"Was there any one else in the race?" queried Mr. Hawtry in what his son considered most questionable taste.
"Oh, yes," he was constrained to answer. "Charlie Anderson was in it. She beat him, too. And I _started_ with them but I thought it would do those boys more good to be licked by a little girl than to have me 'tend to them myself." And Jimmie proceeded leisurely into the house.
"But I don't have to set off the fireworks," Cecelia Anne explained happily. "Jimmie says I don't have to if I don't want to. He's going to do it for me."
"Kind brother," ejaculated Mr. Hawtry. And across the bright gold braids of her little Atalanta, Mrs. Hawtry looked at her husband.
"_Did_ he know?" she questioned, "or did he not? You thought we could be sure if he let her start."
"Well," was Mr. Hawtry's cryptic utterance, "he knows now."
"And then," cried Mary breathlessly, "what did they do then?"
"And then," her father obediently continued, "the two doughty knights smote lustily with their swords. And each smote the other on the helmet and clove him to the middle. It was a fair battle and sightly."
But Mary's interest was unabated. "And then," she urged, "what did they do then?"
"Not much, I think. Even a knight of the Table Round stops fighting for a while when that happens to him."
"Didn't they do anything 'tall?" the audience insisted. "You aren't leaving it out, are you? Didn't they bleed nor nothing?"
"Well, they bled. They never stinteth bleeding for three days and three nights until they were pale as the very earth for bleeding. And they made a great dole."
"And then, when they couldn't bleed any more nor make any more dole, what did they do?"
"That's the end of the story," said the narrator definitely.
"Then tell me another," she pleaded, "and don't let them die so soon."
"There wouldn't be time for another long one," he pointed out as he encouraged his horse into an ambling trot. "We are nearly there now."
"Yes," he repeated. "Anything you choose."
"A great many ladies did," commented her father as the horse sedately stopped before the office of the Arcady _Herald-Journal_, of which he was day and night editor, sporting editor, proprietor, society editor, chief of the advertising department, and occasionally type-setter and printer and printer's devil.