"Barroom loafers?" cries Erma. "Whom do you mean?" and she looks at Ollie in so resolute and defiant a manner that he hesitates to take up the cudgels with her.
Therefore he mutters rather sulkily, "Oh, if you are going to make this Lawrence your hero I have nothing more to say," and glumly pitches into the beefsteak that is in front of him; but, all the same, hates Harry a little more than he has ever done.
Anxious to put an end to a discussion which does her son no good in the eyes of the young lady she regards as his fiancée, Mrs. Livingston proposes a sight-seeing drive about the city.
"You will come with us, Erma?" she adds.
"With pleasure," answers the girl. "Perhaps on the main street I may see papa."
"By Jove," laughs Ferdie. "You're always thinking of papa now. But you forgot him a little—last night at Ogden, eh?"
To this insinuation Erma answers nothing, but rises from the table with a heightened color on her cheeks.
Noticing this, Mrs. Livingston thinks it just as well that her protégée sees no more of the Western mining man, and is rather relieved when Mr. Chauncey informs her Captain Lawrence has departed for Tintic, and will not return for several days.
Then they take a long drive about the city, the hackman condescendingly acting as cicerone to the party, and pointing out the Tabernacle and the proposed Temple, the foundations of which have just been laid, and the Endowment House and the Tithing Office, and the Beehive and Lion House, in which Brigham Young, the president of the Latter-Day Saints, keeps the major portion of his harem; though he has houses and wives almost all over the Territory.
Next, coming down from Eagle Gate, they pass the Mormon theatre with its peculiar classic front made up of two different kinds of Greek architecture, and so on to East Temple Street, by Godby's drug store, and the great block of Zion's Mercantile Co-operative Institution, till they come to Warden Bussey's Bank, upon which Erma and Mr. Livingston have letters of credit.