“I didna know what possessed me to think I could lick him. He was a bookish man, not a fighter, perhaps that made the difference. Though do not get it into your head,” MacKechnie said, peering at his grandson from under his shaggy eyebrows, “that the two cannot go together. We fought for upwards of half an hour, until he hit me on the nose and the pain was tairrific, and I butted him in the belly and knocked him head over giblets into ‘A’s’ old cellar hole, where he stayed for some time.”

“That was dirty fighting, Gramp,” Elbridge said. “To butt a man in the belly.”

“It was. But he was a head and a half taller and outweighed me by forty pounds. And a fight, then, was a fight, not a punching match. I would have done worse, just so I beat him that day, or any other man who came between me and what I had made up my mind to do. Bees in my bonnet, he told me, when his own was buzzing, and did so, all his life, with notions such as he could mine profit out of a trace of gold vein in the quartz, when a child would have known that the money was in cut stone. He might have buzzed his way through the earth to China or come back with the wealth of the Indies, pairhaps, but with no more gold from that vein than he found, which was enough, precisely, to make a wedding ring—”

“Now, hold on, Gramp, you’re mixed up,” Elbridge said. “It was Father had the gold mine. Malcolm. Remember?” and the old man stared at him testily, shifting his weight a little in the bed where he now spent his days.

“—for my daughter,” he went on stubbornly, aware that he had made a mistake, not willing to admit it, passing it over quickly, as trivia from the packed trunk of his memory.

“That day, for once, I knocked the stubbornness out of him, the foolishness, the Old Ellick, whatever that was. At least, I thought I had.”

Elbridge knew what “Old Ellick” was.