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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Leatherwood God, by William Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Leatherwood God
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+
+Release Date: January, 2005  [EBook #7311]
+This file was first posted on April 11, 2003
+Last Updated: February 25, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LEATHERWOOD GOD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Nathan Harris, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks,
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE LEATHERWOOD GOD
+
+By William Dean Howells
+
+
+Illustrations by Henry Raleigh
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: He was now towering over those near him, with his head
+thrown back, and his hair tossed like a mane on his shoulders]
+
+
+
+
+PUBLISHER'S NOTE
+
+The author thinks it well to apprise the reader that the historical
+outline of this story is largely taken from the admirable narrative of
+Judge Taneyhill in the _Ohio Valley Series_, Robert Clarke Co.,
+Cincinnati. The details are often invented, and the characters are all
+invented as to their psychological evolution, though some are based upon
+those of real persons easily identifiable in that narrative. The drama is
+that of the actual events in its main development; but the vital
+incidents, or the vital uses of them, are the author's. At times he has
+enlarged them; at times he has paraphrased the accounts of the witnesses;
+in one instance he has frankly reproduced the words of the imposter as
+reported by one who heard Dylks's last address in the Temple at
+Leatherwood and as given in the Taneyhill narrative. Otherwise the story
+is effectively fiction.
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+He was now towering over those near him, with his head thrown back, and
+his hair tossed like a mane on his shoulders.
+
+Nancy stood staring at her, with words beyond saying in her heart--words
+that rose in her throat and choked her.
+
+“You believe, maybe, that you would be struck dead if you said the things
+that I do; but why ain't I struck dead?”
+
+“It's _my_ cloth! I spun it, I wove it, every thread! It's all we've
+got for our clothes this winter!”
+
+“_Now_ you can see how it feels to have your own husband slap you.”
+
+She had begun to wash his wound, very gently, though she spoke so
+roughly, while he murmured with the pain and with the comfort of the pain.
+
+They swarmed forward to the altar-place and flung themselves on the
+ground, and heaped the pulpit-steps with their bodies.
+
+“And he went down ag'in, and when he come up ag'in, his face was all
+soakin' wet, like he'd been crying under the water.”
+
+
+
+
+THE LEATHERWOOD GOD
+
+
+Already, in the third decade of the nineteenth century, the settlers in
+the valley of Leatherwood Creek had opened the primeval forest to their
+fields of corn and tobacco on the fertile slopes and rich bottom-lands.
+The stream had its name from the bush growing on its banks, which with its
+tough and pliable bark served many uses of leather among the pioneers;
+they made parts of their harness with it, and the thongs which lifted
+their door-latches, or tied their shoes, or held their working clothes
+together. The name passed to the settlement, and then it passed to the
+man, who came and went there in mystery and obloquy, and remained
+lastingly famed in the annals of the region as the Leatherwood God.
+
+At the time he appeared the community had become a center of influence,
+spiritual as well as material, after a manner unknown to later conditions.
+It was still housed, for the most part, in the log cabins which the
+farmers built when they ceased to be pioneers, but in the older clearings,
+and along the creek a good many frame dwellings stood, and even some of
+brick. The population, woven of the varied strains from the North, East
+and South which have mixed to form the Mid-Western people, enjoyed an ease
+of circumstance not so great as to tempt their thoughts from the other
+world and fix them on this. In their remoteness from the political centers
+of the young republic, they seldom spoke of the civic questions stirring
+the towns of the East; the commercial and industrial problems which vex
+modern society were unknown to them. Religion was their chief interest and
+the seriousness which they had inherited from their Presbyterian,
+Methodist, Lutheran, and Moravian ancestry was expressed in their orderly
+and diligent lives; but the general prosperity had so far relaxed the
+stringency of their several creeds that their distinctive public rite had
+come to express a mutual toleration. The different sects had their
+different services; their ceremonies of public baptism, their revivals,
+their camp-meetings; but they gathered as one Christian people under the
+roof of the log-built edifice, thrice the size of their largest dwelling,
+which they called the Temple.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+A storm of the afternoon before had cleared the mid-August air. The early
+sun was hot, but the wind had carried away the sultry mists, and infused
+fresh life into the day. Where Matthew Braile sat smoking his corncob pipe
+in the covered porchway between the rooms of his double-log cabin he
+insensibly shared the common exhilaration, and waited comfortably for the
+breakfast of bacon and coffee which his wife was getting within. As he
+smoked on he inhaled with the odors from her cooking the dense rich smell
+of the ripening corn that stirred in the morning breeze on three sides of
+the cabin, and the fumes of the yellow tobacco which he had grown, and
+cured, and was now burning. His serenity was a somewhat hawklike repose,
+but the light that came into his narrowed eyes was of rather amused
+liking, as a man on a claybank horse rode up before the cabin in the space
+where alone it was not hidden by the ranks of the tall corn. The man sat
+astride a sack with a grist of corn in one end balanced by a large stone
+in the other, and he made as if he were going on to the mill without
+stopping; but he yielded apparently to a temptation from within, since
+none had come from without. “Whoa!” he shouted at the claybank, which the
+slightest whisper would have stayed; and then he called to the old man on
+the porch, “Fine mornun', Squire!”
+
+Braile took out his pipe, and spat over the edge of the porch, before he
+called back, “Won't you light and have some breakfast?”
+
+“Well, no, thank you, Squire,” the man said, and at the same time he
+roused the claybank from an instant repose, and pushed her to the cabin
+steps. “I'm just on my way down to Brother Hingston's mill, and I reckon
+Sally don't want me to have any breakfast till I bring back the meal for
+her to git it with; anyway that's what she said when I left.” Braile
+answered nothing, and the rider of the claybank added, with a certain
+uneasiness as if for the effect of what he was going to say, “I was up
+putty late last night, and I reckon I overslep',” he parleyed. Then, as
+Braile remained silent, he went on briskly, “I was wonderin' if you hearn
+about the curious doun's last night at the camp-meetun'.”
+
+Braile, said, without ceasing to smoke, “You're the first one I've seen
+this morning, except my wife. She wasn't at the camp-meeting.” His
+aquiline profile, which met close at the lips from the loss of his teeth,
+compressed itself further in leaving the whole burden of the affair to the
+man on the claybank, and his narrowed eyes were a line of mocking under
+the thick gray brows that stuck out like feathers above them.
+
+“Well, sir, it was great doun's,” the other said, wincing a little under
+the old man's indifference. Braile relented so far as to ask, “Who was at
+the bellows?”
+
+The other answered with a certain inward deprecation of the grin that
+spread over his face, and the responsive levity of his phrase, “There was
+a change of hands, but the one that kep' the fire goun' the hardes' and
+the hottes' was Elder Grove.”
+
+Braile made “Hoonck!” in the scornful guttural which no English spelling
+can represent.
+
+“Yes, sir,” the man on the claybank went on, carried forward by his own
+interest, but helpless to deny himself the guilty pleasure of falling in
+with Braile's humor, “he had 'em goun' lively, about midnight, now I tell
+you: whoopun' and yellun', and rippun' and stavun', and fallun' down with
+the jerks, and pullun' and haulun' at the sinners, to git 'em up to the
+mourners' bench, and hurrahun' over 'em, as fast as they was knocked down
+and drug out. I never seen the beat of it in all _my_ born days.”
+
+“You don't make out anything very strange, Abel Reverdy,” Braile said,
+putting his pipe back into his mouth and beginning to smoke it again into
+a lost activity.
+
+“Well, I hain't come to it yit,” Reverdy apologized. “I reckon there
+never was a bigger meetun' in Leatherwood Bottom, anywhere. Folks there
+from twenty mile round, just slathers; I reckon there was a thousand if
+there was one.”
+
+“Hoonch!” Braile would not trouble to take out his pipe in making the
+sound now; the smoke got into his lungs, and he coughed.
+
+Reverdy gained courage to go on, but he went on in the same strain,
+whether in spite of himself or not. “There was as many as four exhorters
+keepun' her up at once to diff'rent tunes, and prayun' and singun'
+everywhere, so you couldn't hear yourself think. Every exhorter had a
+mourners' bench in front of him, and I counted as many as eighty mourners
+on 'em at one time. The most of 'em was settun' under Elder Grove, and he
+was poundun' the kingdom into 'em good and strong. When the Spirit took
+him he roared so that he had the Hounds just flaxed out; you couldn't
+ketch a yelp from 'em.”
+
+“Many Hounds?” Braile asked, in a sort of cold sympathy with the riotous
+outlaws known to the religious by that name.
