“And the mayonnaise hasn’t melted,” said Nancy.
“What, nothing to eat but victuals and drink?” exclaimed Percy.
When they had waded through the piles of sandwiches and pyramids of cake, and drained the last drop of ginger ale, silent Charlie, who had an enormous appetite, remarked:
“How hungry this piney-salty combination does make a fellow!”
“Why, Charlie,” said Billie, “don’t say you are still hungry. You remind me of the elephant in Merry’s song:
“‘The elephant ate all night,
The elephant ate all day,
And feed as they would, as much as they could,
The cry was still more hay.’”
Charlie pulled out his mouth organ and began to play such a rollicking dance tune that the boys and girls, almost before they knew it, were two-stepping over the grass as madly as a lot of wild young colts. Then Charlie, seizing Mary about the waist and still playing vigorously on his “harp,” as it was called in that section, joined the dancers himself.
If they had not all of them been so absorbed in executing the Dutch twirl, or racing over the ground like Cossack dancers on the Russian Steppes, they would have been somewhat disturbed to have seen a man peering down at them from the top of a mound. He had crawled up the steep incline and was lying flat on his stomach in the tall grass. His face is familiar enough to us by now, for he had only one eye, but that one, like the eye of the three mythological witches, gleamed brilliantly and wickedly and nothing escaped its range. He smiled as if he rather enjoyed watching the dancers, and especially his one wicked eye followed the movements of Ben and Charlie and Billie Campbell. Presently when the whirling couples had tumbled breathlessly on the grass, fanning themselves with their hats and Ben had called out: “We’d better be getting along now,” the man slipped away as silently as a snake and disappeared somewhere below.
“To the caves,” cried Percy, as they gathered up the rugs and cushions and hastened down the cliff to the motor.
“I suppose it’s safe to leave ‘The Comet’ here without any one to look after him,” Billie had observed, and the others had agreed that it was.