'Well, send hers alone. Can’t you do that?'
Crosby meditated. 'What house did you say she lived in?'
'It’s the only house up there on the hill road. You know! The big, white house. You couldn’t miss it.'
'I guess I better go up there then.'
He glanced out to the street, where the sun simmered on the white, hot road, and wiped some little beads of perspiration from his forehead. Then he walked slowly out through the yard.
When, what seemed a long time afterwards, he dragged himself in from the simmering, white street again, his legs pulling listlessly behind him, he even forgot, for the time being, what the walk had all been about, and sat down vacantly on the cool step in the shade, his cheeks burning a deep, dull red. Then he remembered and pulled himself up again. And that evening another letter started on its way to the Pony Man.
The next morning he waked up with a confused consciousness that something important was hanging over him. Gradually it came back quite clearly. It was the twentieth. And then, for the first time, he became aware of facing a quite unheralded question of challenge. Was there any doubt about the pony’s coming? His long list of subscription names flashed before his eyes, his big, shining pile of money, his mother’s smile, the post-office man’s 'whew!' of admiration before he made out the money-order, the promises in the letter if he began 'right away' and worked—and he had worked all the time ever since! There was but one possible answer to that question. The pony would come—to-day—before night.
He stumbled gayly down the stairs as he thought of all that he was going to do that morning in the barn. It was such a strange, rickety little affair, that barn; it did seem to look so much more like a shed than anything else, that he was continually haunted by his father’s words: 'Barn? I’m afraid she wouldn’t recognize it.' But he could make it clean, anyway, if it wasn’t new. He looked up at the battered manger, from his kneeling position on the floor, as he scrubbed with soap and water, and wondered what he could do about that. Something he was sure. Why, there were plenty of ways to do things if you only had sense. He thought he must be mistaken when he heard his mother calling him to dinner; but then, when he stopped and looked around, he felt a tired glow of satisfaction. The walls and floor of the old stall had not changed color, as he had hoped they would by washing, but they looked damp, and clean, too. Across the battered front of the manger was tacked a shining but crooked piece of clean, brown paper, and inside was a fresh little pile of grass and three large, round ginger-cakes beside it. But Crosby’s eyes traveled most lovingly to a small row of implements which hung down from the wall, at one side, from nails which he had pounded in. Of course ponies had to be groomed, and he looked up proudly at the small, clean brush, hanging by a string and suggestive no longer of the sink; at the worn whisk-broom next; at the broken comb; and finally at a little, shrunken last winter’s glove, with its fingers cut off evenly, which completed the line. He would wear that glove when he did his daily grooming.
'I’ll finish everything after dinner,' he meditated, and went in.
When he came back, a saucer of milk trembled dangerously in one hand, and with a faint, half-conscious smile flickering about his mouth, he put it down on the floor in the corner.