The young man’s face was alight with happiness.  “Mr. Baines,” he said, “I’m grateful to you.  I shall marry Selina.”

“Maybe,” said Scattergood.  “It runs in my mind you got to have dealin’s with Deacon Pettybone, and the deacon always figgers that the news he gits from heaven is fresher and more dependable than what anybody else gits.  Might ask him and see.”

A few days after that Coldriver knew that Parson Hooper had asked the hand of Selina from her father and had been rejected with language and almost with violence.  Then a strange thing took place.  If Jason had married Selina without opposition, his congregation would have been enraged.  He might have been forced from his pulpit.  Now it regarded him as a martyr, and with clacking tongues and singleness of purpose it espoused his cause and declared that their minister was good enough to marry any girl alive, and that Deacon Pettybone was a mean, narrow-minded, bigoted, cantankerous old grampus.  The thing became a public question, second in importance only to the sidewalk.

“Hold your hosses,” Scattergood advised Jason.  “Let’s see what a mite of dickerin’ and persuasion’ll do with the deacon.  Then, if measures fails, my advice to you as a human bein’ and a citizen is to git Seliny into a buckboard and run off with her.  But hold on a spell.”

So Jason held on, and the town meeting approached, and Scattergood continued to sit in idleness on the piazza of his store and twiddle his bare toes in the sunshine.  Deacon Pettybone was a busy man, organizing the forces of the Baptists, and seeking diligently to round up the votes of neutrals.  Elder Hooper, the leader of the Congregationalist party, was equally occupied, and no man might hazard a guess at the outcome of the affair.

“This here is a great principle,” said Deacon Pettybone, “and men gives their lives and sacrifices their families for sich.  I’m a-goin’ to fight to the last gasp.”

“Don’t blame ye a mite,” said Scattergood.  “If them Congregationalists rule this town meetin’ you might’s well throw up your hands.  They’ll rule the town forever.”

“It’s got to be pervented.”

“And nobody but you kin manage it,” said Scattergood.  “The hull thing rests with you.  Why, if you was sick so’s to be absent from that meetin’ the Congregationalists ’u’d win, hands down.”

“I b’lieve it,” said the deacon, “and nothin’ on earth’ll keep me away—­nothin’.  If I was a-layin’ at my last gasp I’d git myself carried there.”

“Deacon,” said Scattergood, solemnly, “much is dependin’ on you.  Coldriver’s fort’nit to have sich a man at the helm.”