Now, in Mishawaka there were some very fine folks—the family of Joseph Doty, for instance. The Dotys lived in a two-story house and had a picket fence. James had dug a ditch for Mr. Doty, and split out shingles for a roof for the Doty barn. At such times he got his dinner at Doty's, for it was the rule then that you always had to feed your help, no matter who they were, just as you feed the threshers and harvesters and silo-men now.
About this time, James began to put bear's grease on his unruly shock of yellow hair, and tried to part it and bring it down in a nice smooth pat on the side. That's a sure sign!
The few who noticed the change said it was all on account of Susan Doty. Once when Susan passed the johnnycake to James, he emptied the whole plate in his lap, to his eternal shame and the joy of the whole town, which soon heard of it through a talkative hired man who was present and laughed uproariously—as hired men are apt to do.
James once heard Susan say that she didn't like rivermen, and that is probably the reason James quit the river, but he didn't tell her so—not then at least.
He got a job in the iron-mill and learned to smelt iron, and he became a pretty good molder, too. Then the hard times came on, and the iron-mill shut down. But there was a cooper's shop in town, and James was already very handy with a drawshave in getting out staves. Most of the men worked by the day, but he asked to work by the piece. They humored him, and he made over two dollars a day.
Joseph Doty was a subscriber to "Gleason's Pictorial" and "Godey's Lady's Book." They also had bound copies of "Poor Richard's Almanac" and "The Spectator," with nearly forty other books. James Oliver read them all—with Susan's help.
Then something terrible happened! The young folks suddenly discovered that they were very much in love with each other. The Doty family saw it too, and disapproved.
The Dotys were English, but as the family had been in America for a century, that made a big difference.
Susan was the handsomest and smartest girl in town—everybody said so. She seemed much older than James Oliver, but the fact was they were of the same age. The Doty family objected to the match, but Doty the Elder one day dropped a hint that if that young Oliver owned a house to take his wife to, he might consider the matter.
The news reached Oliver. He knew of a man who wanted to sell his house, as he was going to move to a town called Fort Dearborn—now known as Chicago—which had recently been incorporated and had nearly a thousand inhabitants. The house was a well-built cottage—not very large, but big enough for two. It was a slab house, with a mud chimney and a nice floor of pounded blue clay. It had two rooms, a cupboard across the corner, a loft to store things in, and forty wooden pegs to hang things on.