II
Bea and Miles Bjornstam were married in June, a month
after "The Girl from Kankakee." Miles had turned respectable.
He had renounced his criticisms of state and society;
he had given up roving as horse-trader, and wearing red
mackinaws in lumber-camps; he had gone to work as engineer
in Jackson Elder's planing-mill; he was to be seen upon the
streets endeavoring to be neighborly with suspicious men whom
he had taunted for years.
Carol was the patroness and manager of the wedding.
Juanita Haydock mocked, "You're a chump to let a good hired
girl like Bea go. Besides! How do you know it's a good
thing, her marrying a sassy bum like this awful Red Swede
person? Get wise! Chase the man off with a mop, and hold
onto your Svenska while the holding's good. Huh? Me go to
their Scandahoofian wedding? Not a chance!"
The other matrons echoed Juanita. Carol was dismayed by
the casualness of their cruelty, but she persisted. Miles had
exclaimed to her, "Jack Elder says maybe he'll come to the
wedding! Gee, it would be nice to have Bea meet the Boss
as a reg'lar married lady. Some day I'll be so well off that
Bea can play with Mrs. Elder—and you! Watch us!"
There was an uneasy knot of only nine guests at the service
in the unpainted Lutheran Church—Carol, Kennicott, Guy
Pollock, and the Champ Perrys, all brought by Carol; Bea's
frightened rustic parents, her cousin Tina, and Pete, Miles's
ex-partner in horse-trading, a surly, hairy man who had bought
a black suit and come twelve hundred miles from Spokane for
the event.
Miles continuously glanced back at the church door. Jackson
Elder did not appear. The door did not once open after
the awkward entrance of the first guests. Miles's hand closed
on Bea's arm.
He had, with Carol's help, made his shanty over into a
cottage with white curtains and a canary and a chintz chair.
Carol coaxed the powerful matrons to call on Bea. They
half scoffed, half promised to go.
Bea's successor was the oldish, broad, silent Oscarina, who
was suspicious of her frivolous mistress for a month, so that
Juanita Haydock was able to crow, "There, smarty, I told you
you'd run into the Domestic Problem!" But Oscarina adopted
Carol as a daughter, and with her as faithful to the kitchen as
Bea had been, there was nothing changed in Carol's life.