“I don’t know yet what I can do. I only know what I cannot do.”
“And that is—?”
“Just what I have said. I cannot be a tavern keeper here the rest of my days with nothing to do half of the time except to watch the men pitch horseshoes behind the blacksmith shop, and listen to the flies buzz in the windows 11 on summer afternoons; and everything else so quiet and dead you don’t know whether you are on the street or in the graveyard. If you’d ever crossed the Mississippi River you’d understand why.”
“Well, I haven’t, and I don’t understand. But the only way to stop this roving is to make a home of your own. Will you tell me how you expect to support a Cloverdale girl when you marry one?”
“I don’t expect to marry one.” The smile was winning, but the son’s voice sounded dangerously like the father’s.
“Why not?”
“Because when I marry it will be to a southern girl—” Asher hesitated a moment. When he went on, his voice was not as son to father, but as man to man.
“It all happened down in Virginia, when I was wounded and in prison. This little girl took care of me. Only a soldier really knows what a woman’s hand means in sickness. But she did more. She risked everything, even her life, to get letters through the lines to you and to get me exchanged. I shiver yet when I think of her, disguised as a man in soldier’s clothes, taking the chance she did for me. And, well, I left my heart down there. That’s all.”
“Why haven’t you ever told us this before, Asher?” his father asked.
Asher stood up where the white moonlight fell full on his face. Somehow the old Huguenot defiance and the old Quaker endurance of his ancestors seemed all expressed in him.