“Why don’t you come out and see us sometime, Burton?”
It was Harry Grant speaking at the door of the store one evening early in June.
“I should like to very much,” was the reply, “but you see I am busy all day.”
“But not all night, surely. Come, you are ready to close up now, and I am just going home. I guess I’ll have to come back later in the night for the vet.; he’s out of town at present. Hustle round now, and lock ’er up, and I’ll be here in a few minutes with the team.”
“But I need a shave, and I’m just in my working garb.”
“Not all of you,” said Burton, and was suddenly astonished at his own temerity.
“Oh, that’s how the land lies,” said Harry, looking quizzically at the other. “Well, if I had any ambitions in which a young lady figured, which, by the way, doesn’t seem to be in my line, I’d rather let her see me in my working clothes than not at all. Besides, you are taking her at the same disadvantage. Now, hustle; I’ll be back in ten minutes.”
As they drove out along the country road Harry remarked, as though the thought had just occurred to him—
“No, I haven’t, though a quiet day there is one of the treats I promise myself. Let’s see; it’s about ten miles from here, isn’t it?”
“Twelve, and as fine a drive on a June Sunday as you could think about. Myrtle has been coaxing me for a month to take her out, but when a fellow pegs along all week on the farm he likes to lay up on Sundays.”
This was rather unlike Harry, for it was well known that twelve hours a day on the land were not enough to keep him off the baseball diamond in the evening.
Burton made some remark about his old opinions of farm-work, and how life in a store had led him to revise them, and was about to dismiss the subject from his mind when Harry, avoiding his eye with a bashfulness usually foreign to his nature, said:
“Nothing to speak of,” his friend admitted. “What would you like me to think?”
“See here,” said the other, “must I force an idea into your head with these horny hands? You’re bright enough on some subjects but denser than hotel coffee on others. In brief: You want to spend a day at the crossing; so does my cousin. Now do you see light?”
“Do you mean that I should ask her to go with me?” said Burton, almost overwhelmed with the possibility.