“You are the oldest; you have most experience; I will take your advice.”
“October is sweet as the smile of a gal when she hears that her man has made fifteen hundred dollars off the purceeds of a half-acre of onions, to the mines; but these yer fall storms is reg’lar Injuns; they light down ’thout sendin’ on handbills. We ought to be p’intin’ for home if we can.”
“But Brent’s wound! Can he travel?”
“Now, about that wound, there’s two ways of lookin’ at it. We ken stop here, or we ken poot for Laramie. I allow that it oughter take that arm of his’n a month to make itself right. Now in a month ther’ll be p’r’aps three feet of snow whar we stand.”
“We must go on.”
“Besides, lookerhere! Accordin’ to me the feelin’s mean suthin’, when a man’s got any. He’ll be all the time worryin’ about the gal till he gets her to her father. It’s my judgment she’d better never see the old man agin; but I wouldn’t want my Ellen to quit me, of I was an unhealthy gonoph like him. Daughters ought to stick closer ’n twitch-grass to their fathers, and sons to their mothers, and she ain’t one to knock off lovin’ anybody she’s guv herself to love. No, she’s one of the stiddy kind,—stiddy as the stars. He knows that, that there pardener of yourn knows it, and his feelin’s won’t give his arm no rest until she’s got the old man to take care of and follow off on his next streak. So we must poot for Laramie, live or die. Thar’ll be a doctor there. Ef we ken find the way, it shouldn’t take us more ’n ten days. I’ll poot him on Bill’s sorrel, jest as gentle a horse as Bill was that rode him, and we’ll see ef we hain’t worked out the bad luck out of all of us, for one while.”
Armstrong’s opinion was only my own, expressed Oregonly. We went on preparing breakfast.
“That there A. & A. mule,” says Armstrong, “was Bill’s and mine, and this stuff in the packs was ours. I don’t know what the fellers did with the two mean mustangs they was ridin’ when they found us fust on Bear River,—used ’em up, I reckon.”
Here Brent hailed us cheerily.
“Look alive there, you two cooks! We idlers here want to be travelling.”