When Dill with much solemnity tore off June from the calendar in the dining room--the calendar with Custer's Last Charge rioting redly above the dates--Billy, home for a day from the roundup, realized suddenly that time was on the high lope; at least, that is how he put it to Dill.
"Say, Dilly, we sure got to jar loose from getting rich long enough to take in that picnic over to Bluebell Grove. Didn't know there was a picnic or a Bluebell Grove? Well now, there is. Over on Horned-Toad Creek--nice, pretty name to go with the grove, ain't it?--they've got a patch uh shade big over as my hat. Right back up on the hill is the schoolhouse where they do their dancing, and they've got a table or two and a swing for the kids to fall outa--and they call it Bluebell Grove because yuh never saw a bluebell within ten mile uh the place. That's where the general round-up for the Fourth is pulled off this year--so Jim Bleeker was telling me this morning. We sure got to be present, Dilly."
"I'm afraid I'm not the sort of man to shine in society, William," dissented the other modestly. "You can go, and--"
"Don't yuh never dance?" Billy eyed him speculatively. A man under fifty--and Dill might be anywhere between thirty and forty--who had two sound legs and yet did not dance!
"Oh, I used to, after a fashion. But my feet are so far off that I find communication with them necessarily slow, and they have a habit of embarking in wild ventures of their own. I do not believe they are really popular with the feminine element, William. And so I'd rather--"
"Aw, you'll have to go and try it a whirl, anyhow. We ain't any of us experts. Yuh see, the boys have been accustomed to having the wheels of industry stop revolving on the Fourth, and turning kinda wobbly for four or five days after. I don't feel like trying to break 'em in to keep on working--do you?"
"To use your own term," said Dill, suddenly reckless of his diction, "you're sure the doctor."
"Well, then, the proper dope for this case is, all hands show up at the picnic." He picked up his hat from the floor, slapped it twice against his leg to remove the dust, pinched the crown into four dents, set it upon his head at a jaunty angle and went out, singing softly: "She's a young thing, and cannot leave her mother."