The Ponder Heart Read Free Page A

riding I objected to—when she was out front on the platform warming up her motor. That was nearly the whole time. You could hear her day and night in the remotest parts of this hotel and with the sheet over your head, clear over the sound of the Merry-Go-Round and all. She dressed up in pants.
    Uncle Daniel said he had to admire that. He admired everything he saw at the Fair that year, to tell the truth, and everything he heard, and always expected to win the Indian blanket; never did—
they
never let him. I'll never forget when I first realized what flittered through his mind.
    He'd belted me into the Ferris Wheel, then vanished, instead of climbing into the next car. And the first thing I made out from the middle of the air was Uncle Daniel's big round hat up on the platform of the Escapades side-show, right in the middle of those ostrich plumes. There he was—passing down the line of those girls doing their come-on dance out front, and handing them out ice cream cones, right while they were shaking their heels to the music, not in very good time. He'd got the cream from the Baptist ladies' tent—banana, and melting fast. And I couldn't get off the Ferris Wheel till I'd been around my nine times, no matter how often I told them who I was. When I finally got loose, I flew up to Uncle Daniel and he stood there and hardly knew me, licking away and beside himself with pride and joy. And his sixty cents was gone, too. Well, he would have followed the Fair to Silver City when it left, if I'd turned around good.
    He kept telling me for a week after, that those dancing girls wore beyond compare the prettiest dresses and feather-pieces he ever saw on ladies' backs in his life, and could dance like the fairies. "They every one smiled at me," he said. "And yet I liked Miss Elsie Fleming very well, too." So the only thing to be thankful for is he didn't try to treat Intrepid Elsie Fleming—she might have bitten him.
    As for Grandpa, I didn't tell him about the twelve banana ice cream cones and where they went, but he heard—he played dominoes with Judge Tip—and as soon as he got home from the Clanahans' he took a spell with his heart. The Ponder heart! So of course we were all running and flying to do his bidding, everything under the sun he said. I never saw such lovely things as people sent—I gained ten pounds, and begged people to spare us more. Of course I was running out there day and night and tending to the Beulah between times. One morning when I carried Grandpa his early coffee, which he wasn't supposed to have, he said to me, "Edna Earle, I've been debating, and I've just come to a conclusion."
    "What now, Grandpa?" I said. "Tell me real slow."
    Well, he did, and to make a long story short, he had his way} and after that he never had another spell in his life till the one that killed him—when Uncle Daniel had
his
way. The heart's a remarkable thing, if you ask me. "I'm fixing to be strict for the first time with the boy," was Grandpa's conclusion. "I'm going to fork up a good wife for him. And you put your mind on who."
    "I'll do my best, Grandpa," I said. "But remember we haven't got the whole wide world to choose from any more. Mamie Clanahan's already engaged to the man that came to put the dial telephones in Clay. Suppose we cross the street to the Baptist Church the first Sunday you're out of danger."
    So up rose Miss Teacake Magee from the choir—her solo always came during collection, to cover up people rattling change and dropping money on the floor—and when I told Uncle Daniel to just listen to that, it didn't throw such a shadow over his countenance as you might have thought.
    "Miss Teacake's got more breath in her than those at the Fair, that's what she's got," he whispers back to me. And before I could stop his hand, he'd dropped three silver dollars, his whole month's allowance, in the collection plate, with a clatter that echoed all over that church. Grandpa fished