Chapter 42
Wondering About the Future

Uncle Nick and Aunt Katie went to San Francisco for a honeymoon.

If I thought the town was buzzing before, now there wasn’t anything more the subject of conversation—from the school to the Gold Nugget to the General Store to the groups of men standing around the streets—than what Uncle Nick had done at what was supposed to have been Pa’s wedding! Those folks who hadn’t attended were kicking themselves for weeks!

I suppose the one person who wasn’t thrilled with the sudden way everything had gone topsy-turvy was Rev. Rutledge. He went through the wedding ceremony with Katie and Uncle Nick with a smile on his face. And I think down inside even he could see how much better it was for Pa to walk down the aisle—still in that handsome black suit, with Katie on his arm—to give her away to Uncle Nick, than it would have been to marry the two of them.

Still, the change was bound to affect his fortunes probably as much as anyone’s, and nobody saw him much for several days.

All us kids were positively dying to know what was going to happen next. That night we pestered Pa with question after question. But he wouldn’t say much. There was a kind of crafty smile on his face, but he just kept saying, “We’ll see, kids . . . we’ll see.”

He did make more than his usual number of trips into town during the next few days, and he hardly went up to the mine at all. Mr. Ashton and Marcus Weber ran the Mine and Freight Company mostly by themselves for the next week.

I knew Pa and Mrs. Parrish were trying to figure a lot of things out. They’d had their differences. They had both had another wife and husband whose memories they still loved. And they both had homes and businesses they didn’t want to give up. But neither one of them would let on a word about what they intended to do about all those things.

And when they finally did say—well, that was another whole story!