“Well, I’ll settle him—” Pete began menacingly.
“Oh, don’t, Pete. I’m sure he didn’t mean anything. Look how he blushed. I think he wanted to be nice.”
Secretly, I was very pleased.
“Funny way of showing it,” Pete grumbled. But with that the episode was closed and we both gave our thoughts to other youthful interests.
He had spoken in a soft, refined voice, and I was quite attracted. I arranged with my older brother, Jim, to bring him over to call a few nights later. I noticed how different he was from most of the chaps I knew. He seemed more quiet and chivalrous. When I had seen him on the street, I had thought his shyness just gawky, rather peculiar in a grown-up, but now it seemed strangely attractive. I began to look at him with fresh appreciation.
Harvey Doe stayed several hours, visiting with us all that evening, and from that night on I began to feel real affection. Everything was more serious after that. Mama asked him to come to supper one night soon and he accepted. I had found my true love at last.
That winter there was more than usually good skating. Oshkosh was always famous for its ice and, before artificial refrigeration came in, at certain times of the winter the lake would be covered with a great band of men and troops of horses, cutting ice. Each team of horses drew an ice “plough” which had seven cast-steel cutters on it. Naturally, with the residential district sloping right down from a little elevation to this lake, everyone did lots of skating and had skating parties in the winter.
“Did you know the young men at our church are going to have a competition for the best skater on Saturday afternoon?” Harvey Doe said to me one evening. “I’m going to try for the first prize—though I don’t suppose I shall have a chance.”
Harvey’s family belonged to the Methodist and Congregational Churches—in fact his uncle, the Reverend F. B. Doe, had preached the opening-day sermon when they finished building their church that year of 1875. He had also preached in Central City, Colorado, in the first years of the gold rush where he had gone to visit his brother, Harvey’s father, who had mining interests in the famous camp. His family was the sort of Protestants who thought of Catholics almost as heathen idol-worshippers. Harvey never said anything to me about their attitude, but I had heard from the neighbors that his mother wasn’t a bit pleased with his seeing so much of a “Romanist and Papist.”
“I’d just like to show Mrs. Doe up,” I thought to myself—I was an extraordinarily good skater, and could do all sorts of figures and arabesques—so I asked aloud: