John shrugged dubiously and answered: "You may look at it that way if you want to, but I see through him. I know his brand."
To Cavanaugh's wonderment, Tilly seemed pleased rather than offended, for she indulged in a little satisfied laugh.
"I suppose you told him we would be there?" she said, lightly, and it was the old man who answered, seeing that John had nothing to say.
"Yes, he knows that now, Miss Tilly, though he looked sorter set back.
In my day and time about the last thing I'd want to do would be to take a sister of mine to a shindig. Going and coming was always the biggest part of the game, and you may bet there was times when I was in for busting a party up as soon as supper was over so as to be on the road again."
Tilly laughed merrily. "I'll make you a buttonhole bouquet if you will wear it," she proposed.
"Well, not to-night--I thank you all the same," Cavanaugh returned, "but you may some other time when I've got my best clothes on. I don't want to part with you two, but don't you think you ought to be on the way?"
"Yes, it is time," Tilly said, and John rose to his feet and stiffly held his arm out to her.
"Please tell mother that we are gone," she said, as she took John's arm and the two turned away.
"What a purty sight!" the old man mused, standing and gazing after them as they walked away in the moonlight. He followed as far as the gate and leaned on it and watched them till they were out of sight.
Presently Mrs. Whaley came out and joined him. He delivered Tilly's message and they sat down and chatted for half an hour; then she went back into the kitchen.
She was making dough for bread to be baked the next day when her husband came and stood beside her. He wore no coat and his coarse suspenders hung loose over his hips; the collar of his shirt was open, showing his hairy chest.
"I saw you out there talking to Cavanaugh," he began. "Did you say anything about that matter?"
"I did--in a roundabout way," she said, taking the great lump of wheat dough in her hands and rolling it into a heap of dry flour at one end of the long wooden bowl. "I didn't want him to take up a notion that we want to marry her off, but I tried to find out what I could. Mr. Trott never has had any love-affairs. He is mighty young--younger than you'd naturally think to have the job he has, and somehow he never has taken to a girl before. Mr. Cavanaugh says this is the first time, and I know he is telling the truth. Oh, he had a lot to say in Mr. Trott's favor.
He says he has a wonderful mind for building and the like, and that the time will come when he will make piles of money. He already gets high wages, and it is always cash, too. He doesn't have to wait till the end of the year like Joel Eperson and other farmers do, and then be up to their eyes in debt, with nothing left over to begin another crop on."
"Does he drink or gamble? That is what I want to know," Whaley put in suddenly.
"No, he doesn't. Mr. Cavanaugh says he hardly thinks of anything but figuring, planning, and calculating. He goes to bed early and gets up early, and can handle a gang of men better even than he can, he's so popular with them."
"Didn't you find out about the feller's religion?"
"No, I didn't. I sorter touched on that--said you wanted to know--but Mr. Cavanaugh made light of it--said all that would come out right in due time. He said he was no hand for hurrying up the young on those lines. He said John Trott at bottom was the right sort, and that he would count on him serving the Lord in the long run as well as the next one."
"I don't know as I'd let that old skunk pick a religion for a son-in-law of mine." Whaley's lip was drawn tight as he spoke. "He don't take enough interest in doctrine, and when you force him to talk about it he says entirely too much about salvation through works alone. I like a man that knows what he believes and can point straight to Biblical authority in page, line, and word. It behooves a Christian to watch out what sort of a mate his daughter picks. Infidelity will breed at a fireside faster than tadpoles under skum in a mud-puddle."
"Well, I'm for keeping that part out of it just now," Mrs. Whaley suggested, timidly. "This is a good chance for the girl, and you know you have made a lot of folks mad by the way you talk to them."
"Well, I haven't said anything to Trott yet," Whaley answered, "and I may not, though he hasn't been out to meeting yet and that seems odd, when the Sabbath is a day of rest and there is nothing else to do."
"I happened to hear him tell Tilly that he was going next Sunday," Mrs.
Whaley answered, "so you see that will work out all right."
"Well, we'll wait and see," Whaley returned. "They dance over there at Teasdale's house, don't they?"
"Some do and some don't," was the answer, slowly made. "Tilly don't and Mr. Trott never did in his life."
"There isn't much difference in actually dancing and giving sanction to it by looking on," Whaley said, his heavy brows meeting in a frown, "an'
I'm in for calling a halt on Tilly going to such places. Looks like there would be plenty of decent amusements without hot-blooded young folks hugging up tight together and spinning around on the floor till they are wet with sweat from head to foot. Sally Teasdale ought to be churched, and she would be if she was a Methodist. The Presbyterians ain't strict enough. Well, if I believed in foreordained baby damnation as they do I'd let a child of mine dance her way into hell and be done with it. They make me sick. I had an argument with old Bill Tye yesterday and I fairly flayed up the ground with him--didn't leave him a leg to stand on, but he was mad--oh, wasn't he mad? The crowd laughed at him good."
