Abel threw back his head and laughed till the room rang.
“Hear her, my girl! Just hear her! That’s ma! That’s Mercy! She’s caught the fever, or whatever ’tis, that ails this town. She’s got no more time to hark back. It’s always get up and go ahead. What you think? She’s advising me to build a new tavern. Me! Mercy advising it! What do you think of that?”
“That it’s a capital idea. We shall need it. We shall need more than one tavern if all goes well. And it will. Now that the Indians are gone forever,”—here Kitty breathed a gentle sigh,—“the white people are no longer afraid. They have heard of our wonderful country and our wonderful location,—right in the heart of the continent, with room on every side to spread and grow eternally, indefinitely.”
“Kitty, I sometimes think you an’ Gaspar are a little off on the subject of your native town; for ’twasn’t his’n; seein’ what a collection of disreputable old houses an’ mud holes an’ sloughs of despond there’s right in plain sight. But you seem to think something’s bound to happen and you two’ll be in the midst of it.”
The Sun Maid laughed, as merrily as in the old days, and answered promptly:
“I’ve never found any sloughs of despond and something is bound to happen. Katasha’s dreams, or prophecies, whichever they were, are to come true. There is something in the very air of our lake-bordered, wind-swept prairie that attracts and exhilarates, and binds. That’s it,—binds. Once a dweller here by this great water, a man is bound to return to it if he lives. Those soldiers who have gone away from us, a mere handful, so to speak, will spread the story of our beautiful land and will come again—a legion. It is our dream that this little pestilence-visited hamlet will one day be one of the marvels of the world; that to it will assemble people from all the nations, to whom it will be an asylum, a home, and a treasure-house for every sort of wealth and wisdom. In my fancies I can see them coming, crowding, hastening; as in reality I shall some day see them, and not far off. And in the name of all that is young and strong and glorious—I bid them welcome!”
She stood in the open doorway and the sunlight streamed through it, irradiating her wonderful beauty. The two old people, types of the past, regarded her transfigured countenance with feelings not unmixed with awe, and after a moment Abel spoke:
“Well, well, well! Kitty, my girl. Hum, hum! You yourself seem all them things you say. Trouble you’ve had, an’ sorrow; the sickness an’ Wahneeny; an’ growin’ up, an’ love affairs; an’ motherhood, an’ all; yet there you be, the youngest, the prettiest, the hopefullest, the courageousest creature the Lord ever made. What is it, child; what is it makes you so different from other folks?”
“Am I different, dear? Well, Mother Mercy, yonder, is looking mystified and troubled. She doesn’t half like my prophetic moods, I know. I merely came, for Gaspar, to inquire about the miller. But I like your own idea of the new tavern, and you should begin it right away. Gaspar will lend you the money if you need it; and if you have time for more sheets than these, Mercy dear, I’ll send you over some pieces of finer muslin and you might begin on a lot for our hospital.”