+
+“Mought been 'fore I got there. But by that time I reckon they was most
+of 'em on the mourners' benches. They ought to tar and feather some of
+them fellers, or ride 'em on a rail anyway, comun' round, and makun'
+trouble on the edge of camp-meetun's. I didn't hear but one toot from
+their horns, last night, and either because the elder had shamed 'em back
+into the shadder of the woods, or brought 'em forwards into the light,
+there wasn't a Hound, not to _call_ a Hound, anywheres. I tell you it
+was a sight, Squire; you ought to 'a' been there yourself.” Reverdy
+grinned at his notion. “They had eight camp-fires goun' instead o' four,
+on top of the highest stageun's yit, so the whole place was lit up as
+bright as day; and when the elder stopped short and sudden, and the other
+exhorters held back their tommyhawks, and all the saints and sinners left
+off their groanun' and jerkun' to see what was comun', now it was a great
+sight, I tell you, Squire. The elder he put up his hand and says he, 'Let
+us pray!' and the blaze from all them stageun's seemed to turn itself
+right onto him, and the smoke and the leaves hung like a big red cloud
+over him, and everybody had their eyes fastened tight on his face, like
+they couldn't turn 'em anywhere else if they tried. But he didn't begin
+prayun' straight off. He seemed to stop, and then says he, 'What shall we
+pray for?' and just then there came a kind of a snort, and a big voice
+shouted out, 'Salvation!' and then there come another snort,--'_Hooff_!'--like
+there was a scared horse got loose right in there among the people; and
+some of 'em jumped up from their seats, and tumbled over the benches,
+and some of 'em bounced off, and fell into fits, and the women screeched
+and fainted, thick as flies. It give me about the worst feelun' I ever
+had in my life: went through me like a ax, and others said the same;
+some of 'em said it was like beun' scared in the dark, or more like when
+you think you're just goun' to die.”
+
+Abel Reverdy stopped for the effect on Braile, who had been smoking
+tranquilly throughout, and who now asked quietly, “And what was it?”
+
+“What was it? A man! A stranger that nobody seen before, and nobody
+suspicioned was there till they hearn him give that kind of snort, and
+they seen him standun' right in front of the mourners' bench under Elder
+Grove's pulpit. He was in his bare head, and he had a suit of long,
+glossy, jet-black hair hengun down back of his ears clean to his
+shoulders. He was kind of pale like, and sad-lookun', and he had a Roman
+nose some like yourn, and eyes like two coals, just black fire, kind of.
+He was putty thickset, round the shoulders, but he slimmed down towards
+his legs, and he stood about six feet high. But the thing of it,” Reverdy
+urged, seeing that Braile remained outwardly unmoved, “was the way he was
+dressed. I s'pose the rest beun' all in brown jeans, and linsey woolsey,
+made us notice it more. He was dressed in the slickest kind of black
+broadcloth, with a long frock-coat, and a white cravat. He had on a
+ruffled shirt, and a tall beaver hat, the color of the fur, and a pair of
+these here high boots, with his breeches strapped down under 'em.”
+
+Braile limbered himself from his splint-bottom chair, and came forward to
+the edge of the porch, as if to be sure of spitting quite under the
+claybank's body. Not until he had folded himself down into his seat again
+and tilted it back did he ask, “Goin' to order a suit?”
+
+“Oh, well!” said Reverdy, with a mingling of disappointed hope, hurt
+vanity, and involuntary pleasure.
+
+If he had been deeply moved by the incident which he had tried to make
+Braile see with his own sense of its impressiveness, it could not have
+been wholly with the hope of impressing Braile that he had stopped to tell
+it. His notion might have been that Braile would ridicule it, and so help
+him throw off the lingering hold which it had upon him. His pain and his
+pleasure both came from Braile's leaving the incident alone and turning
+the ridicule upon him. That was cruel, and yet funny, Reverdy had inwardly
+to own, as it touched the remoteness from a full suit of black broadcloth
+represented by his hickory shirt and his butternut trousers held up by a
+single suspender passing over his shoulder and fastened before and behind
+with wooden pegs. His straw hat, which he had braided himself, and his
+wife had sewed into shape the summer before, was ragged round the brim,
+and a tuft of his yellow hair escaped through a break in the crown. It was
+as far from a tall hat of fur-colored beaver as his bare feet were from a
+pair of high boots such as the stranger at the camp-meeting had worn,
+though his ankles were richly shaded in three colors from the road, the
+field, and the barnyard. He liked the joke so well that the hurt of it
+could hardly keep him from laughing as he thumped his mare's ribs with his
+naked heels and bade her get up.
+
+She fetched a deep sigh, but she did not move.
+
+“Better light,” Braile said; “you wouldn't get that corn ground in time
+for breakfast, now.”
+
+“I reckon,” Reverdy said aloud, but to himself, rather than Braile, and
+with his mind on his wife in the log cabin where he had left her in high
+rebellion which she promised him nothing but a bag of cornmeal could
+reduce, “she don't need to wait for me, exactly. She could grate herself
+some o' the new corn, and she's got some bacon, anyway.”
+
+“Better light,” Braile said again.
+
+The sound of frying which had risen above their voices within had ceased,
+and after a few quick movements of feet over the puncheon floor, with some
+clicking of knives and dishes, the feet came to the door opening on the
+porch and a handsome elderly woman looked out.
+
+She was neatly dressed in a home-woven linsey-woolsey gown, with a blue
+check apron reaching to its hem in front, and a white cloth passed round
+her neck and crossed over her breast; she had a cap on her iron gray hair.
+
+Braile did not visibly note her presence in saying, “The woman will want
+to hear about it.”
+
+“Hear about what?” his wife asked, and then she said to Reverdy, “Good
+morning, Abel. Won't you light and have breakfast with us? It's just
+ready. I reckon Sally will excuse you.”
+
+“Well, she will if _you_ say so, Mrs. Braile.” Reverdy made one
+action of throwing his leg over the claybank's back to the ground, and
+slipping the bridle over the smooth peg left from the limb of the young
+tree-trunk which formed one of the posts of the porch. “My!” he said, as
+he followed his hostess indoors, “you do have things nice. I never come
+here without wantun' to have my old shanty whitewashed inside like yourn
+is, and the logs plastered outside; the mud and moss of that chinkun' and
+daubun' keeps fallun' out, and lettun' all the kinds of weather there is
+in on us, and Sally she's at me about it, too; she's wuss'n I am, if
+anything. I reckon if she had her say we'd have a two-room cabin, too, and
+a loft over both parts, like you have, Mis' Braile, or a frame house,
+even. But I don't believe anybody but you could keep this floor so clean.
+Them knots in the puncheons just shine! And that chimbly-piece with that
+plaster of Paris Samuel prayin' in it; well, if Sally's as't me for a
+Samuel once I reckon she has a hundred times; and that clock! It's a
+pictur'.” He looked about the interior as he took the seat offered him at
+the table, and praised the details of the furnishing with a reference to
+the effect of each at home. In this he satisfied that obscure fealty of
+the husband who feels that such a connection of the absent wife with some
+actual experience of his is equivalent to their joint presence. It was not
+so much to praise Mrs. Braile's belongings to her as to propitiate the
+idea of Mrs. Reverdy that he continued his flatteries. In the meantime
+Braile, who came in behind him, stood easing himself from one foot to the
+other, with an ironical eye slanted at Reverdy from under his shaggy
+brows; he dropped his head now, and began walking up and down the room
+while he listened in a sort of sarcastic patience.
+
+“Ain't you goin' to have anything to eat, Mr. Braile?” his wife demanded,
+with plaintive severity.
+
+Braile pulled at his cob-pipe which muttered responsively, “Not so long
+as I've got anything to smoke. Gets up,” he explained to Reverdy, “and
+jerks it out of my mouth, when we haven't got company.”
+
+“I reckon Abel knows how much to believe of that,” Mrs. Braile commented,
+and Reverdy gave the pleased chuckle of a social inferior raised above his
+level by amiable condescension. But as if he thought it safest to refuse
+any share in this intimacy, he ended his adulations with the opinion, “I
+should say that if these here two rooms was th'owed together they'd make
+half as much as the Temple.”
+
+Braile stopped in his walk and bent his frown on Reverdy, but not in
+anger. “This _is_ the Temple: Temple of Justice--Justice of the
+Peace. Do you people think there's only one kind of temple in Leatherwood?”
+
+Reverdy gave his chuckle again. “Well, Squire, I ought to know, anyway,
+all the log-rollin' I done for you last 'lection time. I didn't hardly
+believe you'd git in, because they said you was a infidel.”
+
+“Well, you couldn't deny it, could you?” Braile asked, with increasing
+friendliness in his frown.
+
+“No, I couldn't deny it, Squire. But the way I told 'em to look at it
+was, Mis' Braile was Christian enough for the whole family. Said
+_you_ knowed more law and _she_ knowed more gospel than all the
+rest of Leatherwood put together.”
+
+“And that was what elected the family, was it?” Braile asked. “Well, I
+hope Mrs. Braile won't refuse to serve,” he said, and he began his walk
+again. “Tell her about that horse that broke into the meetin' last night,
+and tried to play man.”
+
+Reverdy laughed, shaking his head over his plate of bacon and reaching
+for the corn-pone which Mrs. Braile passed him. “You do beat all, Squire,
+the way you take the shine off of religious experience. Why,” he addressed
+himself to Mrs. Braile, “it wasn't much, as fur as anybody could make out.
+It was just the queerness of the whole thing.” Reverdy went over the facts
+again, beginning with deprecation for the Squire but gathering respect for
+them in the interest they seemed to have for Mrs. Braile.
+
+She listened silently, and then she asked, “And what became of him?”
+
+“Well, that's where you got me, Mrs. Braile. Don't anybody know what
+become of him. Just kind of went out like a fire, when the Power was
+workun' the hardest, and wasn't there next time you looked where he been.
