So he somehow got her wedged between two fat women at one of the tables, and stood behind and passed things impartially and ate ham sandwiches and other indigestibles during the intervals. He had the satisfaction of seeing the Pilgrim come within ten feet of them, hover there scowling for a minute or two and then retreat. "He ain't forgot the licking I gave him," thought Billy vaingloriously, and hid a smile in the delectable softness of a wedge of cake with some kind of creamy filling. "_I_ made that cake," announced Miss Bridger over her shoulder when she saw what he was eating. "Do you like it as well as--chicken stew?" Whereupon Billy murmured incoherently and wished the two fat women ten miles away. He had not dared--he would never have dared--refer to that night, or mention chicken stew or prune pies or even dried apricots in her presence; but with her own hand she had brushed aside the veil of constraint that had hung between them. "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.