“You’ll have to wait a minute,” Basil was calling wildly. “It can’t make any difference. I’ll dress in the library. Look here, if you’re a friend of mine, you’ll wait a minute.” He stepped out on the porch. “Hey, El, I’ve just got my—got to change my clothes. You can wait a minute, can’t you?”
The spark of a cigarette flushed in the darkness as El spoke to the chauffeur; the quivering car came to rest with a sigh and the skies filled suddenly with stars.
Once again the fair—but differing from the fair of the afternoon as a girl in the daytime differs from her radiant presentation of herself at night. The substance of the cardboard booths and plaster palaces was gone, the forms remained. Outlined in lights, these forms suggested things more mysterious and entrancing than themselves, and the people strolling along the network of little Broadways shared this quality, as their pale faces singly and in clusters broke the half darkness.
The boys hurried to their rendezvous, finding the girls in the deep shadow of the Temple of Wheat. Their forms had scarcely merged into a group when Basil became aware that something was wrong. In growing apprehension, he glanced from face to face and, as the introductions were made, he realized the appalling truth—the younger sister was, in point of fact, a fright, squat and dingy, with a bad complexion brooding behind a mask of cheap pink powder and a shapeless mouth that tried ceaselessly to torture itself into the mold of charm.
In a daze he heard Riply’s girl say, “I don’t know whether I ought to go with you. I had a sort of date with another fellow I met this afternoon.”
Fidgeting, she looked up and down the street, while Riply, in astonishment and dismay, tried to take her arm.
“Come on,” he urged. “Didn’t I have a date with you first?”
“But I didn’t know whether you’d come or not,” she said perversely.
Elwood and the two sisters added their entreaties.
“Maybe I could go on the Ferris wheel,” she said grudgingly, “but not the Old Mill. This fellow would be sore.”
Riply’s confidence reeled with the blow; his mouth fell ajar, his hand desperately pawed her arm. Basil stood glancing now with agonized politeness at his own girl, now at the others, with an expression of infinite reproach. Elwood alone was successful and content.
“Let’s go on the Ferris wheel,” he said impatiently. “We can’t stand here all night.”
At the ticket booth the recalcitrant Olive hesitated once more, frowning and glancing about as if she still hoped Riply’s rival would appear.
But when the swooping cars came to rest she let herself be persuaded in, and the three couples, with their troubles, were hoisted slowly into the air.
As the car rose, following the imagined curve of the sky, it occurred to Basil how much he would have enjoyed it in other company, or even alone, the fair twinkling beneath him with new variety, the velvet quality of the darkness that is on the edge of light and is barely permeated by its last attenuations. But he was unable to hurt anyone whom he thought of as an inferior. After a minute he turned to the girl beside him.
“Do you live in St. Paul or Minneapolis?” he inquired formally.
“St. Paul. I go to Number 7 School.” Suddenly she moved closer. “I bet you’re not so slow,” she encouraged him.
He put his arm around her shoulder and found it warm. Again they reached the top of the wheel and the sky stretched out overhead, again they lapsed down through gusts of music from remote calliopes. Keeping his eyes turned carefully away, Basil pressed her to him, and as they rose again into darkness, leaned and kissed her cheek.
The significance of the contact stirred him, but out of the corner of his eye he saw her face—he was thankful when a gong struck below and the machine settled slowly to rest.
The three couples were scarcely reunited outside when Olive uttered a yelp of excitement.
“There he is!” she cried. “That Bill Jones I met this afternoon—that I had the date with.”
A youth of their own age was approaching, stepping like a circus pony and twirling, with the deftness of a drum major, a small rattan cane. Under the cautious alias, the three boys recognized a friend and contemporary—none other than the fascinating Hubert Blair.
He came nearer. He greeted them all with a friendly chuckle. He took off his cap, spun it, dropped it, caught it, set it jauntily on the side of his head.
“You’re a nice one,” he said to Olive. “I waited here fifteen minutes this evening.”
He pretended to belabor her with the cane; she giggled with delight. Hubert Blair possessed the exact tone that all girls of fourteen, and a somewhat cruder type of grown women, find irresistible. He was a gymnastic virtuoso and his figure was in constant graceful motion; he had a jaunty piquant nose, a disarming laugh and a shrewd talent for flattery. When he took a piece of toffee from his pocket, placed it on his forehead, shook it off and caught it in his mouth, it was obvious to any disinterested observer that Riply was destined to see no more of Olive that night.
So fascinated were the group that they failed to see Basil’s eyes brighten with a ray of hope, his feet take four quick steps backward with all the guile of a gentleman burglar, his torso writhe through the parting of a tent wall into the deserted premises of the Harvester and Tractor Show. Once safe, Basil’s tensity relaxed, and as he considered Riply’s unconsciousness of the responsibilities presently to devolve upon him, he bent double with hilarious laughter in the darkness.
Ten minutes later, in a remote part of the fairgrounds, a youth made his way briskly and cautiously toward the fireworks exhibit, swinging as he walked a recently purchased rattan cane. Several girls eyed him with interest, but he