Whaley turned away. He intended to chat with Cavanaugh outside, but he met the contractor coming in at the front door on his way to bed.
"I found that passage from Paul and read the whole chapter," Whaley began, but Cavanaugh stopped him.
"I'll see it to-morrow," he said. "My eyes are not strong enough to read at night, even with my specs, and I'm a little bit tired, too. I walked out to the sawmill--five miles and back--this morning, to see about some timber, and it was quite a stretch for me. Good night."
"No wonder he didn't want to see it," Whaley smiled to himself as he leaned in the doorway. "I had him beat and he knows it. I'll bet the old skunk has already looked it up, or asked somebody about it."
CHAPTER XII
A wide country road stretched out in the moonlight before John and Tilly. They walked slowly. Tilly still held his arm and he was transported with sheer ecstasy by that close contact with her. Once or twice he started to speak, but found himself unable to think of anything appropriate, and this both angered and alarmed him, for, he asked himself, how was it that Eperson was always so ready with his tongue when in Tilly's presence? But Tilly seemed to understand John's way and not to care much whether he talked or was silent. As he dared to glance down on her pretty head just below his left shoulder he remembered the bride and the bridegroom on the train, and the contractor's words came back to him like breeze music from the waving tops of celestial trees: "It is ahead of you, my boy."
Ahead of him? Marriage? A home for Tilly and himself alone? She, his wife?--actually his wife? Absurd! Impossible! The bare thought, checked though it was, set fire to his brain and he was thrilled in all his nerves and members. He caught her upward glance and she smiled almost as if she had glimpsed his vision and was thus responding to it.
"You don't like Joel," she said, knowing full well that that remark would prod his tardy speech.
"Well, what if I don't?" he answered, with querulous sharpness.
"Well, you shouldn't dislike him," the little minx continued, designedly. "He hasn't done you any harm. How could he? You have known each other such a short time."
Had John been other than the crude working-boy that he was, he might have made a more adroit answer, but, even as it was, it was not unpleasing to his sly tormentor.
"What is he hanging around you so much for?" John demanded. "I've heard that your father doesn't like him. What does he mean by coming, at the slightest excuse, like to-night, for instance?"
"Joel and I have been friends ever since we were tiny tots," Tilly answered, as casually as a school-girl chewing gum. "And even if--if he really does love me and--and wants me to be his wife, should he be blamed for that?"
The very suggestion of her marriage to any one, and that man in particular, drove John wild. He bit his lip; he swore under his breath, and his oaths had never been guarded before meeting Tilly; his eyes flashed from the fires behind them. He clenched his fists.
"You are mine, mine, mine!" he said to himself with the grinding teeth of a cave-man, and he was all but unaware that his words were not audible. She was smiling up at him, so sweetly, so placidly. What a nimbus of transcendental charm hovered over the wonderful face in the moonlight. Suddenly he checked his onward stride, caught her, and drew her around facing him. What he might have said or done he never knew, but Tilly gravely started on again, gently extracting her hand from his fierce clasp and restoring it to his arm.
"We must not stop," she said. "I hear a horse behind us. It is somebody going to the party, perhaps."
He said nothing as her fingers left his, and they walked on again. It was a horse and a buggy containing a couple from the village. Tilly spoke merrily to them and they answered back as they dashed on.
"It is Marietta Slocum and Fred Murray," Tilly explained. "They are engaged."
"Engaged?" The word seemed to fill the entire consciousness of the crude social anomaly. He told himself that an engagement must naturally precede marriage, and how was that to come about with that helpless tongue in his mouth? Besides, how did he know but that Tilly might refuse him? How did he know but that there might even now be some understanding between her and Eperson? The sheer thought chilled him like a blast from a cavern of ice. She seemed to feel the limpness of the arm she held or in some way to sense the despair that was on him so quickly following the mood she had interrupted only a moment before.
"You are so strange!" she sighed, taking a better grasp on his arm, and even bearing down on it slightly as she lowered her head thoughtfully.
"You are a mystery to me. I can't make you out."
He could not explain. He was not sure that he cared to explain the terrible internal quakings which to him seemed so unmanly, so unlike any feelings that had ever come to him. He wondered if Eperson had actually spoken open words of love to her, and, if so, how had the fellow, with all his suave ability, managed it?