The original manuscript apparently had ye twice in the direct quote found in the second half of Helaman 13:25; the 1830 edition and the printer’s manuscript each read ye for both instances. Beginning with the 1905 LDS edition (but excluding the 1906 large-print LDS edition), the LDS text has read we, which is consistent with the first-person direct quote. This emendation was also adopted by the 1953 RLDS edition.
One could argue here in Helaman 13:25 that there has been a shift from first person to second person in the middle of the sentence in this narrative. There is one example of this kind of shifting in the text but only between complete sentences (see under Alma 56:52 for discussion of this example). Moreover, that example appears to be a third-person abridgment in the midst of a longer first-person narrative. But here in Helaman 13:25, it seems more likely that we have a scribal error—namely, Oliver Cowdery misheard we as the phonetically similar ye in these two places, especially since he had just heard two occurrences of ye, correctly used, in the first half of the verse (“and now when ye talk / ye say …”). Stan Larson identifies the two subsequent instances of ye as errors for we in a footnote on page 569 of his 1978 article “Conjectural Emendation and the Text of the Book of Mormon” (Brigham Young University Studies 18/4: 563–569).
There is one clear example in the original manuscript where Oliver Cowdery initially mixed up we and ye, although this is an example where the correct reading is ye:
In the following example, one that occurred in the printer’s manuscript, Oliver initially wrote ye instead of the correct we; and in this instance, there was a preceding ye that seems to have prompted the error (just as we are proposing here in Helaman 13:25):
In this emendation, the entire quote following ye say becomes indirect. Calabro notes that it is not necessary to emend the second our to your (thus maintaining “in the days of our fathers of old”). In fact, one could argue that the second our led to the replacement of the original your with our. Since both 𝓟 and the 1830 edition are firsthand copies of 𝓞 (no longer extant here), 𝓞 itself must have read our in “if our days”, which means that the error (if there is one here) entered the text when Joseph Smith dictated the text to Oliver Cowdery. Such a replacement of your with our looks more like a visual error since your and our have different vowels, which would mean that Joseph himself misread the your as our.
One problem with this alternative emendation is that there is no evidence in the early transmission of the text for accidental mix-ups of your and our (unlike the mix-ups of ye and we, listed above). Still, there is one example in the printed history where the 1841 compositor set your rather than our:
As discussed under that passage, the 1841 compositor seems to have been influenced by the preceding occurrence of your in that passage (and perhaps also the two occurrences of ye).
Either emendation will work for Helaman 13:25. Ultimately, the question is which error is more plausible. Mishearing we as ye, especially when prompted by surrounding occurrences of ye, seems to be more likely than Joseph Smith misreading your as our because of a following our. The critical text will accept the first emendation but recognize that the second one is also possible.
Summary: The two instances of ye in the direct quote in Helaman 13:25 appear to be an early mishearing on Oliver Cowdery’s part; Joseph Smith probably dictated two occurrences of the phonetically similar we, but Oliver wrote down ye twice in the original manuscript immediately after hearing two correct instances of ye; another possibility is that the original text in Helaman 13:25 read “if your days had been in the days of our fathers of old”, which Joseph Smith could have misread as “if our days had been in the days of our fathers of old” (under the influence of the second our in the clause).