Here Abbie announced bravely, “I will, Ikey, if you must go.”

She blushed deeply as she said it, and the sight of her pretty color so moved the young man that, having the bashfulness of his native crops, he rushed out into the glory of the sunset, and sat upon the granite boulder watching until the gray, the purple, and then the black had washed out the white steeples from the distant valley.

Isaac Masters was of the boulder type.  How many decades was the smooth, worn rock in front of his house riding on the crest of a glacier until it reached its halt?  But now it would need a double charge of dynamite to shake it from its base.  It generally took the mountain lad days, perhaps weeks, to make up his mind, even upon such a simple problem as the quantity of grain his horse should have at a feed when the spring planting began; but when once his intention was fixed it withstood all opposition.  But this time he was astonished at his own temerity of mind, as his mother and sweetheart were; and the more profoundly he pondered over the gravest decision of his life, the more did it seem to him an inspiration, perhaps from the Deity himself.

But Isaac was formed in too simple and honest a mould to delude the two women or himself with iridescent dreams of success.  He had worked on the ragged farm bitterly, incessantly.  He had fought the rocks, and the weeds, and the soil, the frost and the drouth, as one fights for his life, and never had a thought of food or of comfort visited him unaccompanied by the necessity for labor.

“I can work fourteen hours a day, mother, and live upon pork and beans, as well as the next man.”  He stood to his full height, displaying to the pale woman the outlines of massive muscular development.  His hands were huge and callous, their grip the terror of his mates after a husking bee.  He had measured his great strength but once; that was in the dead of winter, with the snow drifted five feet deep between the barn and the house.  A heifer, well grown, had been taken sick, and needed warmth for recovery.  Isaac swung the sick beast over his shoulders, holding its legs two in each hand before his head, and strode through the storm, subduing the battling snow with as much ease as he did the bellowing calf.  His mother met him at the woodshed door.  Behind the gladiator rose the forbidding background of a stark mountain range; but to her astonished and unfocussed sight, her son seemed greater than the mountain, and more compelling than its peaks.  From that hour his whisper was her law; and from that day—­for how could the adoring mother help telling her quarterly caller all about the heifer?—­Isaac had no more wrestling matches in the valley.