+Kind o' th'owed cold water on the meetun' and folks begun goun' home, and
+breakun' up and turnun' in; well it was pretty nigh sun-up, anyway, by
+that time. I don't know! Made me feel all-overish. Seemed like I'd been
+dreamun' and that man was a Vision.” Reverdy had lifted an enraptured
+face, but at sight of Braile pausing in sarcastic pleasure, he dropped his
+head with a snicker. “I know the Squire'll laugh. But that's the way it
+was.”
+
+“He'll laugh the other side of his mouth, some day, if he keeps on,” Mrs.
+Braile said with apparent reproof and latent pride. “Was Sally at the
+meetin' with you?”
+
+“Well, no, she wasn't,” Reverdy began, and Braile asked:
+
+“And did you wake her up and tell her about it?”
+
+“Well, no, I didn't, Squire, that's a fact. She woke me up. I just crep'
+in quiet and felt out the soft side of a puncheon for a nap, and the firs'
+thing I know was Sally havin' me by the shoulder, and wantun' to know
+about gittun' that corn groun' for breakfas'. My! I don't know what she'll
+say, when I do git back.” Reverdy laughed a fearful pleasure, but his
+gaiety was clouded by a shadow projected from the cabin door.
+
+“Well, I mought 'a' knowed it!” a voice at once fond and threatening
+called to Reverdy's quailing figure. The owner of the voice was a young
+woman unkempt as to the pale hair which escaped from the knot at her neck,
+and stuck out there and dangled about her face in spite of the attempts
+made to gather it under the control of the high horn comb holding its main
+strands together. The lankness of her long figure showed in the calico
+wrapper which seemed her sole garment; and her large features were
+respectively lank in their way, nose and chin and high cheek bones; her
+eyes wabbled in their sockets with the sort of inquiring laughter that
+spread her wide, loose mouth. She was barefooted, like Reverdy, on whom
+her eyes rested with a sort of burlesque menace, so that she could not
+turn them to Mrs. Braile in the attention which manners required of her,
+even when she added, “I just 'spicioned that he'd 'a' turned in here,
+soon's I smelt your breakfas', Mrs. Braile; and the dear knows whether I
+blame him so much, nuther.”
+
+“Then you'd better draw up too, Sally,” Mrs. Braile said, without
+troubling herself to rise from her own chair in glancing toward another
+for Mrs. Reverdy.
+
+“Oh, no, I couldn't, Mrs. Braile. I on'y just meant how nice it smelt. I
+got me somepin at home before I left, and I ain't a bit hungry.”
+
+“Well, then, you eat breakfast for _me_; _I'm_ hungry,” the
+Squire said. “Sit down! You couldn't get Abel away now, not if you went on
+an hour. Don't separate families!”
+
+“Well, just as you say, Squire,” Mrs. Reverdy snickered, and she
+submitted to pull up the chair which Mrs. Braile's glance had suggested.
+“It beats all what a excitement there is in this town about the goun's on
+at the camp-meetun', last night. If I've heard it from one I've heard it
+from a dozen. I s'pose Abel's tol' you?”--she addressed herself
+impartially to Mrs. Braile across the table and to the Squire tilted
+against the wall in his chair, smoking behind his wife.
+
+“Not a word,” the Squire said, and his wife did not trouble herself to
+protest; Reverdy opened his mouth in a soundless laugh at the Squire's
+humor, and then filled it with bacon and corn-pone, and ducked his head in
+silence over his plate. “What goings on?”
+
+“Why, that man that came in while Elder Grove was snatchun' the brands
+from the burnun', and snorted like a horse--But I _know_ Abel's tol'
+you! It's just like one of your jokes, Squire Braile; ain't it, Mrs.
+Braile?” Sally referred herself to one and the other.
+
+“You won't get either of us to say, Sally,” Mrs. Braile let the Squire
+answer for both. “You'd better go on. I couldn't hear too often about a
+man that snorted like a horse, if Abel _did_ tell. What did the
+horses hitched back of the tents think about it? Any of 'em try to shout
+like a man?”
+
+“Well, you may laugh, Squire Braile,” Sally said with a toss of her head
+for the dignity she failed of. She slumped forward with a laugh, and when
+she lifted her head she said through the victual that filled her mouth, “I
+dunno what the horses thought, but the folks believe it was a apostle, or
+somepin.”
+
+“Who said so? Abel?” “Oh, pshaw! D'you suppose I b'lieve anythin' Abel
+Reverdy says?” and this gave Reverdy a joy which she shared with him; he
+tried to impart it to Mrs. Braile, impassively pouring him a third cup of
+coffee. “I jes' met Mis' Leonard comun' up the crossroad, and she tol' me
+she saw our claybank hitched here, and I s'picioned Abel was'nt fur off,
+and that's why I stopped.”
+
+The husband and wife looked across the table in feigned fear and threat
+that gave them pleasure beyond speech.
+
+“She didn't say it was your claybank that snorted?” the Squire gravely
+inquired.
+
+“Squire Braile, you surely will kill me,” and the husband joined the wife
+in a shout of laughter. “Now I can't hardly git back to what she
+_did_ say. But, I can tell you, it wasn't nawthun' to laugh at.
+Plenty of 'em keeled over where they sot, and a lot bounced up and down
+like it was a earthquake and pretty near all the women screamed. But he
+stood there, straight as a ramrod, and never moved a eye-winker. She said
+his face was somepin awful: just as solemn and still! He never spoke after
+that one word 'Salvation,' but every once in a while he snorted. Nobody
+seen him come in, or ever seen him before till he first snorted, and then
+they didn't see anybody else. The preacher, he preached along, and tried
+to act like as if nowthun' had happened, but it was no use; nobody didn't
+hardly pay no attention to him 'ceptun' the stranger himself; he never
+took his eyes off Elder Grove; some thought he was tryun' to charm him,
+like a snake does a bird; but it didn't faze the elder.”
+
+“Elder too old a bird?” the Squire suggested.
+
+“Yes, I reckon he mought been,” Sally innocently assented.
+
+“And when he gave the benediction, the snorter disappeared in a flash,
+with a strong smell of brimstone, I suppose?”
+
+“Why, that was the thing of it, Squire. He just stayed, and shuck hands
+with everybody, pleasant as a basket of chips; and he went home with David
+Gillespie. He was just as polite to the poorest person there, but it was
+the big bugs that tuck the most to him.”
+
+“Well,” the Squire summed up, “I don't see but what your reports agree,
+and I reckon there must be some truth in 'em. Who's that up there at the
+pike-crossing?” He did not trouble himself to do more than frown heavily
+in the attempt to make out the passer. Mrs. Reverdy jumped from her chair
+and ran out to look.
+
+“Well, as sure as I'm alive, if it ain't that Gillespie girl! I bet
+she'll know all about it. I'll just ketch up with her and git the news out
+of her, if there is any. Say, say, Jane!” she called to the girl, as she
+ran up the road with the cow-like gait which her swirling skirt gave her.
+The girl stopped for her; then in apparent haste she moved on again, and
+Sally moved with her out of sight; her voice still made itself heard in
+uncouth cries and laughter.
+
+Braile called into the kitchen where Reverdy had remained in the
+enjoyment of Mrs. Braile's patient hospitality, “Here's your chance, Abel!”
+
+“Chance?” Reverdy questioned back with a full mouth.
+
+“To get that corn of yours ground, and beat Sally home.”
+
+“Well, Squire,” Reverdy said, “I reckon you're right.” He came out into
+the open space where Braile sat. “Well, I won't fergit _this_
+breakfast very soon,” he offered his gratitude to Mrs. Braile over his
+shoulder, as he passed through the door.
+
+“You're welcome, Abel,” she answered kindly, and when he had made his
+manners to the impassive Squire and mounted his claybank and thumped the
+horse into motion with his naked heels, she came out into the porch and
+said to her husband, “I don't know as I liked your hinting him out of the
+house that way.”
+
+Braile did not take the point up, but remained thoughtfully smiling in
+the direction his guest had taken. “The idea is that most people marry
+their opposites,” he remarked, “and that gives the children the advantage
+of inheriting their folly from two kinds of fools. But Abel and Sally are
+a perfect pair, mental and moral twins; the only thing they don't agree in
+is their account of what became of that snorting exhorter. But the
+difference there isn't important. If an all-wise Providence has kept them
+from transmitting a double dose of the same brand of folly to posterity,
+that's one thing in favor of Providence.” He took up his wife's point now.
+“If I hadn't hinted him away, he'd have stayed to dinner; _you_
+wouldn't have hinted him away if he'd stayed to supper.”
+
+“Well, are you going to have some breakfast?” his wife asked. “I'll get
+you some fresh coffee.”
+
+“Well, I _would_ like a little--with the head on--Martha, that's a
+fact. Have I got time for another pipe?”
+
+“No, I don't reckon you have,” his wife said, and she passed into the
+kitchen again, where she continued to make such short replies as Braile's
+discourse required of her.
+
+He knocked his pipe out on the edge of his still uptilted chair, as he
+talked. “One fool like Abel I can stand, and I was just going to come in
+when Sally came in sight; and then I knew that two fools like Abel would
+make me sick. So I waited till the Creator of heaven and earth could get a
+minute off and help me out. But He seemed pretty busy with the solar
+system this morning, and I had about given up when He sent that Gillespie
+girl in sight. I knew that would fetch Sally; but it was an inspiration of
+my own to suggest Abel's chance to him; I don't want to put that on your
+Maker, Martha.”
