Summary: A spoof. All is not as it seems in this version of the story.
PG  1,808

The Wooing of Abigail Jones as narrated by Hoss

Chapter 1

“Now my older brother Adam is thirty-five and he’s got to be the most eligible bachelor in all of Nevada. He’s got money, looks, smarts, and he even went to college. There’s just one problem. Adam seems to be allergic to marriage. Heck, I mentioned to him that I thought he ought to get married and he near bust a gut.”

“So Joe and me got a plan working. You see, there’s this new schoolteacher and we think she’d be perfect for Adam. I mean, she likes Shakespeare and poetry, and she likes music, and she even likes school of course. She likes all them things that Adam likes. She ain’t the purtiest one, but turn them lights down a bit, and she’ll do. She’s got that look of hungry bear circling round at a bee hive. She wants some of that honey, and all she needs is Adam to ask her. All we got to do is to find a way to get her and Adam together.”

“This is the plan we came up with. We told him that he ought to be like a go-between for her and Hank. You see, we tricked Adam into thinking that Hank wants Miss Abigail for himself so’s he’d go on over there to talk to her for Hank. He knows well as anybody that Hank couldn’t court nobody proper like especially a school teacher. Course we know that once ole Adam starts in on talking, Miss Abigail is gonna just be falling right in love with him. With with her chasing after him and us pushing him toward her, it should be an easy thing to get them two hitched, dontcha think? We just gotta make sure that Hank does what we tell him. Hank ain’t the smartest guy we got working for us.”

Chapter 2

“Course it weren’t the easiest thing convincing our older brother to do this thing. We had to butter him up real good telling him how he talks better than anybody we know with all them sweet words he’s got and even how he can make any lady near faint dead away with just the right thing to say. We even said we’d saddle up his horse for him and such so he wouldn’t have to do anything that would make him smell bad. That seemed to sweeten the pie enough for him. He said he’d do it.”

“There was almost a problem though. Ya see, when we left the house, I guess he got to talking to Pa wondering what we was up to cause he figured we might be with us being so nice to him and all. Lucky for us, Pa played along real good though and told him we was just trying to help out ole Hank. Pa told us about that later. He wants Adam married as much as we do. That helped to make Adam believe that story right then and there for shur. He trusts Pa even if he don’t always trust me and Joe so much especially when we’re planning things. He does have a point there. Things don’t always go the way we think they will.”

“Well we was darn curious to see if Adam would really do what we asked him to cause he gets a mite nervous whenever he gets near a woman of marrying age especially calling on her at her house. But he rode up there proud as you please and went right up and knocked on her door. Last we saw of him, he was sitting there a talking away with Miss Abigail. She was a staring at him like he was fresh made ice cream and she was ready to taste him. We figured our plan was working out just right.”

Chapter 3

“The next morning, we found out that part of the plan worked slick as a trout sliding through your hands when you pull him in from a spring fed stream. Adam came a marching down those stairs and didn’t even bother to finish dressing first he was so beside himself. Miss Abigail done proposed to him. We never did figure on our plan going so fast. Who woulda figured on a schoolteacher being so forward and all. Adam was so dadblamed mad that it didn’t work the way he wanted. I hummed that wedding march for him, but he didn’t like it so much. When Joe started in on that loud cackle he’s got, Adam threw his boot at Joe too and knocked him plumb off his chair.”

“Dontcha know but Pa come down those stairs too, and he didn’t know all the details about me and Joe working out this devious plot to get Adam hitched up with Miss Abigail. But Pa’s pretty smart, and he started in on playing along with it right away. He got that serious Pa kinda look of his and told Adam that maybe he ought to marry up with that Miss Abigail and uphold the family honor and all. Adam weren’t too happy hearing that neither, and he give Pa some not so happy looks. That made it even funnier.”

“It mighta all worked out all right except Hank come charging into the house like he was mean angry jealous man and all, and Adam looked like he was worried that ole Hank was gonna give him a good pounding. That was a good acting job ole Hank was doing. See, we got the next part of our plan all set up with ole Hank, and to make it work, we needed Hank to act all jealous like. Oh, and Hank has to make believe he can’t sing too. He really sings darn good, but for now, he has to sing awful. He says he can, and I hope he can do it bad enough. It’s real important to our plan that his singing hurts Adam’s ears real bad so that Adam will want to help him out..”

Chapter 4

“This is the next part of our devious thinking: Hank has to tell Adam that he wants Abigail and the only way he can impress her enough is to sing to her. Now once ole Adam heard Hank sing in that fake awful voice of his, he up and decided that he could teach Hank to sing better. Of course he couldn’t cause Hank was faking it and he kept on a faking it. Well, Hank slipped up one time and sang right, but then he told ole Adam that he couldn’t sing like that again like it was a mistake and all.”

“As they worked on it, we could see Adam was getting real frustrated and such cause he wanted Hank to learn to sing better, but mostly cause he wanted Hank to take Abigail off his hands. Well, that’s when me and Joe sprung the second part of our trap. We said we just then thought of a way out of out dima, dila, …, out of our problem Hank was having courting Miss Abigail. We said Adam ought to sing and have Hank standing out in the street like he was singing. We said they could trick Abigail into thinking it was Hank who was romancing her. Adam thought that would work. He likes to think he’s smarter than other folk and can trick ’em into doing stuff.”

“So we got Adam on that porch and he was singing real purty like, and then just like we planned, Hank took off so Miss Abigail knew he wasn’t singing and shur nuff, she come right out on that porch and caught Adam singing that love song like it was right to her. It was working purrfect like me and Joe planned. Well Joe did most of the planning. Adam was caught in our trap. We took off outta there faster than coon dogs on the hunt of a dozen coons. We didn’t want Adam to have nobody there to help him.”

Chapter 5

“We watched off in the distance a fair piece as ole Adam did his best to talk his way outta that one but that Miss Abigail is one tena,,, tama,,,, tennen,,. That Miss Abigail knows what she wants and she goes after it. She shur did with Adam. I thought she was gonna kiss him there for a bit, but dadburnit, he got out of there before she could. He’s learned to be darn slippery in the arms of a woman. Darned if I know how he does it. Ifn she had kissed him, I think we woulda been hearing some wedding bells real soon.”

“Now did I happen to mention that my brother Adam is darn smart? Well he done figured out what we was doing, and in no time at all, he got his own little plan working. He come home and seems he tracked Hank down in the saloon and convinced him that Miss Abigail wanted him, Hank that is, not Adam. Adam can be a real smooth talker when he needs to be. So ole Hank goes on over there and sings to her in his real voice and sits on her doggone ole porch, and dadburnit, asks her to marry up with him. Sure enough, she up and said yes. Just like we figured, she was only waiting for a man to ask her.”

“Just a week later, we got ourselves all dressed up and went to the wedding. It shoulda been Adam standing up there saying ‘I do’ except it wasn’t. Outside the church, Adam said that it was gonna take more than me and Joe to get him up there getting hitched and that we better not try that again. Course I did mention that there was a pretty new seamstress in town, and he perked right up except I don’t think marrying her is what he has in mind. I mentioned that too, and the look he give me kinda told me I was right. I’m not sure my older brother is ever gonna get hitched. I think he likes having all them gals available for romancing and such and not just one.”

“I been telling the story, but I gotta admit to ya that my little brother Joe did most of the planning. Oh, all right, he came up with this whole darn plan. I told him that next time maybe we oughta come up with a simpler plan. This one got too darn complicated. This one was like playing chess with our older brother and ain’t neither one of us figured out how to beat him at that. Joe says he’s gonna have to get us a better plan. I’ve been wondering if maybe I needs me a better planner.”