volume one IN THE D U D L E Y C L A R K - Ohio Vine Tours

Her name was Mathilde Oliphante
Dougherty, and he fell in love with her at first sight.
She was the eldest daughter of the same clan who had stopped by the
remnants of his family‘s cabin and helped bury his mother and sister. Old
man Dougherty, Solomon—Sol—was a kind man with cavernous eyes
overhung by enormous outcroppings of brows. If his daughters, and he
had three, had taken their looks from him, they would have been known as
prodigies of unattractiveness throughout the state of Georgia. Fortunately,
however, the young ladies had received their mother’s good looks, as well as
charms, while from their father had devolved a solid practicality and earthy
sense of humor.
After his tears had dried that day, as he walked alongside the family’s
mule, she had sidled up to him and spoken.
“Ma says tears are for washing th’ laundry of angels. Ain’t you got no
other kin?”
She was a head taller, being his elder by three years, and her thick russet
hair was woven into braids. Her dress was of faded, blue calico and ended
just above her bare feet, its tatty hem red from mud dust.
Although he would grow to dominate her in height, would in fact spend
his tenth year growing like a weed in summer, for now he had perforce to
look up into her doe eyes, eyes that beheld him with a soothing calmness and
served to still the cauldron of emotions that boiled inside. He found himself
at ease with this stranger who was also a girl, and the anguish that held
his heart soon enough loosened its grip. When she told him her name, she
explained,
“Everyone calls me Mod. Ma says it’s short for Modesty, which was my
Aunt’s name on my father’s side, but really it’s my initials because my name
is so long.”
He told her his name, and she approved.
He got to know his other sisters as well, Rachel Majesty and Evangeline
Justice, but as with a baby chick, Mod had imprinted first and deepest.
ROY ROGERS IN THE 21ST CENTURY 22