+
+“It was your inspiration to get him to stay in the first place,” Mrs.
+Braile said within.
+
+“No, Martha; that was my unfailing obedience to the sacred laws of
+hospitality; I _didn't_ expect to fall under their condemnation a
+second time, though.” Mrs. Braile did not answer, and by the familiar
+scent from within, Braile knew that his coffee must be nearly ready. As he
+dropped his chair forward, he heard a sound of frying, and “Pshaw,
+Martha!” he called. “You're not getting me some fresh bacon?”
+
+“Did you suppose there'd be some left?” she demanded, while she stepped
+to and fro at her labors. Her steps ceased and she called, “Well, come in
+now, Matthew, if you don't want _every_thing to get cold, like the
+pone is.”
+
+Braile obeyed, saying, “Oh, I can stand cold _pone_,” and at sight
+of the table with the coffee and bacon renewed upon it, he mocked
+tenderly, “Now just to reward you, Martha, I've got half a mind to go with
+you to the next meeting in the Temple.”
+
+“I don't know as I'm goin' myself,” she said, pouring the coffee.
+
+“I wish you would, just to please me,” he teased.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+No one could say quite how it happened that the stranger went home from
+the camp-meeting with old David Gillespie and his girl. Many had come
+forward with hospitable offers, and the stranger had been affable with
+all; but he had slipped through the hands he shook and had parried the
+invitations made him. Gillespie had not seemed to invite him, and his shy
+daughter had shrunk aside when the chief citizens urged their claims; yet
+the stranger went with them to their outlying farm, and spent all the next
+day there alone in the tall woods that shut its corn fields in.
+
+Sally Reverdy had failed to get any light from the Gillespie girl when
+she ran out from Squire Braile's cabin. The girl seemed still under the
+spell that had fallen upon many at the meeting, and it appeared to Sally
+that she did not want to talk; at any rate she did not talk to any
+satisfactory end. A squirrel hunter believed he had caught a glimpse of
+the stranger in the chestnut woods behind the Gillespie spring-house, but
+he was not a man whose oath was acceptable in the community and his belief
+was not generally shared. It was thought that the stranger would reappear
+at the last night of the camp-meeting, but the Gillespies came without
+him, and reported that they had expected he would come by himself.
+
+The camp-meeting broke up after the Sunday morning service and most of
+the worshipers, sated with their devotional experience, went home,
+praising the Power in song as they rode away in the wagons laden with
+their camp furniture, and their children strewn over the bedding. But for
+others, the fire of the revival burned through the hot, long, August
+Sabbath day, and a devout congregation crowded the Temple.
+
+The impulse of the week past held over to the night unabated. The
+spacious log-built house was packed from wall to wall; the men stood
+dense; the seats were filled with women; only a narrow path was left below
+the pulpit for those who might wish to rise and confess Christ before the
+congregation. The people waited in a silence broken by their deep
+breathing, their devout whispering, the scraping of their feet; now and
+then a babe, whose mother could not leave it at home, wailed pitifully or
+spitefully till it was coaxed or scolded still; now and then some one
+coughed. The air was thick; a bat scandalized the assemblage by flying in
+at the open door, and wavering round the tallow candles on the pulpit; one
+of the men beat it down with his hat, and then picked it up and crowded
+his way down the aisle, out into the night with it. When he came back it
+was as if he had found the stranger whom they were all consciously
+expecting, and had brought him in with David Gillespie and his girl. She
+was tall and straight, like her father, and her hair was red, like his;
+her eyes were gray blue, and the look in them was both wilful and dreamy.
+
+The stranger smiled and took the hands stretched out to him in passing by
+several of the different sectarians who used the Temple. Gillespie seemed
+not to notice or to care for the greetings to his guest, and his girl wore
+her wonted look of vague aloofness.
+
+Matthew Braile had been given a seat at the front, perhaps in deference
+to his age and dignity; perhaps in confusion at his presence. He glanced
+up at the stranger with a keen glint through his branching eyebrows, and
+made a guttural sound; his wife pushed him; and he said; “What?” and “Oh!”
+ quite audibly; and she pushed him again for answer.
+
+The Gillespies sat down with the stranger in the foremost bench. He wore
+the black broadcloth coat of the Friday night before; his long hair,
+combed back from his forehead, fell down his shoulders almost to his
+middle; the glances of his black eyes roved round the room, but were
+devoutly lowered at the prayer which opened the service. It was a
+Methodist who preached, but somehow to-night he had not the fervor of his
+sect; his sermon was cold, and addressed itself to the faith rather than
+the hope of his hearers. He spoke as from the hold of an oppressive spell;
+at times he was perplexed, and lost his place in his exhortation. In the
+close heat some drowsed, and the preacher was distracted by snoring from a
+corner near the door. He lifted his voice as if to rouse the sleeper, or
+to drown the noise; but he could not. He came to the blessing at last, and
+the disappointed congregation rose to go out. Suddenly the loud snort that
+had dismayed the camp-meeting sounded through the heavy air, and then
+there came the thrilling shout of “Salvation.”
+
+The people did not need to look where the stranger had been sitting; he
+had done what they hoped, what they expected, and he was now towering over
+those near him, with his head thrown back, and his hair tossed like a mane
+on his shoulders. The people stopped; some who had gone out crowded in
+again; no one knew quite what to do. The minister halted on the pulpit
+stairs; he had done his part for the night, and he did not apparently
+resent the action of the man who now took it on him to speak.
+
+A tall, stout man among those who had lingered, spoke from the aisle. He
+was the owner of the largest farm in the neighborhood and he had one of
+the mills on the creek. In his quality of miller everybody knew him, and
+he had the authority of a public character. Now he said:
+
+“We want to hear something more than a snort and a shout from our brother
+here. We heard _them_ Friday night, and we've been talkin' about it
+ever since.”
+
+The appeal was half joking, half entreating. The minister was still
+hesitating on the pulpit stairs, and he looked at the stranger. “Will you
+come up, Brother--”
+
+“Call me Dylks--for the present,” the stranger answered with a full voice.
+
+“Brother Dylks,” the minister repeated, and he came down, and gave him
+the right hand of fellowship.
+
+The Gillespies looked on with their different indifference. Dylks turned
+to them: “Shall I speak?”
+
+“Speak!” the girl said, but her father said nothing.
+
+Dylks ran quickly up the pulpit steps: “We will join in prayer!” he
+called out, and he held the congregation, now returned to their places, in
+the spell of a quick, short supplication. He ended it with the Lord's
+Prayer; then he said, “Let us sing,” and line after line he gave out the
+hymn,
+
+  “Plunged in a gulf of dark despair
+   We wretched sinners lay.”
+
+He expounded each stanza, as to the religious sense and the poetic
+meaning, before he led the singing. He gave out a passage of Scripture, as
+a sort of text, but he did not keep to it; he followed with other
+passages, and his discourse was a rehearsal of these rather than a sermon.
+His memory in them was unerring; women who knew their Bibles by heart
+sighed their satisfaction in his perfectness; they did not care for the
+relevance or irrelevance of the passages; all was Scripture, all was the
+one inseparable Word of God, dreadful, blissful, divine, promising heaven,
+threatening hell. Groans began to go up from the people held in the strong
+witchery of the man's voice. They did not know whether he spoke long or
+not. Before they knew, he was as if sweeping them to their feet with a
+repetition of his opening hymn, and they were singing with him:
+
+  “Plunged in a gulf of dark despair
+   We wretched sinners lay.”
+
+It ended, and he gave his wild brutish snort, and then his heart-shaking
+cry of “Salvation!”
+
+Some of the chief men remained to speak with him, to contend for him as
+their guest; but old David Gillespie did not contend with them. “You can
+have him,” he said to the miller, Peter Hingston, “if he wants to go with
+you.” He was almost rude, and his daughter was not opener with the women
+who crowded about her trying to make her say something that would feed
+their hunger to know more. She remained hard and cold, almost dumb; it
+seemed to them that she was not worthy to have had him under her father's
+roof. As for her father, they had no patience with him for not putting in
+a word to claim the stranger while the others were pressing him to come
+home with them. In spite of the indifference of Gillespie and his girl,
+Dylks elected to remain with them, and when he could pull himself from the
+crowd he went away into the night between them.
+
+When Matthew Braile made his escape with his wife from the crowd and
+began to walk home through the dim, hot night, he said, “Is Jane Gillespie
+any particular hand at fried chicken?”
+
+“Now you stop, Matthew!” his wife said.
+
+“Because that would account for it. I reckon it was fried chicken the
+ravens brought to Elijah. All men of God are fond of fried chicken.”
+
+His wife would not dispute directly with his perversity; she knew that in
+this mood of his it would be useless trying to make him partake the wonder
+she shared with her neighbors that the stranger had chosen David Gillespie
+again for his host out of the many leading men who had pressed their
+hospitality upon him, and that he should have preferred his apathy to
+their eagerness.
+
+“I wish he had worn his yellow beaver hat in the pulpit,” Braile went on.
+“It must have been a disappointment to Abe Reverdy, but perhaps he
+consoled himself with a full sight of the fellow's long hair. He ought to
+part it in the middle, like Thomas Jefferson, and do it up in a knot like
+a woman. Well, we can't have everything, even in a man of God; but maybe
+he isn't really a man of God. That would account for a good many things.
