And Condors Danced Read Free Page B

odors of lavender and household ammonia.
    They finished the watering together, with Aunt M. wielding the watering can while Carly and Woo Ying followed along behind—talking. Carly talked and Woo Ying talked and sometimes they both talked at once. Carly told about the picnic on the last day of school and the new batch of ducklings and other news from the ranch house, while Woo Ying pointed out plants that had been forgotten and scolded about others that had been given too much or too little water. Finally Aunt M. shoved the can into his hands. “All right!” she said. “Do it yourself, you tiresome old wretch. Carly and I are going into the parlor. When you’ve finished, you can come in and make us some tea.”
    As Aunt M. led her out of the greenhouse, Carly looked back over her shoulder and grinned at Woo Ying. “In the kitchen,” she said to Aunt M. “Let’s have tea in the kitchen.” Having tea in the kitchen was always a lot more fun because Woo Ying would sit down and join them. In any other room of the house he insisted on behaving like a proper servant, standing at attention near the door while they ate and drank.
    Woo Ying liked everything to be proper, and he’d always had very definite ideas about what was proper and what wasn’t. But standing at the door like a proper servant had never kept him from shouting and yelling. And since he couldn’t hear too well from across the room, the things he shouted didn’t always make much sense.
    “Why say Woo Ying telling lies,” he’d yelled once when Aunt M. was telling about the wonderful fly trap he’d invented. “Woo Ying not ever telling lies.”
    “Killing flies, you crazy Chinaman,” Aunt M. had yelled back. “I said you’ve been killing flies.”
    Carly had to run to Woo Ying to explain, and then they had all laughed. Carly always laughed at the shouting and yelling at Aunt M.’s, even though some people thought it was disgraceful and embarrassing. Carly had tried once to explain it to her mother, to make Mama understand how there were different kinds of shouting and how the kind that Aunt M. and Woo Ying did wasn’t at all embarrassing. “Do you mean because they don’t really mean it?” Carly’s mother had asked. “Oh, they mean it.” Carly grinned. “They mean it, all right. It just isn’t—serious.” Mama had shaken her head with sad disapproval, and Carly said stubbornly, “Well, I like it, anyway.”
    But even more entertaining than the shouting was the conversation when the three of them sat around the kitchen table. Sometimes when they were sitting together Carly could get the two of them to tell about the olden days. There was nothing that she liked better than hearing Aunt M. and Woo Ying talk about the olden days in Santa Luisa, and the even more olden days when Aunt M. was growing up in Maine and Woo Ying in China.

Chapter 4
    S OME OF CARLY’S favorite stories were the ones Woo Ying told about his childhood in China and how he had gotten to California as a stowaway during the gold rush when he was only a boy. He’d had a terrible time on the ship and had almost starved to death before the sailors found him. After that he had to work very hard in the ship’s galley and was sometimes beaten, but at least he had enough to eat. He’d been told that he would be sent back to China when they reached San Francisco, so as soon as the ship docked he jumped overboard and swam to shore. He’d wanted to be a gold miner but after he made his way to the goldfields, he found that Chinese gold miners were not much safer than Chinese stowaways. In fact he was about to be shot by some evil miners when he was rescued by a kind and brave prospector named Edward Carlton. The same Edward Carlton, of course, who later became Aunt M.’s husband.
    All of Woo Ying’s olden-days stories were full of terribly exciting things like narrow escapes and beatings and starvation and evil people with knives and guns. Aunt M.’s stories were