“Ay, how indeed?” said Tom, with a perplexed look.
“Oh, bother the clergy!” cried the irreverent Flinders.
“That’s just what I’d do if there was one here,” responded Tom; “I’d bother him till he married us.”
“I say, what did Adam and Eve an’ those sort o’ people do?” asked Tolly Trevor, with the sudden animation resulting from the budding of a new idea; “there was no clergy in their day, I suppose?”
“True for ye, boy,” remarked Flinders, as he lifted a large pot of soup off the fire.
“I know and care not, Tolly, what those sort o’ people did,” said Tom; “and as Betty and I are not Adam and Eve, and the nineteenth century is not the first, we need not inquire.”
“I’ll tell ’ee what,” said Mahoghany Drake, “it’s just comed into my mind that there’s a missionary goes up once a year to an outlyin’ post o’ the fur-traders, an’ this is about the very time. What say ye to make an excursion there to get spliced, it’s only about two hundred miles off? We could soon ride there an’ back, for the country’s all pretty flattish after passin’ the Sawback range.”
“The very thing!” cried Tom; “only—perhaps Betty might object to go, her brother being so ill.”
“Not she,” said Fred; “since the poor man found in her a sister as well as a nurse he seems to have got a new lease of life. I don’t, indeed, think it possible that he can recover, but he may yet live a good while; and the mere fact that she has gone to get married will do him good.”
So it was finally arranged that they should all go, and, before three days had passed, they went, with a strong band of their Indian allies. They found the missionary as had been expected. The knot was tied, and Tom Brixton brought back the Rose of Oregon as a blooming bride to the Sawback range.