+But I think he shows taste in preferring old Gillespie to Peter Hingston;
+next to Abe Reverdy he's the biggest fool in Leatherwood. Maybe the
+prophet knew by instinct that there would be better fried chicken at
+Gillespie's.”
+
+His wife disdained to make a direct answer. “You may be sure they give
+him of their best, whatever it is. And the Gillespies may be poor, but
+when it comes to respectability and good works they've got a right to hold
+their heads up with the best in this settlement. That girl has done all
+the work of the house since her mother died, when she wasn't a little
+thing half grown; and old David has slaved off his mortgage till his
+farm's free and clear; and he don't owe anybody a cent.”
+
+“Oh, I don't say anything against Gillespie; all I say is that Brother
+Dylks knows which side his bread is buttered on; inspired, probably.”
+
+“What makes you so bitter, to-night, Matthew?” his wife halted him a
+little, with her question.
+
+“Well, the Temple always leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I hate to see
+brethren agreeing together in unity. You oughtn't to have taken me,
+Martha.”
+
+“I'll never take you again!” she said.
+
+“And that man's a rascal, if ever there was one. Real men of God don't
+wear their hair down to their waists and come snorting and shouting in
+black broadcloth to a settlement like this for the good of folks' souls.”
+
+“You've got no right to say that, Matthew. And if you go round talking
+that way you'll make yourself more unpopular than you are already.”
+
+“Oh, I'll be careful, Martha. I'll just think it, and perhaps put two or
+three of the leading intellects like Abe and Sally on their guard. But
+come, come, Martha! You know as well as I do, he's a rascal. Don't you
+believe it?”
+
+“I believe in giving everybody a chance. Don't your own law books say a
+man's innocent till he's proved guilty?”
+
+“Something like that. And I'm not trying Brother Dylks in open court at
+present. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt if he's ever brought
+before my judgment seat. But you've got to allow that his long hair and
+black broadcloth and his snort and shout are against him.”
+
+“I don't believe in them any more than you do,” she owned. “But don't you
+persecute him because he's religious, Matthew.”
+
+“Oh, I don't object to him because he's religious, though I think there's
+more religion in Leatherwood already than any ten towns would know what to
+do with. He's got to do more than preach his brand of religion before I'd
+want to trouble him.”
+
+They were at the hewn log which formed the step to the porch between the
+rooms of their cabin. A lank hound rose from the floor, and pulled himself
+back from his forward-planted paws, and whimpered a welcome to them; a
+captive coon rattled his chain from his corner under the porch roof.
+
+“Why don't you let that poor thing go, Matthew?” Mrs. Braile asked.
+
+“Well, I will, some day. But the little chap that brought it to me was
+like our--”
+
+He stopped; both were thinking the same thing and knew they were. “I saw
+the likeness from the first, too,” the wife said.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+The Gillespies arrived at their simpler log cabin half an hour later than
+the Brailes at theirs. It was on the border of the settlement, and beyond
+it for a mile there was nothing but woods, walnut and chestnut and
+hickory, not growing thickly as the primeval forest grew to the northward
+along the lake, but standing openly about in the pleasant park-like
+freedom of the woods-pastures of that gentler latitude. Beyond the wide
+stretch of trees and meadow lands, the cornfields and tobacco patches
+opened to the sky again. On their farther border stood a new log cabin,
+defined by its fresh barked logs in the hovering dark.
+
+Gillespie pulled the leatherwood latch-string which lifted the catch of
+his door, and pushed it open. “Go in, Jane,” he said to his daughter, and
+the girl vanished slimly through, with a glance over her shoulder at Dylks
+where he stood aloof a few steps from her father.
+
+Gillespie turned to his guest. “Did you see her?” he asked.
+
+“Yes, I walked over to her house this morning.”
+
+“Did any one see _you_?”
+
+“No. Her man was away.”
+
+Gillespie turned with an effect of helplessness, and looked down at the
+wood-pile where he stood. “I don't know,” he said, “what keeps me from
+spliting your head open with that ax.”
+
+“I do,” Dylks said.
+
+“Man!” the old man threatened, “Don't go too far.”
+
+“It wasn't the fear of God which you pretend is in your heart, but the
+fear of man.” Dylks added with a vulgar drop from the solemn words, “You
+would hang for it. I haven't put myself in your power without counting all
+the costs to both of us.”
+
+Gillespie waved his answer off with an impatient hand.
+
+“Did she know you?”
+
+“Why not? It hasn't been so long. I haven't changed so much. I wear my
+hair differently, and I dress better since I've been in Philadelphia. She
+knew me in a minute as well as I knew her. I didn't ask for her present
+husband; I thought one at a time was enough.”
+
+“What are you going to do?”
+
+“Nothing--first. I might have told her she had been in a hurry. But if
+she don't bother me, I won't her. We got as far as that. And I reckon she
+won't, but I thought we'd better have a clear understanding, and she knows
+now it's bigamy in her case, and bigamy's a penitentiary offense. I made
+that clear. And now see here, David: I'm going to stay here in this
+settlement, and I don't want any trouble from you, no matter what you
+think of my doings, past, present, or future. I don't want you to say
+anything, or _look_ anything. Don't you let on, even to that girl of
+yours, that you ever saw me before in your life. If you do, you'll wish
+you _had_ split my head open with that ax. But I'm not afraid; I've
+got you safe, and I've got your sister safe.”
+
+Gillespie groaned. Then he said desperately, “Listen here, Joseph Dylks!
+I know what you're after, here, because you always was: other people's
+money. I've got three hundred dollars saved up since I paid off the
+mortgage. If you'll take it and go--”
+
+“Three hundred dollars! No, no! Keep your money, old man. I don't rob the
+poor.” Dylks lifted himself, and said with that air of mysterious mastery
+which afterwards won so many to his obedience, “I work my work. Let no man
+gainsay me or hinder me.” He walked to and fro in the starlight, swelling,
+with his head up and his mane of black hair cloudily flying over his
+shoulders as he turned. “I come from God.”
+
+Gillespie looked at him as he paced back and forth. “If I didn't know you
+for a common scoundrel that married my sister against my will, and lived
+on her money till it was gone, and then left her and let her believe he
+was dead, I might believe you _did_ come from God--or the Devil,
+you--you turkey cock, you stallion! But you can't prance _me_ down, or
+snort me down. I don't agree to anything. I don't say I won't tell who you
+are when it suits me. I won't promise to keep it from this one or that one
+or any one. I'll let you go just so far, and then--”
+
+“All right, David, I'll trust you, as I trust your sister. Between you
+I'm safe. And now, you lay low! That's my advice.” He dropped from his
+mystery and his mastery to a level of colloquial teasing. “I'm going to
+rest under your humble roof to-night, and to-morrow I'm going to the
+mansion of Peter Hingston. His gates will be set wide for me, and all the
+double log-cabin palaces and frame houses of this royal city of
+Leatherwood will hunger for my presence. You could always hold your
+tongue, David, and you can easily leave all the whys and wherefores to me.
+I won't go from your hospitality with an ungrateful tongue; I will
+proclaim before the assembled multitudes in your temple that I left you
+secure in the faith, and that I turned to others because they needed me
+more. I am not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance; they
+will understand that. So good night, David, and good morning. I shall be
+gone before even you are up.”
+
+Gillespie made no answer as he followed his guest indoors. Long before he
+slept he heard the man's powerful breathing like that of some strong
+animal in its sleep; an ox lying in the field, or a horse standing in its
+stall. At times it broke chokingly and then he snorted it smooth and
+regular again. At daybreak Gillespie thought of rising, but he drowsed,
+and he was asleep when his daughter came to the foot of the ladder which
+climbed to his chamber in the cabin loft, and called to him that his
+breakfast was ready.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+The figure of a woman who held her hooded shawl under her chin, stole
+with steps often checked through the limp, dew-laden grass of the
+woods-pasture and slipped on the rotting logs. But she caught herself from
+tumbling, and safely gained the border of Gillespie's corn field. There
+she sat down trembling on the stone doorstep of the spring-house, and
+waited rather than rested in the shelter of the chestnut boughs that
+overhung the roof. She was aware of the spring gurgling under the stone on
+its way into the sunshine, from the crocks of cream-covered milk and of
+butter in the cool dark of the hut; she sensed the thick August heat of
+the sun already smiting its honeyed odors from the corn; she heard the
+scamper of the squirrels preying upon the ripening ears, and whisking in
+and out of the woods or dropping into the field from the tips of the
+boughs overhanging the nearer rows; but it all came blurred to her
+consciousness.
+
+She was recognizably Gillespie's sister, but her eyes and hair were
+black. She was wondering how she could get to speak with him when Jane was
+not by. He would send the girl away at a sign from her, but she could not
+have that; the thing must be kept from the girl but not seem to be kept.
+
+She let her arms rest on her knees; her helpless hands hung heavy from
+them; her head was bowed, and her whole body drooped under the burden of
+her heart, as if it physically dragged her down. Jane would be coming soon
+with the morning's milk to pour into the crocks; she heard a step; the
+girl was coming; but she must rest a moment.
+
+“What are you doing here, Nancy?” her brother's voice asked.
+
+“Oh, is it you, David? Oh, blessed be the name of the Lord! Maybe He's
+going to be good to me, after all. David, is he gone?”
