“Hah!” began the other boy, but he hadn’t time to finish, for Joel, having announced his intentions, did pitch in, and the visitor, who began by thinking it an easy matter to whip the smaller boy, was now principally occupied in trying to see how he could best avoid the hard thwacks the sturdy little fists were dealing him.
“Ma! Ma!” cried Miranda, at last spying them as she was shaking out her dust-cloth. “There are two boys fighting down by th’ barn,” she screamed over the stairs.
“Oh, you don’t say so,” cried Mrs. Peters back again. “Dear me, I hope they won’t go near th’ Pepper boy. If anythin’ sh’d happen to him, his Ma never’d forgive me.”
“It is th’ Pepper boy who’s fightin’, Ma,” proclaimed Miranda, running her head out of the window; “oh, goodness me!” Then she pulled it in, and hurried over the stairs.
“You go right straight out an’ separate them boys,” commanded old Mrs. Peters, in a dreadful state of mind. “Here, take th’ broom, Mirandy, and tell ’em—I d’no what you will tell ’em, but you git ’em apart anyway.”
Miranda, having a pretty good notion of her own what she would say when she got there, sped over the grass, waving her broom as she went.
“Here, you,” at last, as she reached the spot, her long light braids of hair streaming out behind, and her breath almost gone, “stop!” and she shook her broom at them. “O dear me, Joel Pepper, I am s’prised!”
“There, you see,” exclaimed the other boy, getting up from the grass where Joel had just neatly deposited him underneath himself, “what she says.”
“Oh, it’s you, Jim Potts, is it?” said Miranda, with a look of scorn. “Well, if you ever let me see you here again, I’ll pitch into you myself. Get out!” and she shook her broom at him, and not caring to make the acquaintance of Joel any further, he slunk away, first calling to a yellow dog, nosing around the barn.
“You take that miserable dog away,” screamed Miranda Peters after him; and the dog seeing the broom, for which household implement he had no special fondness, at once set into a lively run in which his master joining, they were soon lost to view.