When the sound of hoofs and voices died away upon her ears, Flea Grigsby pushed aside her barricade and came out of her hiding-place. Her fear in building it was that some mischievous boy or passing negro might peep in at the school-house door and disturb her reading and thinking.
Now that she had left her shadowy nook, it could be seen that she was tall for her age, thin, and dark. She had out-grown her frock of mixed blue homespun—"Virginia cloth," as it was called. Children then wore their skirts down to their heels. Flea's had been let down three times, each letting-down registering itself in a band of unfaded stuff, yet the hem left exposed a pair of slim ankles and bare brown feet. She had shoes and stockings at home for Sunday and holiday wear, and her mother had notified her yesterday that she was "getting too old to go to school barefoot." At home she and three younger children ran upon naked soles (except on Sundays) from the 1st of May to the 1st of November, and revelled in their freedom from cramping shoes.
Her cheeks were burning and her heart was thumping with vainglorious delight, such as she had never felt before. Major Duncombe—"the illustrious Major Duncombe," as she called him in her quaint bookish way—had pronounced her "industrious and intelligent." She hoped that he would say it at his own supper-table that evening, and that her dear Miss Em'ly would hear it. She could fancy how Miss Em'ly's eyes would flash and her pretty mouth smile at praises of the scholar who "just adored her."
Long afterward Flea recalled and thought it strange, in view of what happened in later months, that she should have thought so much of Miss Em'ly that October afternoon when she sat dreaming happily upon the log door-step of the school-house, the hundred-acre field of wheat at her right stretching away almost to the river, and before her, beyond the play-ground and belt of brushwood, the dark forest, in the depths of which she felt almost as much at home as in her father's house.
The day was unseasonably warm, and in the sultry stillness the dry-weather flies were fiercely defying the threats of a cloud that was rising from the west to swallow up the sun. The log door-step was quite hot to the girl's bare feet. The leaves of the scrub-oaks were red-brown, and those of the sumac scarlet, although there had been no frost as yet, and the colors dulled as the sunshine left them. The aspen leaves lay back against their stems, exposing their white linings. Every breath of air was hushed, as if the unrolling cloud were a gray blanket and suffocating the earth.
Presently a low growl of thunder seemed, as it passed, to deaden the calm.
"We are going to have a shower," Flea said, aloud, looking up.
She did not budge. She could not get home before the rain, and she was extremely comfortable where she was. Wrapping her bare arms about her knees—another of her "ways"—she hugged herself and her fancies, caring nothing for heat or threatening storm. From babyhood she had created a world of her own, and lived in it at least half of the time. She called this dreaming, for the lack of a better term, "playing ladies." Nobody else knew of the play, much less of the "ladies" in it. She believed that she had invented it, and in it she always took the chief part.
In her present day-dream Major Duncombe was a conspicuous actor, and the school-room was the stage. Under the new teacher prizes would be offered, and she would win them all. She had read of such things, and of examination day. She would coax her mother into giving her a new Swiss muslin frock—not an old one of Bea's. She had never had a really new Sunday frock of her very own. Bea grew as fast as she, and could not be outstripped. The frock would have a full "baby waist," low in the neck, and short-sleeved. There must be a pink ribbon sash with fringed ends. And perhaps her mother might buy for her a pair of India-cotton stockings, and slippers with rosettes upon them. At the imagination she hugged her knees the harder. She did not own a pair of "bought" stockings. Bea had but two pairs, and wore them upon grand occasions.
Thus dressed, she would leave her modest seat in the school-room and walk up the aisle when Major Duncombe, in his finest manner, called up "Miss Felicia Grigsby" to receive, first one, then another of the prizes offered for—say, reading, writing, history—and there ought to be a fourth. Four were none too many. Oh, for Shakespeare, of course! When all had been given, the Major would make a speech.