The Frontiersmen | Page 4

as hardy a pioneer as ever drew a bead on a panther or an
Indian, passed on, quaking at the thought of the wits of the Station as
he had never yet feared man, and his respected Irish blood ran cold.
And when it waxed warm with wrath once more it came to pass that to
utter the simple phrase "Command me" was as much as a man's life
was worth at Blue Lick Station.
Emsden thought ruefully of the girl's mother and wondered if her
intercession would avail aught with the old autocrat. But he had not yet
ventured upon this. There was nothing certain about Mrs. Mivane but
her uncertainty. She never gave a positive opinion. Her attitude of mind
was only to be divined by inference. She never gave a categorical

answer. And indeed he would not have been encouraged to learn that
Richard Mivane himself had already consulted his daughter-in-law, as
in this highhanded evasion of any decision he felt the need of support.
For once the old gentleman was not displeased with her reply,
comprehensive, although glancing aside from the point. Since there
were so many young men in the country, said Mrs. Mivane, she saw no
reason for despair! With this approval of his temporizing policy
Richard Mivane left the matter to the development of the future.
Emsden's depression would have been more serious had he not
fortunately sundry tokens of the old man's favor to cherish in his
memory, which seemed to intimate that this elusiveness was only a
shrewd scheme to delay and thwart him rather than a positive and
reasonable disposition to deny his suit. In short, Emsden began to
realize that instead of a damsel of eighteen he had to court a coquette
rising sixty, of the sterner sex, and deafer than an adder when he chose.
His artful quirks were destined to try the young lover's diplomacy to the
utmost, and Emsden appreciated this, but he reassured himself with the
reflection that it was better thus than if it were the girl who vacillated
and delighted to torture him with all the arts of a first-class jilt. He was
constantly in and out of the house almost as familiarly as if he were
already betrothed, for in the troublous period that seemed now closing,
with its sudden flights, its panics, its desperate conflicts with the
Indians, he had been able to give an almost filial aid to Richard Mivane
in the stead of the son whom the old man had lost.
Richard Mivane had always felt himself an alien, a sojourner in this
new land, and perchance he might not have been able even partially to
reconcile himself to the ruder conditions of his later life if the bursting
of a financial bubble had not swept away all hope of returning to the
status of his earlier home in England when the tragedy of the duel had
been sunk in oblivion. The frontier was a fine place to hide one's
poverty and fading graces, he had once remarked, and thereafter had
seemed to resign himself to its hardships,--indeed, sometimes he
consigned his negro body-servant, Cæsar, to other duties than his
exclusive attendance. He had even been known to breakfast with his
head tied up in a handkerchief when some domestic crisis had
supervened, such as the escape of all the horses from the pinfold, to call
away his barber. As this functionary was of an active temperament and

not at all averse to the labor in the fields, he proved of more value thus
utilized than in merely furnishing covert amusement to the stationers by
his pompous duplication of his master's attitude of being too cultured,
traveled, and polished for his surroundings. He was a trained valet,
however, expert in all the details of dressing hair, powdering, curling,
pomatuming, and other intricacies of the toilet of a man of fashion of
that day. Cæsar had many arts at command touching the burnishing of
buckles and buttons, and even in clear-starching steinkirks and the
cambric ruffles of shirts. As he ploughed he was wont to tell of his
wonderful experiences while in his master's service in London
(although he had never crossed the seas); and these being accepted with
seeming seriousness, he carried his travels a step farther and described
the life he remembered in the interior of Guinea (although he had never
seen the shores of Africa). This life so closely resembled that of
London that it was often difficult to distinguish the locality of the
incidents, an incongruity that enchanted the wags of the settlement,
who continually incited him to prodigies of narration. The hairbreadth
escapes that he and his fellow-servants, as well as the white people, had
had from the wrath of the Indians, whom the negroes feared beyond