"There's Bunny!" he cried as the runners pranced up the track a second time. Wilma heard the lad's shrill pipe and glancing down caught his eye and smiled. He grinned. He sidled nearer to her and pressed close to the rail.
Willie Trigger decided then and there that he had never before seen such a pretty girl. She was ever so much prettier, he calculated, than the new hired girl in the house next door,—at home. He had fallen desperately in love with her at first sight. Then Wilma spoke to him and his boy heart bounded.
"Do you know him, little man?" she asked, softly.
He wished she had not called him "little man" particularly with so many about, but her voice was so gentle and her eyes were so beautiful that he forgave her in his heart straightway and answered, looking down, "Uh huh; he lives 'cross th' street from our house."
Her eyes took on a greater brilliance then and a smile played about the corners of her pretty mouth.
"So you are Willie Trigger, are you?" she asked so low that he alone might hear. "Oh, I know all about you; he told me."
Willie Trigger never knew what joy it was to live until that instant. To think that He, the great Bunny, had told Her all about Him! It rendered him for the moment speechless. Yet he gave no sign of the swelling of his heart unless a sudden kick at the post to which he clung, and a low, foolish laugh might be taken as a sign. He felt her hand upon his shoulder as the line of entries formed and was superlatively happy.
The pistol cracked. Again the runners came on, swift, straight as arrows. There had been an instant's hush at the start, but now it was forgotten in the uproar. Could it be possible, Wilma wondered, as she leaned far over the rail, hearing above all other sounds the shrill, piercing screech of Willie Trigger, that the great lank figure there at the fore of all the rest, his long legs high lifting, his head thrown back, was the same Bunny who not half an hour before had lagged the second in the race? And yet, as the creature crossed the wire below her and the air became filled with waving canes and hats and handkerchiefs, she knew that such it must have been. Her fingers tightened on the arm of the screaming lad and she drew him close beside her.
"Was that Bunny?" she asked eagerly. "They came so fast I couldn't see. Tell me, was it?"