+
+“He's gone, Nancy.”
+
+“In anger?”
+
+“He's gone; I don't care whether he's gone in anger or not.”
+
+“Did he tell you he saw me?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“And did you promise him not to tell on him? To Jane? To any one?”
+
+“No.” Gillespie stood holding a bucket of milk in his hand; she sat
+gathering her shawl under her chin as if she were still coming through the
+suncleft shadows of the woods pasture.
+
+“Oh, David!”
+
+“What do you want me to do, Nancy?”
+
+“I don't know, I don't know. I haven't slept all night.”
+
+“You mustn't give way like this. Don't you see any duty for you in this
+matter?”
+
+“Duty? Oh, David!” Her heart forboded the impossible demand upon it.
+
+Gillespie set his bucket of milk down beside the spring. “Nancy,” he
+said, “a woman cannot have two husbands. It's a crime against the State.
+It's a sin against God.”
+
+“But I haven't _got_ two husbands! What do you mean, David? Didn't I
+believe he was dead? Didn't you? Oh, David, what--Do you think I've done
+wrong? You let me do it!”
+
+“I don't think you've done wrong; but look out you don't do it. You
+_are_ doing it, now. I can't let you do it. I can't let you live in
+sin!”
+
+“In sin? Me?”
+
+“You. Every minute you live now with Laban you live in sin. Your first
+husband, that was dead, is alive. He can't claim you unless you allow it;
+but neither can your second husband, now. If you live on with Laban a day
+longer--an hour--a minute--you live in deadly sin. I thought of it all
+night but I had not thought it out till this minute when I first saw you
+sitting there and I knew how miserable you were, and my heart seemed to
+bleed at the sight of you.”
+
+“You may well say that, David,” the woman answered with a certain pride
+in the vastness of her calamity. “If it was another woman I couldn't bear
+to think of it. _Why_ does He do it? _Why_ does He set such
+traps for us?”
+
+“Nancy!” her brother called sternly.
+
+“Oh, yes, it's easy enough for you! But if Rachel was here, she'd see it
+different.”
+
+“Woman!” her brother said, “don't try to hide behind the dead in your sin.”
+
+“It's _no_ sin! I was as innocent as the babe unborn when I married
+Laban--as innocent as he was, poor boy, when he would _have_ me; and
+we all thought _he_ was dead. Oh, _why_ couldn't he have been
+dead?”
+
+“This is murder you have in your heart now, Nancy,” the old man said,
+with who knows what awful pleasure in his casuistry, so pitilessly
+unerring. “If the life of that wicked man could buy you safety in your sin
+you could wish it taken.”
+
+“Oh, oh, oh! What shall I do, what shall I do.” She wailed out the words
+with her head fallen forward on her knees, and her loose hair dripping
+over them.
+
+“Do? Go home, and bring your little one, and come to me. I will deal with
+Laban when he gets back tonight.”
+
+She started erect. “And let him think I've left him? And the neighbors,
+let them think we've quarreled, and I couldn't live with him?”
+
+“It won't matter what the world thinks,” Gillespie said, and he spoke of
+the small backwoods settlement as if it were some great center of opinion
+such as in great communities dispenses fame and infamy, and makes its
+judgments supremely dreaded. “Besides,” he faltered, “no one is knowing
+but ourselves to his coming back. It can seem as if _he_ left
+_you_.”
+
+“And I live such a lie as that? Is this _you_, David?”
+
+It was she who rose highest now, as literally she did, in standing on the
+stone where she had crouched, above the level of his footing.
+
+“I--I say it to spare you, Nancy. I don't wish it. But I wish to make it
+easy--or a little bit easier--something you can bear better.”
+
+“Oh, I know, David, I know! You would save me if you could. But maybe--maybe
+it ain't what we think it is. Maybe he was outlawed by staying away so long?”
+
+Neither of them named Dylks, but each knew whom the other meant,
+throughout their talk.
+
+“A lawyer might let you think so till he got all your money.”
+
+“Matthew Braile wouldn't.”
+
+“That infidel?”
+
+She drooped again. “Oh, well, I must do it. I must do it. I'll go and get
+ready and I'll come to you. What will Jane think?”
+
+“I'll take care of what Jane thinks. When do you expect Laban back?”
+
+“Not before sundown. I'll not come till I see him.”
+
+“We'll be ready for you.” He moved now to open the spring-house door; she
+turned and was lost to him in the lights and shadows of the woods-pasture.
+On its further border her cabin stood, and from it came the sound of a
+pitiful wail; at the back door a little child stood, staying itself by the
+slats let into grooves in the jambs. She had left it in its low cradle
+asleep, and it must have waked and clambered out and crept to the barrier
+and been crying for her there; its small face was soaked with tears.
+
+She ran forward with long leaps out of the cornfield and caught it to her
+neck and mumbled its wet cheeks with hungry kisses. “Oh, my honey, my
+honey! Did it think its mother had left--”
+
+She stopped at the word with a pang, and began to go about the rude place
+that was the simple home where after years of hell she had found an
+earthly heaven. Often she stopped, and wondered at herself. It seemed
+impossible she could be thinking it, be doing it, but she was thinking and
+doing it, and at sundown, when she knew by the eager shadow of a man in
+the doorway, pausing to listen if the baby were awake, all had been
+thought and done.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+The emotional frenzies, recurring through the day, were past, and she
+could speak steadily to the man, in the absence of greeting which often
+emphasizes the self-forgetfulness of love as well as marks the
+formlessness of common life: “Your supper's waitin' for you, Laban; I've
+had mine; you must be hungry. It's out in the shed; it's cooler there. Go
+round; baby's asleep.”
+
+The man obeyed, and she heard him drop the bucket into the well, and lift
+it by the groaning sweep, and pour the water into the basin, and then
+splash himself, with murmurs of comfort, presently muffled in the towel.
+Her hearing followed him through his supper, and she knew he was
+obediently eating it, and patiently waiting for her to account for
+whatever was unwonted in her greeting. She loved him most of all for his
+boylike submission to her will and every caprice of it, but now she hardly
+knew how to deny his tacit question as he ventured in from the shed.
+
+“Don't come near me, Laban,” she said with a stony quiet. “Don't touch
+me. I ain't your wife, any more.”
+
+He could not speak at first; then it was like him to ask, “Why--why--What
+have I done, Nancy?”
+
+“_You_, you poor soul?” she answered. “Nothing but good, all your
+days! He's come back.”
+
+He knew whom she meant, but he had to ask, “Joseph Dylks? Why I thought
+he was--”
+
+“Don't say it! It's murder! I don't want you to have his blood on you
+_too_. Oh, if he was _only_ dead! Yes, yes! I have a right to
+wish it! Oh, God be merciful to me, a sinner!”
+
+“When--when--how did you know it, Nancy?”
+
+“Yesterday morning or day before--just after you left. I reckon he was
+waitin' for you to go. I'm glad you went first.” The man looked up at the
+rifle resting on the pegs above the fireplace. “Laban, don't!” she cried.
+“_I_ looked at it when he was walkin' away, and I know what you're
+thinkin'.”
+
+“What is he goin' to do?” the man asked from his daze.
+
+“Nothing. He said he wouldn't do nothing if I didn't. If he hadn't said
+it I might believe it!”
+
+Laban shifted his weight where he stood from one foot to the other.
+
+“He passed the night at David's. He's passed two nights there.”
+
+“Was it the snorting man?”
+
+“I reckon.”
+
+“I heard about him at the Cross Roads. Why didn't David tell us yesterday?”
+
+“Maybe he hadn't thought it out. David thinks slow. He likes to be sure
+before he speaks. He was sure enough this morning!” the woman ended
+bitterly.
+
+“What did he say?”
+
+“He said it was living in sin for us to keep together if he was alive.”
+
+Laban pondered it. “I reckon if we come together without knowing he was
+alive, it ain't no sin.”
+
+“Yes, it is!” she shrieked.
+
+“We was married just like anybody; we didn't make no secret of it; we've
+lived together four years. Are you goin' to unlive them years by stoppin'
+now?”
+
+“Don't you s'pose I been over all that a million times? My mind's sore
+workin' with it; there ain't a thought in me that don't ache from it. But
+David's right. We've got to part. I put your things in this poke here,”
+ she said, and she gave him a bag made from an old pillow tick, with a few
+clothes lumping it half full. “I'll carry the baby, Laban.” She pulled
+back from him with the child in her arms. “Or no, you can carry her;
+you'll have to leave her, too, and you've got a right to all the good you
+can get of her now. Don't touch anything. I'll stay at David's, tonight,
+but I'll come back in the morning, and then I'll see what I'll do--stay,
+or go and live with David. Come!”
+
+“And what about Joey?” Laban asked, half turning with the child when they
+were outside.
+
+“I declare I forgot about Joey! I'll see, to-morrow. It seems as if my
+very soul was tired now.
+
+“Joey will just think we've gone over to David's for a minute; he'll go to
+bed when he comes; he'll have had his supper at Peter Hingston's, anyway.”
+
+As they walked away, she said, “You're a good man, Laban Billings, to feel
+the way you always do about Joey. You've been a true father to him; I
+wonder what his _own_ father'd have been.”
