“Don’t you leave her undo ’em!” I calls out. “It’s for Stubby Mosher,” I says, “that can’t go, after all, to his mother in the Wooster Hospital, that’s going to die—count of his brother not sending him the money. She can’t get well—we know that since last week. They’s only forty-six cents in Sodality treasury. Let’s us buy Mis’ Holcomb’s presents that she’s made and is willing to auction off! Unsight-unseen let us buy ’em! I bid fifty cents.”
The line had kind of wavered and broke, and was looking away from itself towards us. The man at the window had stopped weighing and had his head close up, looking out.
Everybody was hushed dumb for a minute. Then it kind of got to Mis’ Wiswell—that’s had so much trouble that things ’most always get to her easy—and she says out:
“Oh, land! Is it? Why, I bid seventy-five then.”
“Eighty!” says I, reckless, to egg her on.
Then Libby Liberty kind of come to, and bid ninety, though everybody knew the most she has is egg-money—and finally it, whatever it was, went to Mis’ Wiswell for a dollar.
“Is it a present would do for ladies?” she says, when she made her final bid. “I donno, though, as that matters. One dollar!”
Well, then Mis’ Holcomb up with another present, and Mis’ Merriman started that one, and though dazed a little yet—some folks daze so terrible easy if you go off an inch from their stamping-ground!—the rest of us, including Abigail Arnold that hadn’t ought to have bid at all, got that one up to another dollar, and it went to Mis’ Merriman for that. But the next package stuck at fifty cents—not from lack of willingness, I know, but from sheer lack of ways—and it was just going at that when I whispered to Mis’ Holcomb:
“What’s in this one?”
“Towel with crochet work set in each end and no initial,” she says.