“We got a bottle of blackberry cordial my grandmother made before she died,” she said. “We keep it in the top bureau drawer.”
“What a funny place to keep it....” Delia began, and stopped of her own accord.
I remember that everybody was willing enough to let Mary Elizabeth help pick up the dishes. Then she took a tree for Pussy-wants-a-corner, which always follows the picnic part of a picnic. But hardly anyone would change trees with her, and by the design which masks as chance, everyone ran to another tree. At last she casually climbed her tree, agile as a cat, a feat which Delia alone was shabby enough to pretend not to see.
We started homeward when the red was flaming up in the west and falling deep in the heart of the river. By then Mary Elizabeth was almost at ease with us, but rather, I think, because of the soft evening, and perhaps in spite of our presence.
“Oh!” she cried. “Somebody grabbed the sun and pulled it down. I saw it go!”
Delia looked shocked. “You oughtn’t to tell such things,” she reproved her.
Mary Elizabeth flung up the arm with the torn sleeve and ran beside us, laughing with abandon. We were all running down the slope in the red light.
“We’re Indians, looking for roots for the medicine-man,” Delia called; “Yellow Thunder is sick. So is Red Bird. We’re hunting roots.”
She was ahead and we were following. We caught at the dead mullein stalks and milkweed pods and threw them away, and leaped up and pulled at the low branches with their tender buds. We were filled with the flow of the Spring and seeking to express it, as in the old barbaric days, by means of destruction.... At the foot of the slope a little maple tree was growing, tentative as a sunbeam and scarcely thicker, left by the Spring that had last been that way. When she reached it, Delia laid hold on it, and had it out by its slight root, and tossed it on the moss.
“W-h-e-e-e!” cried Delia, “I wish it was Arbour Day to-morrow too!”