“God knows. They'll be landed at Chicago and turned adrift on the world. I'm glad they're away from here. I've no cause to love them, but I was afraid they would be butchered like sheep. Your father and my father, if they had still been elders on the island, wouldn't have submitted, as these folks did, to abuse and exile and the loss of everything they had in the world. I can't understand it of some of them. There was Jim Baker, for instance; I'd have sworn he would fight.”
“I can understand why he didn't. He hasn't taken any interest since his second marriage.”
“Now, that was a nice piece of work! I always liked Jim the best of any of the young men until he did that. And what inducement was there in the woman?”
The light-house keeper's wife fired up. “What inducement there was for him ever to marry Rosanne I couldn't see. And I know Elizabeth Aiken loved him when we were girls together.”
“And didn't Rosanne?”
“Oh—Rosanne! A roly-poly spoiled young one, that never will be a woman! Elizabeth is noble.”
“You're fond of Elizabeth because she was witness to our secret marriage when King Strang wouldn't let me have you. I liked Jim for the same reason. Do you mind how we four slipped one at a time up the back stairs in my father's house that night, while the young folks were dancing be-low?”
“I mind we picked Elizabeth because Rosanne would be sure to blab, even if she had to suffer herself for it. How scared the poor elder was!”
“We did him a good turn when we got him to marry us. He'd be on one of the steamers bound for nowhere, to-night, instead of snug at Green Bay, if we hadn't started him on the road to what King Strang called disaffection.”
The light-house keeper jumped up and ran out on the point, his wife following him in nervous dread.