“Not—want—her—to marry—Brother Brigham Young, Prophet, Seer, and Revelator, President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in all the world!”
“I must go up and talk to him at once.”
“You won’t talk him out of it. Brother Brigham has the habit of prevailing. Of course, he’s closer than Dick’s hat-band, but she’ll have the best there is until he takes another.”
“He may listen to reason—”
“Reason?—why, man, what more reason could he want,—with that splendid young critter before him, throwing back her head, and flashing her big, shiny eyes, and lifting her red lips over them little white teeth—reason enough for Brother Brigham—or for other people I could name!”
“But he wouldn’t be so hard—taking her away from me—”
Something in the tones of this appeal seemed to touch even the heart of the Wild Ram of the Mountains, though it told of a suffering he could not understand.
“Brigham is very sot in his ways,” he said, after a little, with a curious soft kindness in his voice,—“in fact, a sotter man I never knew!”
He drove off, leaving the other staring at the letter now crumpled in his hand. He also said, in his subsequent narrative to the Entablature of Truth: “You know I’ve always took Brother Rae for jest a natural born not, a shy little cuss that could be whiffed around by anything and everything, but when I drove off he had a plumb ornery fighting look in them deep-set eyes of his, and blame me if I didn’t someway feel sorry for him,—he’s that warped up, like an old water-soaked sycamore plank that gits laid out in the sun.”
But this look of belligerence had quickly passed from the face of Joel Rae when the first heat of his resentment had cooled.