THE SHOTGUN PRINCESS
A double-barreled, muzzle-loading shotgun rested upon two wooden pegswhich protruded front the neatly whitewashed plaster of the kitchenwall. Both barrels were loaded with ample charges of buckshot, and twopercussion caps gleamed with sinister brightness under the ornatehammers. Dark and menacing, the shotgun lay blackly along thatimmaculate wall, and by its presence prevented Doris Wilkins fromgetting married.
With that fearsome weapon, capable at close range of blowing a holethrough the side of a house, Orla Wilkins guarded his sister from allyoung men who approached with serious intentions. Wilkins was large andsmiling, one of those doughy men who lump out their clothes in the wrongplaces. He was able to hold his own in a fight with most of the stalwartsons of the Bildad Road neighborhood; but he was also much opposed toexertion, and it was far less trouble to point a shotgun than it was toswing a fist.
Wilkins had said, with his china-doll smile, that he would rather domanslaughter than lose a good housekeeper. Bildad Road believed him; atleast sufficiently so that no man had yet been found who was willing toput the matter to the final test. Everybody knew that for thethirty-seven years of his life Orla had been nourished upon the famousWilkins apple pie, first by his mother and then by his sister, andeverybody realized that for a man who thought as much of his stomach asOrla Wilkins did, this was a life-and-death issue. He was the kind ofbrother-in-law no man would want.
Doris was something like the fresh apple pie that she made—young andsweet, tender and delicious. She was spiced with twinkles in her browneyes and curls in her brown hair; where her colossal brother was pudgy,she was small and delicately curved and swift moving.
Some of the girls of Bildad Road would have treated such a brother tocrockery or stovewood over the head, but Doris was as amiable assunshine. Wilkins, knowing when he was well off, provided her with thebest from the general store at the Corners, and until the coming ofJohnny Trumbull she bowed cheerfully to fate; content to be the shotgunprincess of Bildad, cherished and guarded for the sake of her delectablecooking.
On a snapping cold night in December this Johnny Trumbull sat in theWilkins’ kitchen and meditated upon the Wilkins’ shotgun. By actualmeasurements he was a rather small man; something like fifty poundslighter than Orla Wilkins and half a foot shorter. But Trumbull did notgive the impression of being inferior in size, and it was only when hestood side by side with a genuine Bildad Roader that his stature wasnoticeably under the neighborhood average. His eye gleamed steadily,like a blue beacon, and he moved with a careless ease that was pleasantto watch. Doris was watching him now; her brother was, too, with a palesmile and a warning in his dull gaze.
Trumbull did not need to study the face of Orla Wilkins to knowapproximately what was going on behind it; he had been obliged to seethat piecrust-colored countenance every time he came for the purpose ofgetting better acquainted with Doris, and he understood the feelings ofWilkins only too well. Wilkins never left his sister alone for a momentwith any man under seventy-five.
Johnny Trumbull had come to the neighborhood a month before, and sincehe had got acquainted with Doris he had never been able to find heralone; whenever he went to the house, Orla Wilkins opened the door andsettled