+
+“No truer father to him than I've been a husband to you, Nancy,” the man
+said, and as they walked along together, so far apart, his speech came to
+him, and he began to plead their case with her as before an adverse judge.
+Worn as she was with the arguments for and against them after the long day
+of iteration, she could not refuse to let him plead. She scarcely answered
+him, but he knew when they reached Gillespie's cabin that she had seen
+them in the fierce light of her conscience, where there was no shadow of
+turning.
+
+David was alone; Jane, he said, had gone to the Reverdys, and was going
+with the woman to the Temple.
+
+Nancy did not seem to hear him. She took the sleeping baby from its
+father's arms. “Laban has come with me to say good-by before you, David. I
+hope you'll be satisfied.”
+
+“I hope your conscience will be satisfied, Nancy. It doesn't matter about
+me. Laban, do you see this thing like I do?”
+
+“I see it like Nancy does.”
+
+“God will bless your effort for righteousness. Your path is dark before
+you now, but His light will shine upon it.”
+
+The old man paused helplessly, and Nancy asked “Does Jane know?”
+
+“Not yet. And I will confess I'm not certain what to do, about her, and
+about the neighbors. This is a cross to me, too, Nancy. I have lived a
+proud life here; there has never been talk about me or mine. Now when you
+and Laban are parted, there will be talk.”
+
+“There's no need to be,” Laban said; “not at once. They want me back at
+the Cross Roads, the Wilkinses do. I can go now as well as in the morning.
+I forgot to tell you,” he added to his wife. “It was drove out of my mind.”
+
+“Oh, I don't blame you,” she answered.
+
+“I can have work there all the fall.”
+
+David Gillespie rubbed his forehead, and said tremulously: “I don't know
+what to say. I suppose I am weak. It'll be _one_ kind of a lie. But,
+Laban--I thank you--”
+
+“I can come back here Sundays and see Nancy and the baby,” Laban suggested.
+
+The old man's voice shook. “You'll be making it harder for yourself,” was
+all he could say.
+
+“But perhaps--perhaps there'll be light--that light you said--by and by--”
+
+“Let us pray that there'll be no light from the Pit. I am a sinful man,
+Laban, to let you do this thing. I ought to have strength for all of us.
+But I am older now, I'm not what I was--the day has tried me, Nancy.”
+
+“Good-by, then, Laban,” the woman said. “And don't you think hard of
+David. I don't. And I'm not sure I'll ever let you come. Say good-by as if
+it was for life.” She turned to her brother. “We can kiss, I reckon?”
+
+“Oh, I reckon,” he lamented, and went indoors.
+
+Laban opened his arms as if to take her in them; but she interposed the
+baby.
+
+“Kiss her first. Me last. Just once. Now, go! I won't be weak with you
+like David is. And don't you be afraid for _me_. I can get along.
+_I'm not a man_!” She went into the cabin, with her baby over her
+shoulder; but in a little while she came back without it, and stared after
+the figure of Laban losing itself in the night. Then she sat down on the
+doorstep and cried; it seemed as if she never could stop; but the tears
+helped her.
+
+When she lifted her head she caught the sounds of singing from the
+village below the upland where the cabin stood. It was the tune that
+carried, not the words, but she knew them from the tune; as well as if she
+were in the Temple with them she knew what the people were singing. While
+she followed the lines helplessly, almost singing them herself, she was
+startled by the presence of a boy, who had come silently round the cabin
+in his bare feet and stood beside her.
+
+“Oh!” she cried out.
+
+“Why, did I scare you, mom?” he asked tenderly. “I didn't mean to.”
+
+“No, Joey. I didn't know any one was there; that's all. I didn't expect
+you. Why ain't you at home in bed? You must be tired enough, poor boy.”
+
+“Oh, no, I ain't tired. Mr. Hingston is real good to me; he lets me rest
+plenty; and he says I'll make a first rate miller. I helped to dress the
+burrs this morning--the millstones, you know,” the boy explained, proud of
+the technicality. “Oh, I tell you I just like it there,” he said, and he
+laughed out his joy in it.
+
+“You always was a glad boy, Joey,” his mother said ruefully.
+
+“Well, you wouldn't thought so if you seen me over at our house. It
+seemed like there was somebody dead; I dasn't hardly go in, it was so dark
+and still. Whyn't you there? Didn't pop come home?”
+
+“Yes, but he had to go back to the Cross Roads; he's got work there all
+the fall.”
+
+“Well! We do seem to be gittin' along!” He laughed again. “I reckon you
+come over here because it seemed kind o' lonesome. Goin' to stay all night
+with Uncle?”
+
+“Yes. You won't mind being there alone?”
+
+“Oh, no! Not much, I reckon.”
+
+“You can stay here too, if you want to--”
+
+“Oh, no! Mom,” he confessed shyly, “I brung Benny Hingston with me. I
+thought you'd let him stay all night with me.”
+
+“Why, certainly, Joey--”
+
+“He's just behind the house; I wanted to ask first--”
+
+“You know you can always bring Benny. There's plenty of room for both of
+you in your bed. But now when you go back with him be careful of the lamp.
+I put a fresh piece of rag in and there's plenty of grease. You can blow
+up a coal on the hearth. I covered the fire; only be careful.”
+
+“Oh, we'll be careful. Benny's about the carefullest boy the' is in
+Leatherwood. Oh, I do like being in the mill with Mr. Hingston.” He
+laughed out his joy again, and then he asked doubtfully, “Mom?”
+
+“Yes, Joey.”
+
+“Benny and me was wonderin'--we'd go straight back home, and not light
+any lamp at all--if you'd let us go to the Temple. There's a big meetin'
+there to-night.” The mother hesitated, and the boy urged, “They say that
+strange man--well, some calls him the Snorter and some the Exhorter--is
+goin' to preach.” The mother was still silent, and the boy faltered on:
+“He dresses like the people do Over-the-Mountains, and he wears his hair
+down his back--”
+
+The mother gasped. “I don't like your being out late, Joey. I'd feel
+better if you and Benny was safe in bed.”
+
+“Oh, well.” The boy's voice sank to the level of his disappointment; but
+after a silent interval he caught it up again cheerily. “Oh, well, I
+reckon Benny won't care much. We'll go right back home. We can have a
+piece before we go to bed?”
+
+“Yes--”
+
+“Benny thinks our apple-butter is the best they is. Can we have some on
+bread, with sugar on top?”
+
+His mother did not answer at once, and he said again, as if relinquishing
+another ideal, “Oh, well.”
+
+Nancy rose up and kissed him. “Yes, go to the Temple. You might as well.”
+
+“Truly, mom? Oh, Benny, hurrah! She's let me! Come along!”
+
+He ran round the cabin to his comrade, and she heard them shouting and
+laughing together, and then the muted scamper of their bare feet on the
+soft road toward the settlement.
+
+The mother said to herself, “He'd get to see him sooner or later.” She
+drew her breath in a long sigh, and went into the cabin. “What a day, what
+a day! It seems a thousand years,” she said aloud.
+
+“Are you talking to me, Nancy?” her brother asked from somewhere in the
+dark.
+
+“No, no. Only to myself, David. Where did I put the baby? Oh! I know.
+I've let Joey go to the Temple to hear his father preach. Lord have mercy!”
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+The discourse of Dylks the second night was a chain of biblical passages,
+as it had been the first night. But an apparent intention, which had been
+wanting before, ran through the incoherent texts, leaping as it were from
+one to another, and there binding them in an intimation of a divine
+mission. He did not say that he had been sent of God, but he made the
+texts which he gave, swiftly and unerringly, say something like that for
+him to such as were prepared to believe it. Not all were prepared; many
+denied; the most doubted; but those who accepted that meaning of the
+inspired words were of the principal people, respected for their higher
+intelligence and their greater wealth.
+
+He had come to the Temple with Peter Hingston and he went with him from
+it. Hingston's quarter section of the richest farmland in the bottom
+bordered his mill privilege, with barns and corncribs and tobacco sheds,
+and his brick house behind the mill was the largest and finest dwelling in
+the place. His flocks and herds abounded; his state was patriarchal; and
+in the neighborhood which loved and honored him, for some favor and
+kindness done nearly every man there: for money when the crops failed; for
+the storage of their wheat and corn in the deep bins of his mill when the
+yield was too great for their barns; for the use of his sheds in drying
+their tobacco before their own were ready. His growing sons and daughters,
+until they were grown men and women, obeyed his counsel as they had obeyed
+his will while children. But he was severe with no one; since his wife had
+died his natural gentleness was his manner as it had always been his make,
+and it tempered the piety, which in many was forbidding and compelling, to
+a wistful kindness. His faith admitted no misgiving, for himself, but his
+toleration of doubts and differences in others extended to the worst of
+skeptics. He believed that revelation had never ceased; he was of those
+who looked for a sign, because if God had ever given Himself in communion
+with His creatures it was not reasonable that he should afterwards always
+withhold Himself. A friendly humor looked from his dull eyes, and, in
+never quite coming to a formulated joke, stayed his utterance as if he
+were hopeful of some such event in time. He stood large in bulk as well as
+height, and drew his breath in slow, audible respirations.
