This shifting of responsibility to paternal shoulders restored the habitual expression of cheerfulness to Tommy's smudgy face, but there was no corresponding smile on Sammy's. There was no help to be had in the household of Perkins.
That was why he was waiting on the starch-box while Tommy was sent on an errand. It was in the vain hope that Tommy would return and apply for his "boost" and share it with him before darkness fell. He was a practical child, not given to whimsical reflections, but as he sat there in desperate silence, he began wondering what the different customers would have to say if they were suddenly called upon, as he had been that afternoon, to write about September.
Mrs. Powers, for instance, in her big crape bonnet, with its long wispy veil trailing down her back. He was almost startled, when, as if in answer to his thought, she uttered the word that was at the bottom of his present trouble, the subject assigned him for composition.
"Yes, Mr. Bowser, September is a month that I'm never sorry to say good-bye to. What with the onion pickle and peach preserves and the house-cleaning to tend to, I'm nearly broke down when it's over. There's so many odds and ends to see to on a farm this time of year, first in doors and then out. I tell Jane it's like piecing a crazy quilt. You can't never count on what a day's going to bring forth in September. You may get a carpet up and beat, and have your stove settin' out waiting to be put up, and your furniture in a heap in the yard, and the hired man will have to go off and leave it all while he takes the cider-mill to be mended. And you in a stew all day long for fear it'll rain before he gets things under shelter.
"Then it's a sad time to me, too," she exclaimed with a mournful shake of the head in the black bonnet. "It was in September I lost my first and third husbands, two of the best that ever had tombstones raised to their memory, if I do say it as oughtn't. One died on the sixteenth, and his funeral was preached on the eighteenth, and the other died fifteen years later on the twenty-third, and we kept him three days, on account of waiting till his brother could get here from Missouri. So you see that makes nearly a week altogether of mournful anniversaries for me every September."
Another breath and she had reached the three tombstones, and talking volubly on her favourite subject, she completed her purchases and went out. But her conversation had not lightened the woes of the little Prometheus on the starch-box. Despair still gnawed on. House-cleaning worries and onion pickle, and reminiscences of two out of three departed husbands, might furnish material for Mrs. Powers's composition, should the fates compel her to write one, but there was no straw of a suggestion for Sammy Perkins, and again he cried out inwardly as bitterly as the oppressed of old had cried out against Pharaoh.
A man in a long, sagging linen duster was the next comer. He squeaked back and forth in front of the counter in new high-heeled boots, and talked incessantly while he made his purchases, with a clumsy attempt at facetiousness.
"Put in a cake of shaving-soap, too, Jim," he called, passing his hand over the black stubble on his chin. "County court begins to-morrer. Reckon the lawyers will shave everything in sight when it comes to their bills, but I want to be as slick as them. I'll be settin' on the jury all week. Did you ever think of it, Jim, that's a mighty interesting way to earn your salt? Jest set back and be entertained with the history of all the old feuds and fusses in the county, and collect your two bucks a day without ever turning your hand over. Good as a show, and dead easy.
"Only one thing, it sort o' spiles your faith in human nature. The court stenographer said last year that in the shorthand he writes, the same mark that stands for lawyer stands for liar, too. He! he! he! isn't that a good one? You can only tell which one is meant by what comes before it, and this fellow said he'd come to believe that one always fit in the sentence as good as the other. Either word was generally appropriate. You miss a lot of fun, Jim, by not getting on the jury. I always look forrard to fall on that account."
No help for Perkins's oldest in that conversation. He waited awhile longer. Presently an old gentleman in a long-tailed, quaintly cut black coat, stepped up on the porch. He had a gold-headed cane under his arm, and the eyes behind the square-bowed spectacles beamed kindly on the little fellow. He stopped beside the starch-box a moment with a friendly question about school and the health of the Perkins household. The boy's heart gave a jump up into his throat. The old minister knew everything. The minister could even tell him what to write in his composition if he dared but ask him. He opened his mouth to form the question, but his tongue seemed glued in its place, and the head under the torn hat drooped lower in embarrassed silence. His troubled face flushed to the roots of his tow hair, and he let the Angel of Opportunity pass him by unchallenged.