“I’ll bring Little Buck a play-pretty from the settlement,” she said softly. “He’ll keer a sight more for hit than for the apples. I wish I’d knowed you liked ’em—I’d brought you more. Why don’t you come over and see us and git all you want? We’ve got two trees of ’em.”
Chapter V
The Red Rose and the Briar
ALL through April Judith’s project of a play-party languished. She had to pull steadily against the elders, for not only were the men hard at it making ready for the putting in of the year’s crops, but it was gardening time as well, when even the women and children are pressed in to help at the raking up and brush piling. Wood smoke from the clearing fires haunted all the hollows. Everybody was preparing for the making of the truck patch. Down on the little groups would drop a cloud and blot out the bonfire till it became the mere glowing point at the heart of a shaken opal—for if you are wise you burn brush on a rainy day.
Old Jephthah opposed the plan for the girl’s festivity on another ground. “I’ve got no objection to a frolic, Jude,” he observed quietly, on hearing the first mention of the matter, “but I wouldn’t have no play-party at this house. Hit’s too handy to that cussed still of Blatch’s. A passel of fool boys is mighty apt to go over thar an’ fill theirselves up with corn whiskey, an’ the party will just about end up in a interruption.”
He said no more, and Judith made no reply. Though ordinarily she would have hesitated to go against her uncle’s expressed wishes, her heart was too much set on this enterprise to allow of easy checking. She made no reply, but her campaign on behalf of the merrymaking went steadily on.
“I wonder you can have the heart to git up play-parties and the like when Andy and Jeff’s a-sufferin’ in the jail,” Pendrilla Lusk plucked up spirit to say when the plan was first mooted to her.
Andy and Jeff, the wild young hawks, with the glamour upon them of lawless, adventurous spirits, and bold, proper lovers, equally fascinated and terrified the Lusk girls—timid, fluttering pair—and were in their turn attracted to them by an inevitable law of nature.