They went across the fields toward the house, and the Bishop spoke further.
“There ain’t any need to get into your high-heeled boots, Brother Rae, jest because I was aiming to save her to a crown of glory,—a girl that’s thought to have been born on the wrong side of the blanket!”
They stopped by the first corral, and Joel Rae talked. He talked rapidly and with power, saying many things to make it plain that he was determined not to look upon the Wild Ram of the Mountains as an acceptable son-in-law. His manner was excited and distraught, terrified and indignant,—a manner hardly justified by the circumstances, about which there was nothing extraordinary, nothing not pleasing to God and in conformity to His revealed word. Bishop Wright indeed was puzzled to account for the heat of his manner, and in recounting the interview later to Elder Wardle, he threw out an intimation about strong drink. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “I suspicion he’d jest been putting a new faucet in the cider barrel.”
When Prudence came in from the blossoming peach-trees that night her father called her to him to sit on his lap in the dusk while the crickets sang, and grow sleepy as had been her baby habit.
“What did Bishop Wright want?” she asked, after her head was pillowed on his arm. Relieved that it was over, now even a little amused, he told her:
“He wanted to take my little girl away, to marry her.”
She was silent for a moment, and then:
“Wouldn’t that be fine, and we could build each other up in the Kingdom.”
He held her tighter.
“Surely, child, you couldn’t marry him?”