And Condors Danced by Zilpha Keatley Snyder Page A

sermon because she felt quite certain it was going to be about sin. The Reverend Mapes was always disappointingly vague on the subject of sins and sinners, but there had been some visiting preachers in the past who had dropped some fascinating hints. Carly had been hoping that Brother Tupper would do the same.
    It wasn’t at all hard, of course, to get information about the ordinary, everyday sins. But it was obvious that God wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble to create hell just to pay people back for things like disobedience and immodesty. So it was pretty certain there were a lot of much more interesting sins that no one would talk about, at least not to Carly. And right at first Brother Tupper’s sermon seemed promising.
    Brother Tupper began by talking in his soft southern voice about how the world was becoming more evil and sinful all the time, and most of it was because of atheists. The atheists, he said, were spreading all over the country like a plague. According to Brother Tupper a lot of terrible things were going on in the world, things like immoral books and stage shows and strikes and bombings and assassinations, and the atheists were behind them all. Brother Tupper worked himself up to a rasping red-faced bellow over the atheists, and Carly was looking forward to what else he was going to say about sin when he suddenly changed the subject. After that he only talked about the End of the World.
    The End of the World was coming very soon. Brother Tupper was sure of it, and he read a lot of verses from the Bible to prove it. The verses told about signs that would come just before the world ended—and all the signs had happened already or were just about to happen. Just before the end there would be wars and rumors of wars, and famines and earthquakes, and, the most convincing of all, horseless carriages. Brother Tupper reminded everyone about the wars in Casablanca and Moldavia, and the famine in China, and nobody needed to be reminded about the San Francisco earthquake, or horseless carriages like the one the Quigleys had just bought. There didn’t seem to be any doubt about it—the last days were well under way.
    After church that day Carly went home with Aunt M. and Woo Ying, as she always did on Sunday afternoons, and all the way to Greenwood she was still thinking about the sermon and the end of the world. She didn’t even mention about being chosen to ride on the Fourth of July float, since it seemed pretty certain that the world wasn’t going to last that long.
    Woo Ying started talking about what they were going to have for Sunday dinner, which was ordinarily a subject that Carly found interesting after the long morning in church. But with the world about to end, even chicken and dumplings and strawberry pie seemed unimportant. But it wasn’t until Aunt M. and Carly got out at the front gate, and Woo Ying had taken Chloe and the surrey on to the stable, that Aunt M. said, “Carly, child, what is the matter? You don’t seem like yourself at all.”
    At first Carly shook her head because she was afraid what she wanted to ask would sound awfully selfish, but by the time they got to the veranda she couldn’t stand it any longer. “Aunt M.,” she said, “do you think the world will end before the Fourth of July parade?—because I was going to get to be the Statue of Liberty on the Presbyterian float.”
    Aunt M. blew up. “Ridiculous!” she shouted, stomping down the hall, dragging Carly after her by the arm. “That ridiculous, sanctimonious old hayseed,” she yelled, shoving Carly down into a chair by the kitchen table. Stomping over to the sink, she began to pump water into the tea kettle, still shouting. “Red-faced—self-righteous—heartless old pulpit-thumper. Going around the country showing off his piety by scaring little children to death.” She was still shouting when Woo Ying came in the back door.
    “Stop that,” Woo Ying hollered. “Be sick again, yell like that!” He