“Yes.”
“Tight. You against me.”
She nodded, and she was breathing like a tired swimmer.
“Have you ever kissed anyone?”
“No,” she said.
“But when you do, it will be me, won’t it?”
“Yes. I guess so.”
“When?”
“I don’t know.”
“It would be nice if we were alone, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Are you still afraid of me?”
“I don’t know. Yes.”
“Do you think I’m bad, Adelaide?”
“Yes.”
“Wicked?”
“Yes.”
“Evil?”
“I don’t know. Let me go.”
“I’m not touching you. I haven’t touched you.”
She looked at her arms, one, then the other, and then she straightened up. “Let’s go and get some fresh air,” she said.
“All right, but you made a promise.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to see that you keep it.”
“When I kiss somebody it will be you, but maybe I don’t want to kiss anybody.”
“We know better. Both of us,” he said.
He left the party while she was still disturbed by their conversation, reintroduced himself to Chris Mohn, and engaged a room at the hotel. Then, not to waste the visit, he called on the blacksmith, hay and feed dealers, and the owner of the wagon works—all men with whom the stage line did business. The stage was an enterprise that Moses Lockwood administered personally, but Abraham Lockwood was Moses Lockwood’s son, and the men were accordingly pleasant. In the course of his conversations with them he learned more about the Hoffner family, the Levi Hoffner family, and came away convinced that—modesty to one side—they were the Lockwoods of Richterville, with a larger share of good will than the Lockwoods could claim.
In a week Adelaide Hoffner, the emotional girl, was less in his thoughts than Adelaide Hoffner, daughter of Levi. Marriage was one of the items in Abraham Lockwood’s consideration of his future, along with the death of his father, which could reasonably be expected in a few years. Moses Lockwood was now in his sixty-first year, shrewd enough in business matters but easily exhausted by physical effort. From now on any time was his time for dying, and he knew it. When one of the Bundy brothers was found drowned in the canal Moses Lockwood said to his son, “One more to go. I want to outlive those bastards, and I want to see my first grandchild. That’s going to be up to you, son. The girls will never get a husband, neither one of them. I wrote you during the War. If anything happened to me, you were going to have to take care of Mom and the girls. Mom is all right, but one of these days we’re going to have to put Daphne away, and maybe Rhoda too. If they was farm girls they could be farmer women. A farmer woman works like a mule all day and nighttime comes and she does something else like a donkey, and that’s all their life is. All they got to look forward to. But our girls have a well-to-do father, never had to work, don’t show any tendency to work, can’t hardly read or write as good as their mother. I doubt if any farmer would have them, and the Lord knows none of the town fellows want them. So that’s up to you, too, son. Be nice to them till they have to be put away, the poor miserable creatures. Poor, miserable creatures. And their mother was pretty. Your mother was a pretty young woman. Bright, too. Bright as a new pin. Spunky. All them things. But the girls didn’t get any of it. Daphne hiding herself down-cellar or locking herself in the privy. Rhoda doing things if I didn’t know them I’d never believe them. Their father. There’ll be the money to take care of them. I saw to that. But when all is said and done, I wonder if they wouldn’t of been better off poor. The poor can’t be so particular when they’re picking a wife.”
His father’s observations alarmed Abraham Lockwood: the rich could be particular in picking a husband. Sam Stokes was somewhat of a catch, in all honesty as much of a catch as Abraham Lockwood would be. No single branch of the Stokes family had more money than the Lockwoods, father and son; but the Stokes clan and the mighty Hofman clan, who were closely related, and the Chapins and the Walkers were now suddenly united with the Hoffners of Richterville. Abraham Lockwood, counting his trump, was now not so sure he had enough to win.
“Father,” he said, a few days after the preceding conversation, “I have a young lady picked out to marry. Levi Hoffner’s daughter.”
“Well, he has enough of them. One fewer than a month ago, but he must have a few left. You like one of them?”
“Yes. I met her at the wedding.”
“Pretty and all that, I guess, or you wouldn’t show no interest. Well, why are you telling me?”
“Let me have the stage line. That will give me an excuse to go to Richterville.”
“The hell with the stage line. Levi Hoffner could build a railroad to Swedish Haven if he wanted to. Well—halfway. But why do you want to let those people think of you as a smelly stage driver, or black Ted, our hostler there? That’s what they’ll think of you as. That’s no way to do it, son. Go to Levi with something big and important. Did you talk to him at the wedding?”
“No.”
“Glad to hear that, because if you’d of talked to him you’d of sized him up for a different kind of a man. Not a man that gives a damn for a stage driver for a son-in-law. He knows me, Levi. But he would of thought right away you weren’t as smart as your old man. And you are. In some ways smarter, but not always. Levi Hoffner could have stopped your Grandpa and I from putting the stage into Richterville.”
“How?”
“How? A dozen different ways. Refusing us stable room. Ordering the blacksmith and the wagon works to refuse us. Give us trouble with the law. Or just poison our animals.”
“He’d have done that?”
“Levi Hoffner and his father, Jake Hoffner, wouldn’t of sat and waited for the Bundy brothers. They would of rode up to Gibbsville and had it out with them right out in the street. I couldn’t do that. Nobody knew me. I didn’t have nobody I could ask to go with me. But Jake and Levi had all of them Hoffners, livin’ here since back in George Washington’s time. I was the one and only Lockwood in the whole damn county till your mother took the name. The only way we put the stage in Richterville was because the Hoffners let us. And they was sure we’d go broke. We would of, too, if we didn’t have other money. We lost money on the stage line the first four years. No mail contract. Philadelphia bastards didn’t want us to get the mail contract. They wanted the mail to go all the way around by way of Fort Penn and Reading. No, don’t go to Richterville as the owner of the stage line. Who invited you to that wedding? Not the Hoffners.”
“No. Sam Stokes was a fraternity brother of mine.”
“You bet. The Hoffners wouldn’t invite the Lockwoods. You see what I mean? When you go to call on Levi Hoffner, you want to be able to look him in the eye as an equal.”
“We have more than they have.”
“Now we have, but that ain’t the way he remembers it. You sure we have more?”
“I did some scouting.”
“Good boy. Better scouting and maybe I’d have my whole ear. But even if we do have more, son. We don’t have something they do have. A big family and over a hundred years in the one neighborhood. We don’t even count in Swedish Haven yet. Only our money, our property. But marry this Hoffner girl and by Jesus we’ll count. I’ll put my brains to work. I know Levi Hoffner, and you don’t.”
Moses Lockwood sat silent for so long that his son thought he had gone to sleep with his eyes open, but presently he spoke. “Son?”
“Yes sir.”
“Go tell Levi Hoffner you want to start a railroad.”