“Come on,” shouted Tillie, as the boat drew near. “Come on, and I will give thy flesh unto the fowls of the air and to the beasts of the field.”
The answer was a contemptuous laugh.
This angered Tillie still more. “Come on!” she screamed, “come on, you crooks, you tin horn gamblers, you—!”
The names Tillie called her adversaries belong only to the land of the north. Florence heard them that day for the first time. We shall not repeat them here, but utter a little prayer that Tillie may be forgiven in Heaven.
She punctuated her last remark with a wild swing of the arm. Not so wild as it seemed, however, for a stone, crashing against the side of the highly polished craft, cut a jagged line of white for fully two feet.
“Come on!” she screamed. “We’ll make your pretty boat look like a tin can the day after Fourth of July!” A second swing, a second streak of white down the shiny surface of brown.
Suddenly, the younger of the two boys took command. He veered the boat sharply about, then went sailing away.
“We win!”
For the first time Florence saw that Tillie’s face had gone white. She slumped down among the rocks to hide her face in her hands.
“I forgot!” she moaned at last. “I got mad, and I forgot. Now they’ll ruin us. Dad told me not to do it. But I done it all the same.”