of his host. John Ashe, a tall, dark, handsome Kentuckian, with whom even the trifles of life were evidently full of serious import, waited with a kind of chivalrous respect the further speech of his guest. Being utterly devoid of any sense of the ridiculous, he always accepted Mr. McClosky as a grave fact, singular only from his own want of experience of the class.
“Ores is running light now,” said Mr. McClosky with easy indifference.
John Ashe returned that he had noticed the same fact in the receipts of the mill at Four Forks.
Mr. McClosky rubbed his beard, and looked at his valise, as if for sympathy and suggestion.
“You don't reckon on having any trouble with any of them chaps as you cut out with Jinny?”
John Ashe, rather haughtily, had never thought of that. “I saw Rance hanging round your house the other night, when I took your daughter home; but he gave me a wide berth,” he added carelessly.
“Surely,” said Mr. McClosky, with a peculiar winking of the eye. After a pause, he took a fresh departure from his valise.
“A few words, John, ez between man and man, ez between my daughter's father and her husband who expects to be, is about the thing, I take it, as is fair and square. I kem here to say them. They're about Jinny, my gal.”
Ashe's grave face brightened, to Mr. McClosky's evident discomposure.
“Maybe I should have said about her mother; but, the same bein' a stranger to you, I says naterally, 'Jinny.'”
Ashe nodded courteously. Mr. McClosky, with his eyes on his valise, went on,—
“It is sixteen year ago as I married Mrs. McClosky in the State of Missouri. She let on, at the time, to be a widder,—a widder with one child. When I say let on, I mean to imply that I subsekently found out that she was not a widder, nor a wife; and the father of the child was, so to speak, onbeknowst. Thet child was Jinny—my gal.”
With his eyes on his valise, and quietly ignoring the wholly-crimsoned face and swiftly-darkening brow of his host, he continued,—
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