen to that voice another minute I’ll scream—I know I shall.”
“The only way to stop her that I can think of,” Connie whispered back, “would be to take the cover off the parrot’s cage. He would drown out most anybody.”