“I’m sure of it,” she agreed. “And you always have my best—my best wishes.”
“And down in your heart you dare care some, or you wouldn’t talk it over with me,” I insisted.
“We liked each other as boy and girl. Perhaps our talk is what I believe I owe to that friendship. Now tell me something about our backwoods settlements.”
In story-writing the lover should, or usually does, fling himself off the scene when his attempt at love-making is thwarted. Not so in life with Patsy. I believed she cared for me, or would care for me if I could only measure up to the standard provided for her by her father’s influence.
So instead of running away I remained and tried to give her a truthful picture of border conditions. She understood my words but she could not visualize what the cabins stood for. They were so many humble habitations, undesirable for the town-bred to dwell in, rather than the symbols of many, happy American homes. She pretended to see when she was blind, but her nods and bright glances deceived me none. She had no inkling of what a frontier woman must contend with every day, and could she have glimpsed the stern life, even in spots, it would be to draw back in disgust at the hardships involved.
So I omitted all descriptions of how the newly married were provided with homes by a few hours’ work on the part of the neighbors, how the simple furniture was quickly fashioned from slabs and sections of logs, how a few pewter dishes and the husband’s rifle constituted the happy couple’s worldly possessions. She wished to be nice to me, I could see. She wished to send me away with amiable thoughts.
“It sounds very interesting,” she said. “Father must take me over the mountains before we return to town.”
“Do not ask him to do that,” I cried. And I repeated the message sent by Mrs. Davis.
She was the one person who always had her own way with Ericus Dale. She smiled tolerantly and scoffed:
“Father’s cousin sees danger where there isn’t any. No Indian would ever bother me once he know I was my father’s daughter.”