The Tinder-Box

by Maria Thompson Daviess

"Well, here goes! In the City Council meeting last night your Uncle Peter told us about the plans that they have made up at Bolivar for entertaining the C. & G. Commission, and the gloom of Polk and Lee, Ned and the rest of them could have easily been cut in blocks and used for cold storage purposes. They are just all down and out about it and no fight left. Of course, they all lose by the bond issue, but I can't see that it is bad enough to knock them all out like this. I got up in mighty wrath and—and I have got myself into one job. My eloquence landed me right into one large hole, and I am reaching out for a hand from you."

"Here it is," and I reached over and left a smear of loam across the back of his hand, while I brought away a brown circle around my wrist that the responsive grasp of his fingers left. "Do you want me single-handed to get the bluff line chosen?"

"Not quite, but almost," he answered with another laugh. "You would if you tried. I haven't a doubt. Do you remember the talk we had the other night about its seeming inhospitable of you not to invite the other gentlemen in the Commission over to see you when you invite Hall and his father? And you know you had partly planned some sort of entertainment for the whole bunch. You had the right idea at the right place, as you always do. As you said, we don't want Bolivar to see us with what looks like a grouch on us at their good fortune, and I think that as the Commission are all to be here as the guests of a private citizen, Glendale ought to entertain them publicly. There is no hope to get the line for us, but I would like those men at least to see what the beauty of that bluff road would be. The line across the river runs through the only ugly part of the valley, and while I know in the balance between dollars and scenery, scenery will go down and out, still it would be good for them to see it and at least get a vision of what might have been, to haunt them when they take their first trip through the swamps across the country there. Now, as you are to have them anyway, I want to have the whole town entertain the whole Commission and Bolivar with what is classically called among us a barbecue-rally, the countryside to be invited. Bolivar is going to give them a banquet, to be as near like what the Bolivarians imagine they have in New York as possible, and Mrs. Doctor Henderson is to give them a pink tea reception to which carefully chosen presentables, like you and me, are to be invited. You remember that circus day in July?—a rally will be like that or more so. What do you think?"

"Oh, I think you are a genius to think about it," I gasped, as I sat down on a very cruet Killarney branch and just as quickly sat up again, receiving comforting expressions of sympathy from across the bush, to which I paid no heed. "Those blasé city men will go crazy about it. We can have the barbecue up on the bluff, where we have always had it for the political rallies, and a fish-fry and the country people in their wagons with children tumbling all over everything and—and you will make a great speech with all of us looking on and being proud of you, because nobody in New York or beyond can do as well. We can invite a lot of people up from the City and over from Bolivar and Hillsboro and Providence to hear you tell them all about Tennessee while things are cooking and—"

"This rally is to show off Glendale not—the Crag," he interrupted me with a quizzical laugh.

Now, how did he know I called him the Crag in my heart? I suppose I did it to his face and never knew. I seem to think right out loud when I am with him and feel out loud, too. I ignored his levity, that was out of place when he saw how my brain was beginning to work well and rapidly.

"You mean, don't you, Jamie, that you want to get Glendale past this place that is—humiliating—swimming with her head up?" I asked softly past a rose that drooped against my cheek.

Perfectly justifiable tears came to my lashes as I thought what a humiliation it all was to him and the rest of them, to be passed by an opportunity like that and left to die in their gray moldiness off the main line of life—shelved.

"That is one of my prayers, to get past humiliations, swimming with my head up," I added softly, though I blushed from my toes to my top curl at the necessity that had called out the prayer the last time. It's awful on a woman to feel herself growing up stiff and sturdy by a man's side and then to get sight of a gourd-vine tangling itself up between them. I'm the dryad out of one of my own twin oaks down by the gate, and I want the other twin to be—

I wonder if his eyes really look to other women like deep gray pools that you can look deeper and deeper into and never seem to get to the bottom, no matter if the look does seem to last forever and you feel yourself blushing and wanting to take your eyes away, or if it is just I that get so drowned in them!