Lydia of the Pines Part 5

The squaw did not so much as glance at Kent. Her eyes were fastened on Lydia, with the look of a hungry, expectant dog. Lydia ran her fingers through her damp curls, and sighed. Then she gave little Patience her share of the bread and b.u.t.ter and a cooky. She laid the precious deviled egg in its twist of paper on top of the remainder of the bread and cookies and handed them to the Indian.

"You can't have any of mine, if you give yours up!" warned Kent.

"I don't want any, pig!" returned Lydia.

The old squaw received the food with trembling fingers and broke into sobs, that tore at her old throat painfully. She said something to Lydia in Indian, and then to the children's surprise, she bundled the food up in her skirt and started as rapidly as possible back in the direction whence she had come.

"She's taking it back to some one," said Kent.

"Poor thing," said Lydia.

"Poor thing!" sniffed Kent. "It would be a good thing if they were all dead. My father says so."

"Well, I guess your father don't know everything," snapped Lydia.

"Evyfing," said Patience, who had finished her lunch and was digging in the sand.

Kent paused in the beginning of his attack on his last sandwich to look Lydia over. She was as thin as a half-grown chicken in her wet bathing suit. Her damp curls, clinging to her head and her eyes a little heavy with heat and weariness after her morning of play, made her look scarcely older than Patience. Kent wouldn't confess, even to himself, how fond he was of Lydia.

"Here," he said gruffly. "I can't eat this sandwich. Mother made me too many. And here's a doughnut."

"Thanks, Kent," said Lydia meekly. "What do you want to play, after lunch?"

"Robinson Crusoe," replied Kent promptly. "You'll have to be Friday."

As recipient of his bounty, Lydia recognized Kent's advantage and conceded the point without protest.

She held Patience's abbreviated bathing suit skirt with one hand.

"Where are you heading for, baby?" she asked.

"Mardy! Mardy!" screamed Patience, tugging at her leash.

"Oh, rats, it's Margery Marshall. Look at the duds on her. She makes me sick," groaned Kent.

"She's crazy about little Patience," answered Lydia, "so I put up with a lot from her."

She loosed her hold on Patience. The baby trundled along the sand to meet the little girl in an immaculate white sailor suit, who approached pushing a doll buggy large enough to hold Patience. She ran to meet the baby and kissed her, then allowed her to help push the doll carriage.

"Mardy tum! Mardy tum!" chanted Patience.

Margery's black hair was in a long braid, tied with a wide white ribbon. Margery's hands were clean and so were her white stockings and shoes. She brought the doll's carriage to pause before Lydia and Kent and gazed at them appraisingly out of bright black eyes--beautiful eyes, large and heavily lashed. Kent's face was dirty and sweat streaked. His red bathing suit was gray with sand and green with gra.s.s stain. On his head he wore his favorite headgear, a disreputable white cotton cap with the words "Goldenrod Flour Mills" across the front.

"Well," he said belligerently, to Margery, "do you see anything green?"

Margery shrugged her shoulders. "Watcha playing?"

"Nothing! Want to play it?" replied Lydia.

"Thanks," answered Margery. "I'll watch you two while I sit with the baby. Isn't she just ducky in that bathing suit?"

Lydia melted visibly and showed a flash of white teeth. "You bet!

How's Gwendolyn?" nodding toward the great bisque doll seated in the wonderful doll carriage. "I wish I had a doll like that."

"She isn't in it with Florence Dombey," said Kent. "Florence is some old sport, she is. Guess I'd better cut her down."

It was remarkable that while on most occasions Lydia was the tenderest of mothers to Florence Dombey, she was, when the fever of "play and pretend" was on her, capable of the most astonishing cruelties. During the game of pirates, Florence Dombey had been hung from a willow branch, in lieu of a yardarm, and had remained dangling there in the wind, forgotten by her mother.

Kent placed her in Patience's carriage. "I'll tell you what I'll do,"

he said. "I'll go up the sh.o.r.e and get Smith's flat boat. We'll anchor it out from the sh.o.r.e, and that'll be the wreck. We'll swim out to her and bring stuff in. And up under the bank there we'll build the cave and the barricade."

"Gee," exclaimed Lydia, "that's the best we've thought of yet. I'll be collecting stuff to put in the wreck."

All during the golden August afternoon the game waxed joyfully. For a long time, Margery sat aloof, playing with the baby. But when the excavating of the cave began, she succ.u.mbed, and began to grovel in the sand with the other two. She was allowed to come in as Friday's father, and baby Patience, panting at her work of scratching the sand with a crooked stick, was entered as the Parrot. Constant small avalanches of sand and soil from the bank powdered the children's hair and clothes with gray-black dust.

"Gosh, this is too much like work," groaned Kent, at last. "I'll tell you, let's play the finding of Friday's father."

"I don't want to be tied up in a boat," protested, Margery, at once.

"Mardy not in boat," chorused little Patience, toddling to the water's edge and throwing in a handful of sand.

"Isn't she a love!" sighed Margery.

"Huh, you girls make me sick," snorted Kent. "We won't tie you in the boat. We'll bring the boat in and get you, then we'll anchor it out where it is now, and--and--I'll go get Smith's rowboat, and Friday and I'll come out and rescue you."

Margery hesitated. "Aw, come on!" urged Kent. "Don't be such a 'fraid cat. That's why us kids don't like you, you're such a silly, dressed-up doll."

The banker's daughter flushed. Though she loved the pretty clothes and though the sense of superiority to other children, carefully cultivated by her mother, was the very breath of her nostrils, she had never been quite so happy as this afternoon when grubbing on an equality with these three inferior children.

"I'm not afraid at all and I'm just as dirty as Lydia is. Go ahead with your old boat."

They tethered Patience with Kent's cord to one of the willow trees and Margery was paddled out several boat lengths from the sh.o.r.e and the great stone that served for anchor was dropped over. Kent took a clean dive overboard, swam ash.o.r.e and disappeared along the willow path.

Little Patience set up a wail.

"Baby turn too. Baby turn, too," she wept.

"I'll go stay with her till Kent comes," said Lydia, diving into the water as casually as if she were rising from a chair.

"I won't stay in this awful boat alone!" shrieked Margery.

Lydia swam steadily to the sh.o.r.e, then turned. Margery was standing up in the boat.

"Sit down! Sit down!" cried Lydia.

Margery, beside herself with fear, tossed her arms, "I won't stay in this old--"

There was a great splash and a choking cry as Margery's black braid disappeared beneath the water.

"And she can't swim," gasped Lydia. "Kent!" she screamed, and made a flying leap into the water. Her slender, childish arms seemed suddenly steel. Her thin little legs took a racing stroke like tiny propellers.