Mazie and Tillie McFadden had waited. Since the amusement park was only six blocks from Mazie’s home, they walked. In a short time they were mingling with the fun-mad throng that flowed like a many colored stream down the board walks of Forest City, a city which Johnny had once said was doomed. As he entered it now he asked himself whether this were true. The answer was: Who knows?
The mingled sounds that strike one’s ears on a night like this are stunning in their variety and intensity. The dull tom-tom of some Gypsy fortune teller inviting trade by pounding a flat-headed drum; the steady challenge of men who invite you to risk your small change on the turn of a spindle wheel; the inviting shout of hawkers; the high-pitched screams descending from the roller coaster as a car pitches down through space; the minor shouts of revelers on the board walks; all this, blended with the dull rumble of wheels, the clank of machinery, the splash of boats, the murmur of ten thousand voices, produces a sound which in the aggregate blends into a mad jumble that leaves one with no conscious thought of sound. No one sound seems to register above the others. It is all just one great noise.
The sights that strike your eye are scarcely less impressive. Great streamers of confetti, red, white, blue, yellow and green tissue ribbons hanging from wires, from plaster-of-paris domes, from windows, from electric lights, from every spot where a sparrow might rest his wings; bushels of bits of paper flying through the air like a highly tinted snow storm; and the amusements—here a car rushing through space, there the whirling invitation of an airplane, and there again the slow and stately Ferris wheel. Beneath all this the colorful throng that, like some giant reptile, moves ever forward but never comes to an end. These were the sights that thrilled the four young pleasure seekers.
The sensations of touch, too, added to the frenzy that appeared to enter one’s very veins and to send his blood racing. A wild group of revelers, playing a game that is little less than crack-the-whip, wrap themselves about you, to at last break up like a wave of the sea and go surging away. A single frenzied reveler seizes you sharply by the arm, to scream at you and vanish. A tickler touches your ear; a handful of fine confetti sifts down your neck; you are caught in a swelling current of the crowd to be at last deposited with a final crush into a little eddy close by some game of chance, or booth where root beer and hot dogs are sold.
They had been cast aside by the throng into such an eddy as this when, finding herself without other occupation, Mazie focused her opera glasses, which hung by a strap at her side, on a wooden tower two hundred feet high. This tower, lighted as it was by ten thousand electric lamps, seemed at the distance a white hot obelisk of steel. The tower stood in the center of the place and there were six bronze eagles at the very top of it.
“How plainly I can see them,” Mazie murmured to herself. “I can even see the copper wire that binds them to the pillars.”
Little did she dream of the awe-inspiring and awful sights she would witness on that tower, with those glasses, on this very night.
It was at this moment that Pant noticed little Tillie McFadden’s eyes, full of longing, fixed upon the roller coaster.
“Ever ride on that?” he asked.
The girl shook her head.