Correspondence followed and by this time it had become very agreeable. She proved to be a very logical young woman, and Jean Baptiste was favorably impressed. She was, moreover, industrious, ambitious, and well educated. Her age was about the same as his, so on the surface he thought that they should make a very good match. So be it.
In the meantime, however, he had opened a correspondence with another whom he had met on his trip the winter before where she had been teaching in a coal mining town south of Chicago. The same had developed mutually, and he had found her agreeable and obviously eligible. Her father was a minister, a dispenser of the gospel, and while for reasons we will become acquainted with in due time, he had cultivated small acquaintance with preachers, he took only such slight consideration of the girl's father's profession that he had good cause to recall some time later.
About the time he was deeply engrossed in his correspondence with both the farmer's daughter and the young school teacher, he received a letter from a friend in Chicago introducing him to a lady friend of hers through mail. This one happened to be a maid on the Twentieth Century Limited, running between New York and Chicago. Well, Jean Baptiste was looking for a wife. Sentiment was in order, but it was with him, first of all, a business proposition. So be it. He would give her too a chance.
He was somewhat ashamed of himself when he addressed three letters when perhaps, he should have been addressing but one. It was not fair to either of the three, he guiltily felt; but, business was business with him.
From his friend's sister he received most delightful epistles, not altogether frivolous, with a great amount of common sense between the lines. But what was more to the point, her father was wealthy, and she must have some conception of what was required to accumulate and to hold. He rather liked her, it now seemed.
Now from the preacher's daughter he received also pleasing letters. Encouraging, but not to say unconventionally forward. He appreciated the fact that she was a preacher's child, and naturally expected to conform to a certain custom.
But from New York he received the most encouragement. The position the maid held rather thrilled him. He loved the road—and she wrote such letters! It was plain to be seen here what the answer would be.
Which?
He borrowed ten thousand dollars, giving a mortgage upon his land in security therefor. He purchased relinquishments upon three beautiful quarter sections of land in the county lying just to the west. The same, having to be homesteaded before title was acquired, had all ready been in part arranged for. His grandmother and sister were waiting to file on a place each—the third was for the bride-to-be. There remained a few weeks yet in which to make said selection; but, notwithstanding, all must be ready to make filing not later than the first day of October—and September at last arrived.
He became serious, then uneasy. Which? He wrote all three letters that would give either or all a right to hear the words from him, but did not say sufficient to any to give grounds for a possible breach of promise suit later.