“But how about me? Here I am, lost if I do and lost if I don’t. You better sit down here again and see if there isn’t some way I can get that crown of glory.”
She sat down by him, instantly sobered from her own joy, and calmly gave him a hand to hold.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” she said, frankly. “You wait awhile. Don’t do anything right away. I’ll have to ask father.” And then as he reached over to pick up the Book of Mormon,—“No, let’s not read any more to-day. Let’s sit a little while and only think about things.” She was so free from embarrassment that he began to doubt if he had been so very deeply clever, after all, in suggesting the relationship between them. But after she had mused awhile, she seemed to perceive for the first time that he was very earnestly holding both of her hands. She blushed, and suddenly withdrew them. Whereat he was more pleased than when she had passively let them lie. He approached the matter of salvation for himself once more.
“Of course I can wait awhile for you to find out the rights of this thing, but I’m afraid I can’t be baptised even if you tell me to be—even if you want me to obey the Lord and marry some pretty little light-complected, yellow-haired thing afterwards—after I’d married my first wife. Fact is, I don’t believe I could. Probably I’d care so much for the first one that I’d have blinders on for all the other women in the world. She’d have me tied down with the red ribbon in her hair”—he touched the red ribbon in her own, by way of illustration—“just like I can tie the biggest steer you ever saw with that little silk rag of mine—hold him, two hind legs and one fore, so he can’t budge an inch. I’d just like to see some little, short, kind of plump, pretty yellow-haired thing come between us.”
For an instant, she looked such warm, almost indignant approval that he believed she was about to express an opinion of her own in the matter, but she stayed silent, looking away instead with a little movement of having swallowed something.
“And you, too, if you were my sister, do you think I’d want you married to a man who’d begin to look around for some one else as soon as he got you? No, sir—you deserve some decent young fellow who’d love you all to pieces day in and day out and never so much as look at this little yellow-haired girl—even if she was almost as pretty as you.”
But she was not to be led into rendering any hasty decision which might affect his eternal salvation. Moreover, she was embarrassed and disturbed.
“We must go,” she said, rising before he could help her. When they had picked their way down to the mouth of the cañon, he walking behind her, she turned back and said, “Of course you could marry that little yellow-haired girl with the blue eyes first, the one you’re thinking so much about—the little short, fat thing with a doll-baby face—”
But he only answered, “Oh, well, if you get me into your Church it wouldn’t make a bit of difference whether I took her first or second.”