“Well, mother, if you must know, he’s dying for Emily, and she’s dying for him.”
“Then why don’t he tell her so? There’s not a better girl in the country, nor more capable.”
“Because he imagines a host of things. He thinks because she and her folks know all about his coming out of a workhouse, and she knows what he was when he first came here, and how he was picked upon and scouted at school, they must kind of look down upon him; that though they might pity him, treat him as a friend and try to help him along, it would be another thing if he wanted to come into the family, and even if they didn’t care they might think other people would, and throw it up at them that she was going with a redemptioner.
“That’s all the merest nonsense, and his imagination. I go there with him, and after a little while get up to go; then up he’ll jump and go with me, though they ask and urge him to stop. He’ll go home from meeting with her, and sometimes I go with them on purpose, and she’ll ask us to go in, I’ll say I must go, and give him a punch in the ribs to go in, but no, off he comes with me. I know by what Ed. says the old folks would like it, and I tell him he can’t expect her to break the ice, and would not want her to. I wish I could shut them up together, I’d starve them to it as they do a jury.”
“If they like each other, and it suits all round,—I know it would suit William and his wife; he wrote a long letter to your father, and sent it by James, in which he said everything good about James that he could say, and has made him promise to trap with him next winter,—and if there is nothing in the way but James’ diffidence, it will take care of itself. There never was a man yet who liked a woman and didn’t find some way to let her know it.”
“Yes, mother, she may know; I expect she knows it now, but how shall she know it enough?”
“There will be some way provided.”
James and the boys concluded to sow their land with wheat and grass seed, as this was their last year, Mr. Whitman finding the grass seed. Matters went on in their regular course till the beginning of wheat harvest, when Mrs. Conly sent for Mrs. Whitman to come over there and spend the afternoon, and for Mr. Whitman to come to tea.
“I have had a letter from Mary,” said Mrs. Conly, “and she is just crazy for me to let Emily come on with James Renfew this fall, when he goes to trap, and come back with him in the spring, she does so long to see some of us: and she can’t come on account of the baby, and it’s such a good chance. I thought I never could let Emily go over the mountains. I don’t see how I can; and I want to talk it over with you.”
After weighing the matter all round, these sage counsellors concluded that Mary Whitman ought in reason to be gratified; she was away there in the woods; and it was natural that she should want to see her sister, or some of her folks; and she was so lonely when William was away trapping. There could be no danger from Indians, since General Wayne had chastised them so severely.