“But your brother is dumb. How did he produce that awful screech?”
Alonphilus raised a small, curiously contrived whistle to his lips, and a moment later, the same wild, terrifying cry that they had heard before, rung out on the air.
Ten minutes more, and they were again mounted and ready to set out for the settlement.
“Sarah,” said the Elder, in his nasal voice, “I ask you again if you contemplate becoming the helpmeet of that worldly man of conflict?”
“Yes, Uncle Tugwoller,” she replied, sweetly, reining her horse up by the side of Leander’s. “You’ll marry us to-morrow, won’t you?”
“If I must,” he said, dolorously, tugging away at the corner of his disarranged dicky, “if I must, and my remuneration is forthcoming.”
“You’ve triumphed, Sally,” said the giant lover, with a tender intonation on the name. “My uncle Peter uster say as how a female would if she wanted to, and if she didn’t, she wouldn’t. I hope the Elder ain’t a gittin things mixed and twisted.”
It was after nightfall before the party arrived at the settlement. At times along the way, the Elder experienced much difficulty in maintaining his place on the back of his horse. Once he lost off his dicky, but he bore the trip with surprising equanimity.
The Elder was alone in the world now, save for Sally, his wife having died two years before.
With his niece, in company with Henry Black—the man whom, in our last chapter, Leander suspected might be the husband of his sweetheart—the Reverend Tugwoller was on his way to join a colony of eastern people then forming in the far North-west, whither he had been called to act in his ministerial capacity. Of course now that Sally had so happily—or unfortunately, he would have said—met with her first and only love, and they had been so felicitously reunited, this plan was abandoned; and the next morning he pronounced them man and wife, at Pete Wimple’s, where the company spent the night in the presence of our assembled friends. He settled quietly down with his niece and her husband, who abandoned the wilderness soon after and took up the life of a farmer in the interior of Michigan. He tried in vain to bring Leander to a realizing sense of his innate wickedness, and began to think at last that Sally might have done worse, after all, when it came to his knowledge that the beatified fellow was the fortunate possessor of two or three hundred acres of fine land, clear of all claims, besides about five thousand dollars hard cash that his father had received for his place in the East.