The girl threw back her head and the brilliant hair seemed to scintillate as she laughed a jolly laugh.
“Tony, your name means goat—Caprioli—and I’m afraid you’re it! Shame, my dear, when you’re doing your best to bleach my hair, but Mike scores! My hair is red, hot red, and what’s more I’m not sorry it is! Shake, boys, and stop your scrapping! Red hair is what gives me pep, and pep is what makes me hustle around—when I’m late, too!—and buy toffy squares for the crowd! So it’s all right, friend Tony, though I’m much obliged to you for standing up for me! Catch, fellows! I bought a box, two boxes, three squares apiece, and good luck to you all! Hurry up! It’s almost one o’clock, and I’ll have to run the rest of the way, or the girl I relieve will fight me!”
The animosity in the air cleared up like magic under the spell of this girl’s merry laughter of eyes and lips. She rapidly dealt out sticky squares of toffy to the crowd, and boyishly, though daintily, licked her finger tips when the last square had left them.
“Enough of that!” she cried. “Suck it; don’t chew it! You’ll get no more toffy till cool weather comes! I was a dunce to buy anything so messy. Balls, or peanuts, or anything neat for mine—and so for yours!—till September! So long, boys, dear; I’ve got to hustle. Hope you’ll each sell more than any of the rest! Every last paper you take out. Good-bye!”
She waved her hand to the adoring group; each boy waved back again and shouted: “Good-bye!” in spite of the difficulty of enunciation caused by a large, soft toffy square in the roof of the mouth.
The girl hurried away, not running as she had threatened to do, but walking so fast that running would have been easier.
The group of boys melted around the corner, in the direction of the shortest way to the newspaper offices, and the funny little daily event was over for the time being. The red-haired girl had formed the acquaintance of this young mongrel band, and it had been her kindly whim to make for them a daily small joy to anticipate. She varied her gifts, but she never failed them; that they adored her and exalted her into an incarnate proof that human trustworthiness and kindness was truth, not fiction, she was keen enough to see was the best result of her action.
No one but herself and the boys knew about “this freak philanthropy,” as she called it to herself; it took but a few minutes of her time and not a great expenditure of money. “It was worth it,” so she told herself, “to let her red hair light up the poor little snipes’ noon hour.”
The girl swung into a tall building at a tremendous pace, her hands out of her pockets now, her arms swinging to speed her action, not at all breathless, but softly whistling: “Silver Threads among the Gold,” a little twist around the corners of her lips as she considered how distant that state of things was from her own radiant locks.
She burst out of the elevator and into the great room of the telephone exchange almost with one movement, covering the intervening space between one and the other door on a sort of slide.