eking out his love within the acute and
well-applied hearing facilities of the families of some ten
"stationers," to use the phrase of the day, diligently sought to decoy,
on successive occasions, Richard Mivane out to the comparative solitudes
of the hunting, the fishing, the cropping. In vain. Richard Mivane
displayed sudden extreme prudential care against surprise and capture by
Indians, when this was possible, and when impossible he developed
unexpected and unexampled resources of protective rheumatism. The young
lover was equally precluded from setting forth the state of his
affections and the prospects of his future in writing. Apart from the
absurdity of thus approaching a man whom he saw twenty times a day, old
Mivane would permit no such intimation of the extent of his
affliction,--it being a point of pride with him that he was merely
slightly hard of hearing, and suffered only from the indistinctness of
the enunciation of people in general. And indeed, it was variously
contended that he was so deaf that he could not hear a gun fired at his
elbow; and yet that he heard all manner of secrets which chanced to be
detailed in his presence, in inadvertent reliance on his incapacity, and
had not the smallest hesitation afterward in their disclosure, being
entitled to them by right of discovery, as it were.

Emsden, in keen anxiety, doubtful if his suit were seriously
disapproved, or if these demonstrations were only prompted by old
Mivane's selfish aversion to give away his granddaughter, finally
summoned all his courage, and in a stentorian roar proclaimed to the old
gentleman his sentiments.

Richard Mivane was a man of many punctilious habitudes, who wore cloth
instead of buckskin, however hard it might be to come by, and silver
knee-buckles and well-knit hose on his still shapely calves, and a
peruke carefully powdered and tended. He had a keen, wrinkled, bloodless
face, discerning, clever, gray eyes, heavy, overhanging, grizzled
eyebrows, and a gentlemanly mouth of a diplomatic, well-bred,
conservative expression.

It was said at Blue Lick Station that he had fled from his own country,
the north of England, on account of an affair of honor,--a duel in early
life,--and that however distasteful the hardships and comparative
poverty of this new home, it was far safer for him than the land of his
birth. His worldly position there gave him sundry claims of superiority,
for all of which his hardy pioneer son had ha