I shall marry Selina."
"Maybe," said Scattergood. "It runs in my mind you got to have dealin's
with Deacon Pettybone, and the deacon always figgers that the news he
gits from heaven is fresher and more dependable than what anybody else
gits. Might ask him and see."
A few days after that Coldriver knew that Parson Hooper had asked the
hand of Selina from her father and had been rejected with language and
almost with violence. Then a strange thing took place. If Jason had
married Selina without opposition, his congregation would have been
enraged. He might have been forced from his pulpit. Now it regarded him
as a martyr, and with clacking tongues and singleness of purpose it
espoused his cause and declared that their minister was good enough to
marry any girl alive, and that Deacon Pettybone was a mean,
narrow-minded, bigoted, cantankerous old grampus. The thing became a
public question, second in importance only to the sidewalk.
"Hold your hosses," Scattergood advised Jason. "Let's see what a mite
of dickerin' and persuasion'll do with the deacon. Then, if measures
fails, my advice to you as a human bein' and a citizen is to git Seliny
into a buckboard and run off with her.
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