“You said ‘Dick,’” he said slowly. “You meant it, Nancy?”
“I meant it—Dick.”
Then the Rev. Richard Ingraham did the most sensible thing he ever did in his life, he put his hand over the cold one on his arm, and said, “I love you, Nancy Cowder.”
And the reply came swiftly, unhesitatingly, “I love you, Dick.”
An hour later the two came out to the veranda, the look of glory still on their faces. In a very few minutes—so few that he might have been accused of waiting around the corner for their appearance,—Reuben Cowder joined them. Dick went straight to the point: “I have asked Nancy to marry me, Mr. Cowder. She has said, Yes. What do you say?”
“Well,” said Reuben Cowder, “I say I would rather have you for a son than any man I ever knew.”
The three sat long on the veranda in the warm, deepening, October twilight, looking out over the great valley in its glorious autumn coloring, down to a segment of that curve of the great river above which Sabinsport lay. It was not of the past that they talked, it was not of Sabinsport’s struggles and sorrows, it was not of the war news of the day; it was of the future. To all three of them, Reuben Cowder as well as Dick and Nancy, the last hour had opened the new world for which the war had been fought.
“It will soon be over,” Reuben said. “We’ve got them, sure thing. We must think now of the future, Dick. There are a lot of changes coming to Sabinsport. There will be things doing here when the boys get back. I will need you both. I am old. I have the old ways; but I have learned something since you and Ralph Gardner came to this town, and I’m not so old that I can’t learn more. I must do it, for we must reckon with those stacks there.”
He nodded his head to the opening he had cut long ago in the noble trees which ran down the long slope of the great lawn, an opening that he always carefully preserved for it brought into the landscape from the veranda the tall smoke stacks of the wire mills.
Dick’s mind flew back to the day a dozen years before when he had walked over the hills and caught his first view of the town. There were but four stacks that day, there were twelve now, and from every one of the twelve black smoke rose, straight into the clear air, and they said as clear and loudly to him now as they had so long ago, “We are the strong things here, we are the things to be reckoned with.”