“But everything in your speech wasn’t bad! You spoke quite nobly of the founders of the city. I felt a thrill for my grandfather. I suppose you have always lived here, too.”
In the living-room Ezra Dameron had put down his newspapers and was reading his Bible. Leighton could see him plainly from where he sat, beyond Zelda’s shoulder. Her father’s profile was as sharp and hard as though it were cut in granite. It made a curious, incongruous background for the graceful head, with its crown of dead black hair, the soft curving cheeks, and the deep, serious eyes of the girl.
“No; we are country folk. My father came from Mills County,—there weren’t really any mills there to speak of, but a great educator of that name lived there in the early days. My father lived here for a while after the war, but he was glad to get back to Tippecanoe. My mother still lives there. I went to Tippecanoe College, and now here I am; and so you have the story of my life! Perhaps I shall go back, too, just as my father did,—if I can’t find the moose!”
“I have heard that the country about Tippecanoe is very pretty.”
“Yes; I like the town. My father and your uncle went to the college, and I followed them, all unworthily. I go back very often,—it is really home, you know, my mother being there.”
“I hardly know what life in a town of that sort may be like. I suppose everything takes its color from the college.”
“Yes, in a great measure. Tippecanoe is a little old-fashioned and quaint. I always felt that my father missed an opportunity sometime in his life, but I never knew when or how; and I have no right to think so.”
Ezra Dameron, with the old Bible on his knees, raised his eyes and stared into the fire as these words caught and held his attention. He remembered Morris Leighton’s father very well, and he smiled grimly as he watched the hickory logs burning and reconstructed for himself certain pages of his own life. There had been a man that Margaret Merriam had loved, and would have married, if her pride had not betrayed her into an estrangement; but it was her pride that had given her into his own hands. He heard the son of Morris Leighton talking to his daughter,—to Margaret Dameron’s daughter,—and the fact gave him a certain pleasure. He continued to stare into the fire, with the old leather-bound Bible open on his lean knees. The girl was his own and she should not be given to Morris Leighton’s son. He should take care of that. And he nodded to himself as he turned the leaves of his Bible.
CHAPTER XII
JACK BALCOMB’S PLEASANT WAYS
There comes a time in the life of young men when their college fraternity pins lie forgotten in the collar-button box and the spiking of freshmen ceases to be a burning issue. Tippecanoe was one of the few freshwater colleges that barred women; but this was not its only distinction, for its teaching was sound, its campus charming and the town of which it was the chief ornament a quiet place noted from the beginning of things for its cultivated people.