"The first time I went logging I got one leg broke and my head smashed, but I haven't ever regretted it. That accident, and the incidental scare, did more for me than any two successful seasons could have done. Now, your plunging right into a marrying may prove providential. Sermons and infant christenings will seem like child's play after. What do you say?"
Drew was laughing and the tears stood in his eyes.
"I'll—I'll do my level best," he managed to say through his spasms of mirth. "This seems like a horrible approach to anything so serious, but it is the way you put it, you know, and—and the air, and the supper. The laugh comes easy, you see."
"Oh! enjoy yourself." Filmer waved his pipe aloft. "I'm glad you can take life this way, with the handicap of your trade, I don't quite see, by thunder, how your future parish is going to account for you, but so far as I'm concerned you can laugh till you bust."
Filmer was delighted. Not in years had he been so taken out of himself.
"Now this here town," he explained, "likes to have its buryings and weddings set off with a sermon with the principal actor as text. They like to get their money's worth. See? This girl, what I want spliced, is a devilish—" he paused—"you don't mind moderately strong language, do you?" he asked. "We all get flowery up here. What is lacking in events, talk makes up. I'll hold back when I can—in reason."
"Don't mind me!" Drew was trying to control his mirth.
Filmer nodded appreciatively.
"Well, as I was remarking—and I've got to be open with you—this here girl will be safer married, and so will some other folks. I ain't much of a reader of character, but I sense things like all creation, and I feel that getting the girl in harness as soon as possible is the only plain common-sense method. She's mettlesome, you know, the kind that kicks over the traces, and slams any one happening to be handy. She ain't never done it yet—but she's capable of it."
"Is—is the girl a relation or——?"