"But I'd rather look at it from outside, Paul, dear," said Mrs. Blackton.
"But—Peggy—if it went off now you'd be in just as bad shape out here!"
"I don't think we'd be quite so messy, really I don't, dear," she persisted.
"Lord bless me!" he gasped.
"And they'd probably be able to find something of us," she added.
"Not a button, Peggy!"
"Then I'm going to move, if you please!" And suiting her action to the word Peggy led the way to the buckboard. There she paused and took one of her husband's big hands fondly in both her own. "It's perfectly wonderful, Paul—and I'm proud of you!" she said. "But, honestly, dear, I can enjoy it so much better at four o'clock this afternoon."
Smiling, Blackton lifted her into the buckboard.
"That's why I wish Paul had been a preacher or something like that," she confided to Joanne as they drove homeward. "I'm growing old just thinking of him working over that horrid dynamite and powder all the time. Every little while some one is blown into nothing."
"I believe," said Joanne, "that I'd like to do something like that if I were a man. I'd want to be a man, not that preachers aren't men, Peggy, dear—but I'd want to do things, like blowing up mountains for instance, or finding buried cities, or"—she whispered, very, very softly under her breath—"writing books, John Aldous!"