“I’ve got my birthday dollar yet,” I contributed. “If I spent it for Fourth of July, I’d be glad of it, but if I spend it for anything else, I’ll want it back.”
“I had a dollar,” said Calista, gloomily, “but I used a quarter of it up on the circus. Now I’m glad I did. I wish’t I’d stayed to the sideshow.”
“Stitchy Branchitt says,” Betty offered, “that the boys are all going to Poynette and spend their money there. Poynette’s got exercises.”
Oh, the boys would get a Fourth. Trust them. But what about us? We could not go to Poynette. We could not rise at three A.M. and fire off fire-crackers. No fascinating itinerant hucksters would come the way of a town that held no celebration. We had nowhere to spend our substance, and to do that was to us what Fourth of July implied.
The New Boy came wandering by, eating something. Boys were always eating something that looked better than anything we saw in the candy-shop. Where did they get it? This that he had was soft and pink and chewy, and it rapidly disappeared as he approached us.
Margaret Amelia Rodman threw back her curls and flashed a sudden radiant smile at the New Boy. She became quite another person from the judicious, somewhat haughty creature whom we knew.
“Let’s us get up a Fourth of July celebration,” she said.
We held our breath. It never would have occurred to us. But now that she suggested it, why not?
The New Boy leaped up on a gate-post and sat looking down at us, chewing.
“How?” he inquired.