Once only had Cal been out of doors and that was when leaning on the girl's arm he had gone into the dooryard. Dorothy did not wish the simple ceremony of their marriage to take place indoors, but that when Uncle Jase, the justice of the peace, joined their hands with the words of the simple ritual, they should stand under the shade of the tree which, already hallowed as a monument, should likewise be their altar.
So one afternoon, when the cool breath of evening came between sunset and dusk, they had gone out together and for the first time in daylight he stood by the broad-girthed base of the walnut's mighty bole.
"See thar, Cal," breathed the girl, as she laid reverent fingers upon the trunk where initials and a date had been carved so long ago that now they were sunken and seamed like an old scar.
"Them letters an' dates stands fer ther great-great-great gran'mammy thet wrote ther book—an' fer ther fust Kenneth Thornton. They're our fore-parents, an' they lays buried hyar. Hit's all in ther front pages of thet book upsta'rs in ther chist."
The ground on which they stood was even now, for the mounds so long ago heaped there had been levelled by generations of time. Later members of that house who had passed away lay in the small thicket-choked burial ground a hundred yards to the side.
"Hit's a right fantastic notion," complained old Caleb who had come out to join them there, "ter be wedded outdoors under a tree, stid of indoors under a roof," but the girl turned and laid a hand on his arm, and her eyes livened with a glow of feeling and tenderness.
"Hit was right hyar thet we diskivered we loved one another," she said, softly, "an' ef ye'd ever read thet book upstairs I reckon ye'd onderstand. Our foreparents planted this tree hyar in days of sore travail when they'd done come from nigh ter ther ocean-sea at Gin'ral George Washington's behest, an' they plum revered hit from thet time on."
She paused, looking up fondly into the magnificent fulness of branches where now the orioles had hatched their brood and taught the fledglings to fly, then her eyes came back and her voice grew rapt.
"Them revolutionary folk of our own blood bequeathed thet tree ter us—an' we heired hit from 'em along with all thet's good in us. They lays buried thar under hit, an' by now I reckon hits roots don't only rest in ther ground an' rock thet's underneath hit—but in ther graves of our people theirselves. Some part of them hes done passed inter thet old tree, I reckon, ter give virtue ter hits sap an' stren'th. Thet's why thar hain't no other place ter be married at."
The July morning of their wedding day dawned fresh and cloudless, and from remote valleys and coves a procession of saddled mounts, ox-carts, and foot travellers, grotesque in their oddly conceived raiment of festivity, set toward the house at the river's bend. They came to look at the bride, whose beauty was a matter of local fame, and for their first inquisitive scrutiny of the stranger who had wooed with such interest-provoking dispatch and upon whom, rumour insisted, was to descend the mantle of clan leadership, albeit his blood was alien.