“I wish I’d thought to bring a prune pie,” he told her daringly, in his eagerness half strangling over a crumb of cake.

“Nobody wants prune pie at a picnic,” declared one of the fat women sententiously.  “You might as well bring fried bacon and done with it.”

“Picnics,” added the other and fatter woman, “iss for getting somet’ings t’ eat yuh don’d haff every day at home.”  To point the moral she reached for a plate of fluted and iced molasses cakes.

“I love prune pies,” asserted Miss Bridger, and laughed at the snorts which came from either side.

Billy felt himself four inches taller just then.  “Give me stewed prairie-chicken,” he stooped to murmur in her ear—­or, to be exact, in the blue bow on her hat.

“Ach, you folks didn’d ought to come to a picnic!” grunted the fatter woman in disgust.

The two who had the secret between them laughed confidentially, and Miss Bridger even turned her head away around so that their eyes could meet and emphasize the joke.

Billy looked down at the big, blue bow and at the soft, blue ruffly stuff on her shoulders—­stuff that was just thin enough so that one caught elusive suggestions of the soft, pinky flesh beneath—­and wondered vaguely why he had never noticed the beating in his throat before—­and what would happen if he reached around and tilted back her chin and—­“Thunder!  I guess I’ve sure got ’em, all right!” he brought himself up angrily, and refrained from carrying the subject farther.

It was rumored that the dancing would shortly begin in the schoolhouse up the hill, and Billy realized suddenly with some compunction that he had forgotten all about Dill.  “I want to introduce my new boss to yuh, Miss Bridger,” he said when they had left the table and she was smoothing down the ruffly blue stuff in an adorably feminine way.  “He isn’t much just to look at, but he’s the whitest man I ever knew.  You wait here a minute and I’ll go find him”—­which was a foolish thing for him to do, as he afterward found out.

For when he had hunted the whole length of the grove, he found Dill standing like a blasted pine tree in the middle of a circle of men—­men who were married, and so were not wholly taken up with the feminine element—­and he was discoursing to them earnestly and grammatically upon the capitalistic tendencies of modern politics.  Billy stood and listened long enough to see that there was no hope of weaning his interest immediately, and then went back to where he had left Miss Bridger.  She was not there.  He looked through the nearest groups, approached one of the fat women, who was industriously sorting the remains of the feast and depositing the largest and most attractive pieces of cake in her own basket, and made bold to inquire if she knew where Miss Bridger had gone.

“Gone home after some prune pie, I guess maybe,” she retorted quellingly, and Billy asked no farther.