John, before answering, took her by the hand and led her to a seat on the great boulder. Then he said: "Your father refuses. He looks at the matter from a different view point and his may be the correct one. Whether he or I am right rests with you; not upon your decision but your nature. If we do not marry it may mean a happier life for you, though for me a necessary sacrifice. I offer very little more than my love and fidelity; offsetting this, as he puts it, is a life of privation, hardship and sacrifice--if service can be so called. What he expects for you to have is what you have been brought up to expect--and I can never give."
"John, I love life and joy and gayety but I also love helping others. I love serving God; but as a king should be served, with praise and thankfulness. I think a song of thanksgiving is as divine worship as tears of penitence, though each in order. If you will wait, and you and I are but twenty, in time he will come around to mother's and my way of thinking. We run the Captain, though he is often victor in the preliminary skirmish. Mother said she had always expected me to be your wife and I have never thought of any one else for a husband."
An hour later they came to the house chatting happily; Dorothy having convinced John that her happiness was dependent upon their marriage; and that before the end of another year Captain Fairfax would give his consent.
John and Richard rode with the Fairfaxes and the Clarks to the ford of the Cumberland and after farewells and many promises of extended visits, left them to continue their journey over the Wilderness Trail to Logan Station; and they returned home.
Two years passed before John saw Dorothy again, though he wrote her many letters sending them by travelers from Virginia to the settlements. He received fewer than he sent, as the travel was mainly to and not from the settlements.
Colonel Campbell, his son, their one servant and Richard Cameron were kept busy through the fall and winter completing their buildings, foraging for grain and roughness for their cattle, more than thirty head, and making necessary clearings for the spring crops. There was not a great deal of clearing, as they used the meadow of nearly a hundred acres across the creek, from which the Indians by their repeated fires had years before burned off the timber to make pasture land for buffalo. More than half of this, after being cleared of briars and bush growth, they expected to cultivate in corn. John and the servants were assigned to this work while Colonel Campbell and Richard attended to the cattle and other duties. Their work was somewhat retarded by immigrants, who, coming through the gap, stopped overnight, sometimes longer, at Campbell's Station, as the place from the first was called. Several traders made a proposition to Colonel Campbell to open a tavern; which he declined, although it was an excellent place for one.