The father’s imagination and self-pity started on a rampage again. His temper began to growl. By six o’clock he was a roaring small-town lion, seeking whom he might devour,—principally something in the boy line under twenty-one.
Tact and discretion! Tact and discretion!
Johnathan knew he should employ them, that he must control his temper or another time he might break worse than his knuckles. Yet how could he save his son from this horribly yawning pit of premature matrimony? At last he had it! Archibald Cuttner!
It was true that Johnathan did not know Archibald Cuttner only as he sometimes thrust the collection plate in front of him on Sunday mornings, or had brought his Congress shoes to the Main Street shop for resoling—“in the old days”, as Johnathan already phrased it. But that did not deter him from going at once and laying his case before the girl’s grandparent in a great tumult of hysterical fatherhood.
The Cuttners were finishing the evening meal as Johnathan rang the bell. Old Archibald, a thin little man with queer, humped shoulders, came out with his napkin still tucked in his turkey neck.
They sat down in the porch chairs for a time and Johnathan handed the girl’s letter across and Archibald read it.
“God!” was Cuttner’s comment as he finished page after page of the “mush.” It disgusted him as much as it had angered Johnathan. It had been fifty years since Archibald had been nineteen and in love.
“S’pose we walk a pace,” he suggested. “I’d like to smoke. And we’ll talk.”
The two men left the house and while Cuttner puffed at a long black cheroot, Johnathan narrated his parental “troubles” from the first.
“Yer right, Forge,” the old man agreed. “Getting a boy past the ‘girl age’ is the hardest job a man can have shoved on to him—and the most thankless. Give ’em a free rein and the young asses go stick their heads in the trap o’ married care. Tighten the rein and it only makes ’em crazier to get at it. So what’s a man to do, anyhow? I’m beginning to think we don’t lay on the harness tug these days strong enough—to begin with—girls as well as boys.”