"I won't bet," I said, "I know I couldn't!"
"I'll bet the oysters for the crowd, Squire Vandemark," he went on deviling me, "that you couldn't perform the marriage ceremony."
Now here he came closer to my abilities, for I had been through a marriage ceremony lately, and I have a good memory--and oysters were a novelty in Iowa, coming in tin cans and called cove oysters, put up in Baltimore. It looked like a chance to stick Doc Bliven, and while I was hesitating, Mrs. Bliven whispered that there was a form for the ceremony in the instruction book.
"I'll bet you the oysters for the crowd I can," I said. "You furnish the happy couple--and I'll see that you furnish the oyster supper, too."
"Any couple will do," said the doctor. "Come, Mollie, we may as well go through it again."
The word "again" seemed suspicious. I began to wonder: and before the ceremony was over, I reading from the book of instructions, and people interrupting with their jokes, I saw that this meant a good deal to the Blivens. Mollie's voice trembled as she said "I do!"; and the doctor's hand was not steady as he took hers. I asked myself what had become of the man who had made the attack on Bliven as he stood in line for his mail at the Dubuque post-office away back there in 1855.
"Don't forget my certificate, Jake," said Mrs. Bliven, as they sat down; and I had to write it out and give it to her.
"And remember the report of it to the county clerk," said Henderson L. Burns, who held that office himself. "The Doc will kick out of the supper unless you do everything."
I did not forget the report, and I suppose it is there in the old records to this day.
"We got word," whispered Mrs. Bliven to me as she went away, "that I have been a widow for more than a year. You've been a good friend to me, Jake[16]!"