Page:Micheaux - The Conquest, The Story of a Negro Pioneer (1913).djvu/263

 "It is a beautiful name," she admitted, looking at me slyly out of her small black eyes. She was part Indian, just a trifle, but sufficient to give her black eyes instead of brown, as most colored people have, and she had long black hair.

Before Orlean returned from the store her mother and I were like mother and son and Orlean seemed pleased, while Ethel looked at Claves and admitted that I would get Orlean, anyhow. The only thing necessary now was to reach the elder, and the next morning we spent a couple of hours trying to locate him by telephone. We finally succeeded, as I thought, but he denied later he was the party, though I would have sworn to the voice being his as I could hear him distinctly. In answer to my statement that we were ready to marry he shouted in a frantic voice:

"I don't approve of it! I don't approve of it! I don't approve of it!" and kept shouting it over and over until the operator called the time was up.

A letter had been sent him by special delivery the day I arrived and the following morning a reply was received stating that if Orlean married me, without my convincing him that I was marrying her for love, and not to hold down a Dakota claim, she would be doing so without his consent. In discussing the matter later Ethel, who had become resigned to the inevitable, said:

"If you want to get along with papa you must flatter him. Just make him think he is a king."

"Ah," I thought. "Here is where I made my mistake."

I had started wrong. "Just make him think he