Despite his rough appearance, he confided matter-of-factly that he wasn’t even really a mountain man anymore, no beaver left, no market for it anyway, the passes well traveled, the wilderness next to gone.  What he knew, he said, was the Indian lands, so he’d become a scout, a tracker, a guide, a sign language expert, an explorer, sometimes based out of the fort, sometimes ignoring the fort altogether. His one wish though was to be able to read a book and write a letter, not such a different wish than any of the others.  He didn’t know his age exactly, having been on his own one way or another for so long.  Charlotte thought if he were to get cleaned up, shaved and shorn, he might actually still be short of old by a lot and not totally horrible-looking.

“I’m not able to read this Moby-Dick,” he said, putting the book down on the desk that he was barely able to fit into.

“It’s difficult,” Charlotte said.  “To raise the reading level is all.”

“Difficult, yes, but I’ve got so many quarrels with the author that I can’t see straight.”

“You do?”

“Yes, so I’m respectfully returning it back to your possession.”

“Here, try out another then.  It’s about a man marooned on an island, sort of like a mountain man without the mountain.”

“We read it out loud,” Ada said.  “It was hard, but good.”

“Reading what’s hard is how you learn,” Charlotte said.

She realized that Jenkins McPherson was watching both of them and not thinking about whether a book was hard or good.

He turned to Ada.  “Miss,” he said.  “I’d like to ask for your hand in marriage.”

Ada turned fifteen different shades of crimson.  Charlotte gasped.  “Do you realize I’m sitting right here?”

“I do, no disrespect meant.  But she’s sitting right there and I’ve been thinking on asking her for some time now.”

“No disrespect meant?”  Charlotte was sure that in about one minute her voice would be rising to a level no one wanted to hear.  “She’s thirteen.”

“How old do you think I was when I got out into those woods, having to find my own dinner, my own bed, learn by myself about the world and how it all worked?”

Now he had done it.  “Jenkins McPherson, don’t tell me about any of this.  I don’t want to hear it.  We all of us have our very sad life story.  Before you go shooting your mouth off you should maybe ask somebody else how things have gone for them lately.  Or ever.”

“I think maybe you’re a bit tetchy because you’re in the family way,” he said, looking less than certain now about this whole affair.

“I’m a bit tetchy, as you call it, because she’s thirteen!” Charlotte said, getting to that untenable level.