I
shrieked my story over the wire in disconnected,
incoherent sentences. Then I rushed back to the little
cottage where Alma Pflugel and I waited with what
patience we could summon.
Blackie was the first to arrive. He required few
explanations. That is one of the nicest things about
Blackie. He understands by leaps and bounds, while
others crawl to comprehension. But when Frau Nirlanger
came, with Bennie in tow, there were tears, and
exclamations, followed by a little stricken silence on
the part of Frau Nirlanger when she saw Bennie snatched
to the breast of this weeping woman. So it was that in
the midst of the confusion we did not hear the approach
of the probation officer and her charge. They came up
the path to the door, and there the little sister turned
the knob, and it yielded under her fingers, and the old
door swung open; and so she entered the house quite as
Alma Pflugel had planned she should, except that the
roses were not blooming along the edge of the sunken
brick walk.
She entered the room in silence, and no one could
have recognized in this pretty, fragile creature the
pitiful wreck of the juvenile court. And when Alma
Pflugel saw the face of the little sister--the poor,
marred, stricken face--her own face became terrible in
its agony.
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