My friend, Samuel McKee, the Presbyterian minister in the village, being from Kentucky, came nearer to understanding the value of my horse than any other spectator. "I don't wonder you brought him back," he said, after careful study. "He is a beauty. There's a strain of Arabian in him."
My mother's joy over my safe return was quite as wordless as her sorrow at our parting (in April) had been. To have me close beside her, to lay her hand upon my arm, filled her with inexpressible content. She could not imagine the hundredth part of the hardships I had endured, and I made no special effort to enlighten her—I merely said, "You needn't worry, mother, one such experience is enough. I shall never leave you for so many months again," and I meant it.
With a shy smile and a hesitant voice, she reverted to a subject which was of increasing interest to her. "What about my new daughter? When am I to see her? I hope now you'll begin to think of a wife. First thing you know you'll be too old."
My reply was vaguely jocular. "Be patient a little while longer. I shall seriously set to work and see what I can find for you by way of a daughter-in-law."
"Choose a nice one," she persisted. "One that will like the old house—and me. Don't get one who will be too stylish to live here with us."
In this enterprise I was not as confident as I appeared, for the problem was not simple. "The girl who can consent to be my wife must needs have a generous heart and a broad mind, to understand (and share) the humble conditions of my life, and to tolerate the simple, old-fashioned notions of my people. It will not be easy," I acknowledged. "I can not afford to make a mistake—one that will bring grief and not happiness to the homestead and its mistress."
However, I decided to let that worry stand over. "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof," was a saying which my father often repeated—and yet I was nearing the dead line! I was thirty-eight.
That first night of my return to the valley was of such rich and tender beauty that all the suffering, the hardships of my exploration were forgotten. The moon was at its full, and while the crickets and the katydids sang in unison, the hills dreamed in the misty distance like vast, peaceful, patient, crouching animals. The wheat and corn burdened the warm wind with messages of safely-garnered harvests, and my mind, reacting to the serenity, the peace, the opulence of it all, was at rest. The dark swamps of the Bulkley, the poisonous plants of the Skeena, the endless ice-cold marshes of the high country, the stinging insects of the tundra, and the hurtling clouds of the White Pass, all seemed events of another and more austere planet.
On the day following the fair, just as I was stripping my coat and rolling my sleeves to help my father fence in a pasture for Ladrone, a neighbor came along bringing a package from the post office. It was a book, a copy of my Life of Grant, the first I had seen; and, as I opened it I laughed, for I bore little resemblance to a cloistered historian at the moment. My face was the color of a worn saddle; my fingers resembled hooks of bronze, and my feet carried huge, hob-nail shoes. "What would Dr. Brander Matthews, Colonel Church and Howells, who had warmly commended the book, think of me at this moment?" I asked myself.
Father was interested, of course, but he was not one to permit a literary interest to interfere with a very important job. "Bring that spade," commanded he, and putting my history on top of a post, I set to work, digging another hole, rejoicing in my strength, for at that time I weighed one hundred and eighty pounds, all bone and muscle. So much the trail had done for me.