The lists grew amazingly. Long before noon we had to get new papers. By night we had every child that we knew, save Stitchy Branchitt. He had a railroad pass to Poynette, and he favoured the out-of-town celebration. But the personal considerations of economic conditions were as usual sufficient to swing the event, and the next morning I suppose that twenty-five or thirty of us, bearing the names of three or four times as many, marched into Judge Rodman’s office.
On the stairs Margaret Amelia had a thought.
“Does your father pay taxes?” she inquired of Mary Elizabeth—who was with us, having been sent down town for starch.
“On his watch—he used to,” said Mary Elizabeth, doubtfully. “But he hasn’t got that any more.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Margaret Amelia, “whether we’d really ought to of put down any names that their fathers don’t pay taxes. It may make a difference. I guess you’re the only one we got that their fathers don’t—that he ain’t—”
I fancy that what Margaret Amelia had in mind was that Mary Elizabeth’s father was the only one who lived meanly; for many of the others must have gone untaxed, but they lived in trim, rented houses, and we knew no difference.
Mary Elizabeth was visibly disturbed.
“I never thought of that,” she said. “Maybe I better scratch me off.”
But there seemed to me to be something indefinably the matter with this.
“The Fourth of July is for everybody, isn’t it?” I said. “Didn’t the whole country think of it?”