At eight o'clock that morning the town of Willow Creek was in the thrall of the circus. Country wagons were passing on every side street. Delivery carts were rattling about with unusual alacrity. By half-past nine dressed-up children were flitting along the side streets hurrying their seniors. On the main thoroughfare flags were flying, and the streams of strangers that had been flowing into town were eddying at the street corners. The balloon-vender wormed his way through the buzzing crowd, leaving his wares in a red and blue trail behind him. The bark of the fakir rasped the tightening nerves of the town. Everywhere was hubbub; everywhere was the dusty, heated air of the festival; everywhere were men and women ready for the marvel that had come out of the great world, bringing pomp and circumstance in its gilded train; everywhere in Willow Creek the spirit which put the blue sash about the country girl's waist and the flag in her beau's hat ran riot, save at the home of Miss Morgan. There the bees hummed lazily over the old-fashioned flower garden; there the cantankerous jays jabbered in the cottonwoods; there the muffled noises of the town festival came as from afar; there Miss Morgan puttered about her morning's work, trying vainly to croon a gospel hymn; and there Bud Perkins, prone upon the sitting-room sofa, made parallelograms and squares and diamonds with the dots and lines on the ceiling paper. When the throb of the drum and the blare of the brass had set the heart of the town to dancing, some wave of the ecstasy seeped through the lilac bushes and into the quiet house. The boy on the sofa started up suddenly, checked himself ostentatiously, walked to the bird cage, and began to play with the canary. The wave carried the little spinster to the window. The circus had a homestead in human hearts before John Wesley staked his claim, and even so good a Methodist as Miss Morgan could not be deaf to the scream of the calliope nor the tinkle of cymbals.
To emphasize his desolation, Bud left the room, and sat down by a tree in the yard, with his back to the kitchen door and window. There Miss Morgan saw him playing mumble-peg in a desultory fashion. When the courtiers of Boyville came home from the parade they found him; and because he sat playing a silent, sullen, solitary game, and responded to their banter only with melancholy grunts, they knew that the worst had befallen him. Much confab followed, in which the pronoun "she" and "her" were spoken. Otherwise Miss Morgan was unidentified. For the conversation ran thus, over and over:—
"You ask her."
"Naw, I've done ast 'er."
"'T won't do no good for me to ast 'er. She don't like me."
"I ain't 'fraid to ast 'er."
"Well, then, why don't you?"