The calmness was accounted for by the fact that Joyce Birkdale was to be married. The circumstances leading up to this event had been sufficiently interesting to demand sobriety. St. Angé did not believe in putting on airs, but it had its own ideas of decorum; things had sort of dovetailed lately, and, according to Leon Tate, "it was up to them to spread eagle and plant their banner for knowing a good thing from a rotten egg."
Leon was above consistent figures of speech. He had power of his own that controlled even language.
"ONCE I WENT SO FAR AS TO GO UP THERE WITH MY GUN"
After Jared Birkdale had defied Leon in his own stronghold, and, instead of agreeing with Tate that Joyce had come to Isa as to a mother, had insisted upon bare, unglorified fact, he had betaken himself into oblivion. Tate was confronted with the predicament of having a helpless girl on his hands to do for—unless another man was forthcoming.
Jude rose to the occasion. He confided to Jock Filmer his desire for immediate marriage, and good-natured Jock, his system permeated by gossip, consented to send down to the Junction—since Joyce objected to the hell-fire minister at Hillcrest—and bring a harmless wayfarer of the cloth, who Murphy, the engineer of the daily branch train, had said, was summering there.
"He's a lean, blighted cuss," Murphy had explained; "what God intended for an engineer, but Nature stepped in and flambasted his constitootion, and so he took to preaching—that not demanding no bodily strength.
"He comes pottering round the engine, using the excuse of saving my soul, and I don't let on that I see through him. I give him pints about the machinery; and if I tell him he can ride in the cab with me anywhere, he'd marry a girl, or bury a tramp, if he had to go to hell to do it."
So Jock detailed Murphy to decoy the side-tracked gentleman at the Junction up to St. Angé.