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Updated: May 4, 2025
It happened at the end of two years that rheumatism and an overstrained old age brought Jabel Blake to bed, and a flood, passing down the valley, aroused him, despite advice, to his old indomitable leadership against its ravages.
As for Jabel Blake, he was too late for that day to deposit his bonds at the Treasury and obtain the currency for the Ross Valley bank, so he went sauntering around the city, grim as a defeated office-seeker.
There's Elk's sword and horse, and the schooling of both of you, and the burying of your father, Jim MacNair, eighteen years ago this May. Dear! dear!" The Honorable Perkiomen Trappe, catching a part of this remark, observed that Jabel Blake, judging by his appearance, shouldn't have buried MacNair's father, but devoured him.
And fortune smiled upon him as never before. His mills went day and night, stopping never except on Sabbaths. The ground seemed to give forth iron and lime wherever he dug for it. The town became the thriftiest settlement in the Allegheny valleys, and Jabel Blake was the earliest riser and the hardest delver in the State.
There was no bank at Ross Valley, but people began to say that old Jabel Blake had particles of gold in the flinty composition of his life, and that his trip to Washington had made him gentler and wider in his charities. He was attentive to young children. He encouraged young lovers. He lifted many errant people to their feet, and started them on their way to a braver life of sacrifice.
To Jabel's clannish and religious nature Judge Dunlevy represented the loftiest possibilities of human character; and that one of the two poor orphans the sons of a wood-cutter and log-roller on the Alleghenies, and the victim of intemperance at last whom Jabel had watched and partly reared, should now be betrothed to Catharine Dunlevy, the judge's only daughter, affected every remaining sentiment in Jabel's heart.
Jabel's unfeeling remark gave MacNair no apparent pain; but he said: "Jabel, don't speak to Elk about father. He is not as patient as he should be, and perhaps in Washington they disguise some of the matters which we treat bluntly and openly. There's Kitty Dunlevy, you know, and she is a little proud." The glazed, whitish eye of Jabel bore the similitude of a beam of satisfaction.
"Pshaw!" laughed Elk MacNair; "a skinflint who has raked up fortune with his fingers, ground down his laborers, pinched his soul, and stooped his stature for money, has no right to be my chaplain, Jabel Blake! You have grown rich like a scavenger. What matter if I bring down fortune with my rifle, though the American eagle be the bird.
Both of them welcomed Arthur MacNair with that respectful warmth which acknowledged the nearness of his relationship to the approaching nuptials, and the Judge said: "Great credit to Jabel Blake as a representative citizen, in that his eyes have seen the glory of these fine boys, to whom he has been so fast a friend!"
He returned to his rest never to arise; for now a fever laid hold upon the old captain, and he talked in his delirium of Judge Dunlevy and his bank, and he was attended all the while by Arthur MacNair. One night, in a little spell of relief, Jabel Blake opened his eyes and said, "Arty, I dreamed old Jabel Blake was in heaven, and that he had founded a bank there!"
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