"Oh! enjoy yourself." Filmer waved his pipe aloft. "I'm glad you _can_ take life this way, with the handicap of your trade, I don't quite see, by thunder, how your future parish is going to account for you, but so far as I'm concerned you can laugh till you bust." Filmer was delighted. Not in years had he been so taken out of himself. "Now this here town," he explained, "likes to have its buryings and weddings set off with a sermon with the principal actor as text. They like to get their money's worth. See? This girl, what I want spliced, is a devilish--" he paused--"you don't mind _moderately_ strong language, do you?" he asked. "We all get flowery up here. What is lacking in events, talk makes up. I'll hold back when I can--in reason." "Don't mind me!" Drew was trying to control his mirth. Filmer nodded appreciatively. "Well, as I was remarking--and I've got to be open with you--this here girl will be safer married, and so will some other folks. I ain't much of a reader of character, but I sense things like all creation, and I _feel_ that getting the girl in harness as soon as possible is the only plain common-sense method. She's mettlesome, you know, the kind that kicks over the traces, and slams any one happening to be handy. She ain't never done it yet--but she's capable of it." "Is--is the girl a relation or----?" Jock flushed. "Neither. Nor the man. The feller--Jude Lauzoon is his name--I don't care a durn for, but he's all gone over this girl, and if any one can steer him straight she can, and when she gets the reins in her hands, I believe she's going to keep her head, in order to steer straight. "The girl's name is Joyce Birkdale. Mother dead; raised sort of promiscuous on the instalment plan. Father an old buck who only keeps sober because he want's to see what's going on. He lit out and made himself scarce a time back, and this here Joyce took refuge after a hell of--excuse me! after a row with the old man--up to the Black Cat. Leon Tate acts the father-part to any one in a fix--it helps his trade--keeps folks in his debt, you know, but he ain't going to hamper hisself past a certain point, and if this here Jude Lauzoon should get a beckon from old man Birkdale he'd skip as quick as thunder--that's what is troubling Tate, and, by gosh! it's troubling me, but for another reason what needn't enter into this here conversation. "If it was trusting you with a funeral or a christening," Filmer felt his way gingerly, "I wouldn't care a durn. You can't hurt the dead and the kid might outgrow it; but when it comes to tying folks together tight, it's a blamed lot like trusting something brittle in a baby's hand. It mustn't be broke, you see, or there'll be h--I mean trouble, to pay." "See here!" Drew sat up straight, "I'm not much younger than you, if the truth were known. So let us cut extreme youth out of the question."