"Henry," said the father, when the two were picking near together and throwing corn over the tail-gate of the wagon, "if you give up goin' away an' git married right off, an' settle toun here, I'm a-mine to teed you that east eighty an' a forty of timber. Eh?"
"That's purty good," said Henry; "but if your deed waits till I find a wife, it may be a good while coming."
"That eighty lays 'longside of Albaugh's medder an' lower gorn-field," said the father, significantly.
"You mean if I was to marry Rache, Albaugh might give us another slice."
"Of gourse he would; an' I'd help you put up a house, an' maybe I'd let you hav' the roan golt. You'd hav' the red heifer anyhow."
"But I never took a shine to Rache; and if I did, I couldn't noways come in. They's too many knocking at that door."
"But Rachel ain't no vool," said the elder. "She knows a good piece of lant w'en she sees it, an' maybe she's got enough of voolin' rount."
All that afternoon Henry revolved this proposition in his mind, and he even did what he had never done before in his life—he lay awake at night. The next day, after the midday dinner, he said to himself: "I might as well resk it. Albaugh's got an all-fired good place, and all out of debt. And that's a tre-mendous nice eighty father's offered to give me."
So he went up stairs and put on a new suit of blue jeans fresh from his mother's loom. Then he walked over to Albaugh's, to find Rachel sewing on the front porch.
Rachel had been "kindah dauncey like," as her mother expressed it, ever since her visit to Barbara. She had received as many attentions as usual, but they seemed flat and unrelishable to her now. She began seriously to reflect that a girl past twenty-three was growing old in the estimation of the country, and yet she was further than ever from being able to make a choice between the lovers that paid her court, more or less seriously.