Her father nodded approval, as the song ended and the wagon halted before the stable door. As the story goes, young Dan Birge and Lorraine McDowell, the minister’s only child, were playing hop-scotch in imminent danger of the horses’ feet. They paused to stare at the newcomers. The young person had begun in businesslike fashion:
“I want to speak to the pro-pry-e-tor. My name is Thurley, Thurley Precore, and this is my dad. He’s awful sick. We come all the way from Boulder, out in Colorado—I guess you don’t know where that is, but it’s miles ’n’ miles from here. My ma is sick, too,—she’s lyin’ down inside, and she’ll have to see a doctor right off. Where is the pro-pry-e-tor? Ain’t you listening to me? We sell tinware—why, say, our pots and pans can’t be beat—nor matched. Even the gypsies said so when we camped with ’em at Lisbon, Ohio. Isn’t it so, pa?” turning her flushed, lovely face to the man beside her.
“I guess if you says it is—it is,” he chuckled. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he added to the astonishment of the boy and girl, “what Thurley says goes—she’s been runnin’ this family for enough years to prove that she kin,” the chuckle ended in a hollow cough.
Then, the wretched lace-curtained window was pushed open, and a woman’s faded face appeared, a vapid, senseless face with dyed blond hair and china-doll blue eyes; a wisp of pink ribbon showed about her drawn throat.
“Dear me, Cornelius, don’t stand here all day,” she began fretfully. “Thurley, come right inside and git on some decent duds. I guess folks think, because we’re travellin’ in a wagon, that we ain’t no better than gypsies—well, every one has their high days AND their low ones. If my father could see me now!” Her thin hands loaded with cheap rings lifted into view and twelve-year-old Daniel Birge, counted as the gallows’ brightest prospect, nudged Lorraine McDowell, the only girl he ever played with—because his father made him—until they both laughed.
“Of all the bringin’ up!” floated out in thin, melancholy tones. “Cornelius, are you goin’ to set there like a bump on a log and have me laffed at?”
But Thurley had jumped down and with clenched fists approached Daniel and Lorraine. She paused, womanlike, to give vent to her opinion before she should strike. Just then Prince Hawkins and his wife and Betsey Pilrig and her lame grandchild, Philena, gathered as spectators.