“That doesn’t save Nathaniel from this misalliance with your granddaughter now. What can we do?”
“What do you want I should do—at the girl end of it?”
“Couldn’t you send her back where she came from?”
“Back to A-higher? Yeah, I can send her back to A-higher? But what assurance you got this balky young colt won’t kick over the traces the minute she’s gone and start after her, dragging the whiffletree?”
“I’ll attend to that. You get the girl out of town. I’ll keep with him and watch him if I have to eat and sleep with him every night from now till the time he’s twenty-one.”
“Won’t be able to help yerself then, will yer?”
“But he’ll be a man grown, then, in the eyes of the law. He’ll know his own mind.”
“Ain’t far from it now, Forge. Nineteen, ain’t he?”
“But two years at this period makes all the difference in the world. Anyhow, if he deliberately goes wrong the moment he’s of age, my hands are clean. I’ll have done my duty in the eyes of the law and of God. After that, he’s got only himself to thank if he makes a foul bed and has to lie in it.”
So Johnathan found an unexpected ally in Archibald Cuttner. And the latter returned home to order Carol to “pack her traps and go back to her folks.”