+
+The first people of the community tacitly recognized him as the first man
+in it, though none would have compared him in education with his nearest
+friend, Richard Enraghty, who had been the schoolmaster and was now the
+foremost of the United Brethren. He led their services in the Temple, and
+sometimes preached for them when it came their turn to occupy the house
+which they shared with the other sects. Hingston was a Methodist, but
+perhaps because their sects were so akin in doctrine and polity their
+difference made no division between the friends: Enraghty little and
+fierce and restless, Hingston large and kind and calm. What they joined in
+saying prevailed in questions of public interest; those who yielded to
+their wisdom liked to believe that Enraghty's opinion ruled with Hingston.
+Matthew Braile alone had the courage to disable their judgment which he
+liked to say was no more infallible than so much Scripture, but the hardy
+infidel, who knew so much law and was inexpugnable in his office, owned
+that he could not make head against their gospel. He could darken their
+counsel with citations from “Common Sense” and “The Age of Reason,” but
+the piety of the community remained safe from his mockery.
+
+The large charity of Hingston covered the multitude of the Squire's sins;
+he would have argued that he had not been understood perhaps in the worst
+things he said; but the fiercer godliness of Enraghty was proof against
+the talk of a man whose conversation was an exhalation from the Pit. He
+had bitterly opposed Matthew Braile's successive elections; he had made
+the pulpit of the Temple an engine of political warfare and had launched
+its terrors against the invulnerable heathen. He was like Hingston in
+looking for a sign; in that day of remoteness from any greater world the
+people of the backwoods longed to feel themselves near the greatest world
+of all, and well within the radius of its mysteries. They talked mostly of
+these when they met together, and in the solitude of their fields they
+dwelt upon them; on their week days and work days they turned over the
+threats and promises of the Sabbath and expected a light or a voice from
+on high which should burst their darkness and silence.
+
+To most of them there was nothing sacrilegious in the pretensions which
+could be read into the closely scriptured discourse of Dylks when he
+preached the second time in the Temple. The affability which he used in
+descending from the pulpit among them, and shaking hands and hailing them
+Brother and Sister, and personally bidding each come to the mercy seat,
+convinced them of his authority; no common man would so fearlessly trust
+his dignity among those who had little of their own. They thronged upon
+him gladly, and the women, old and young alike, trembled before him with a
+strange joy.
+
+“Where is your father, Sister Gillespie?” he demanded of the girl, who
+wavered in his strong voice like a plant in the wind.
+
+“I don't know--he's at home,” she said.
+
+“See that he comes, another time. I send him my peace, and tell him that
+it will not return to me. Say that I said he needs me.”
+
+He went out between Enraghty and Hingston, and as they walked away, he
+sank his voice back in words of Scripture; farther away he began his hymn:
+
+  “Plunged in a gulf of dark despair,
+   We wretched sinners lay”--
+
+and ended with his shout of “Salvation!”
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+The cabin of the Reverdys stood on a byway beyond the Gillespies. Sally
+had joined the girl on her way out of the Temple, and was prancing beside
+her as they went homeward together. “Oh, ain't it just great? I feel like
+as if I could fly. I never seen the Power in Leatherwood like it was
+to-night. He's _sent_; you can tell that as plain as the nose on your
+face. How happy I do feel! I believe in my heart I got salvation this
+minute. Don't you feel the Spirit any? But you was always such a still
+girl! I did like the way the women folks was floppun' all round. _I_
+say, if you feel the Power workun' in you, show it, and help the others to
+git it. What do you s'pose he meant by your paw's needun' him?”
+
+“I don't know. Perhaps _he_ will,” the girl answered briefly.
+
+“Goun' to tell him? Well, that's right, Janey. I kep' wonderun' why he
+didn't come to-night. If Abel hadn't be'n so beat out with his work at the
+Cross Roads to-day, you bet I'd 'a' made _him_ come; but he said I'd
+git enough glory for both. I believe his talkun' with Squire Braile don't
+do him no good. You b'lieve Washington and Jefferson was friends with Tom
+Paine? The Squire says they was, but I misdoubt it, myself; I always hearn
+them two was good perfessun' Christians. Kind o' lonesome along here where
+the woods comes so close't, ain't it? Say, Janey: I wisht you'd come a
+little piece with me, though I don't suppose the bad spirits would dast to
+come around a body right on the way home from the Temple this way--”
+
+They had reached the point where Sally must part with the girl, who
+stopped to lift the top rail of the bars to the lane leading from the road
+to her father's cabin. She let it drop again. “Why, I'll go the whole way
+with you, Sally.”
+
+“Will you? Well, I declare to gracious, you're the best girl I ever seen.
+I believe in my heart, I'll rout Abel out and make him go back home with
+you.”
+
+“You needn't,” the girl said. “I'm not afraid to go alone in the dark.”
+
+“Well, just as you say, Janey. What do you do to keep from beun' afraid?”
+
+“Oh, I don't know. I just think, I suppose.”
+
+“Well, _I_ just want to _squeal_.” Sally had been talking in
+her loud, loose voice to keep her courage up. “Well, I declare if we ain't
+there a'ready. If you just say the word I'll have Abel out in half a
+minute, and--”
+
+“No,” the girl said. “Good night.”
+
+“Well, good night. I've got half a mind to go back with you myself,”
+ Sally called, as she lifted her hand to pull the latchstring of her door.
+
+Jane Gillespie found her father standing at the bars when she went back.
+He mechanically let them down for her.
+
+“I thought you would be in bed, Father,” she said gently, but coldly.
+
+“I've had things to keep me awake; and it's hot indoors,” he answered,
+and then he demanded, “Well?”
+
+If it was his way of bidding her tell him of her evening's experience,
+she did not obey him, and he had to make another attempt on her silence.
+“Was Hughey there?”
+
+“Hughey? I don't know.”
+
+“Didn't he ask to come home with you?”
+
+“I didn't see him. Sally Reverdy came with me.”
+
+“Yes, I knew that.”
+
+She was silent for another moment and then she said, “Father, I have a
+message for you. He said, 'I send my peace to him; and it will not return
+unto me.' He said you needed him.”
+
+Gillespie knew that she meant Dylks and he knew that she kept out of her
+voice whatever feeling she had in delivering his message.
+
+In the dark, she could not see her father's frown, but she was aware of
+it in his answer. “You went there against my will. Well?”
+
+“I believe.”
+
+“You believe? What do you believe?”
+
+“Him. That he is sent.”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“I can't tell you. He made me; he made all the people there.”
+
+Her father was standing between her and the door. He stood aside. “Go to
+bed now. But be quiet. Your Aunt Nancy is there.”
+
+“Aunt Nancy?”
+
+“Laban came, but he went back to the Cross Roads, and she's over for the
+night with the baby.”
+
+“The baby? Oh, I'll be careful!” A joy came into her voice, and the
+strain left it in something like a laugh.
+
+Early in the morning she crept down the ladder from the loft; her father
+had looped his cot up against the cabin wall and gone out. Nancy was
+sitting up in the bed she had made for herself on the floor, coiling a
+rope of her black hair into a knot at her neck. The baby lay cooing and
+kicking in her lap. The morning air came in fresh and sweet at the open
+door.
+
+“Oh, Aunt Nancy, may I take her?”
+
+“Yes; I'll get the breakfast. Your father'll be hungry; he's been up a
+good while, I reckon.”
+
+“I'll make the fire first, and then I'll take the baby.”
+
+The girl uncovered the embers on the hearth and blew them into life; then
+she ran out into the cornfield, and gathered her apron full of the milky
+ears, and grated them for the cakes which her aunt molded to fry for
+breakfast. She took the baby and washed its hands and face, talking and
+laughing with it.
+
+“You talk to it a sight more than you do to anybody else, Jane,” the
+mother said. “Don't put anything but its little shimmy on; it's goin' to
+be another hot day.”
+
+“I believe,” the girl said, “I'll get some water in the tub, and wash her
+all over. There'll be time enough.”
+
+“It'd be a good thing, I reckon. But you mustn't forget your milkin'. I
+dunno what _our_ cow'd do this morning if it wasn't for Joey. But
+he'll milk her, him and Benny Hingston, between them, somehow. Benny
+stayed with him last night.”
+
+“I did forget the milking,” the girl said, putting the baby's little
+chemise on. “But I'll do it now. Sissy will have to wait till after
+breakfast for her washing.” She got the tin bucket from where it blazed
+a-tilt in the sun beside the back door of the cabin, and took her deep
+bonnet from its peg. She did not ask why the boys slept alone in the
+cabin, but her aunt felt that she must explain.
+
+“Laban's got work for the whole fall at the Cross Roads. He went straight
+back last night. I come here.” She had got through without telling the lie
+which she feared she must. “I'm goin' home after breakfast.”
+
+Jane asked nothing further, but called from the open door, “Sukey, Sukey!
+Suk, Suk, Suk!” A plaintive lowing responded; then the snapping sound of a
+cow's eager hoofs; the hoarse drumming of the milk in the bucket followed,
+subduing itself to the soft final murmur of the strippings in the foam.
+Jane carried the milk to the spring house before she reappeared in the
+cabin with a cup of it for the baby.
+
+“It's so good for her to have it warm from the cow,” she said, as she
+tilted the tin for the last drop on the little one's lips. “I wish you'd
+leave her here with me, Aunt Nancy.”
+
+“It's about time she was weaned,” the mother said. “I reckon you better
+call your father now. He must be ready for his breakfast, bendin' over
+that tobacco ever since sun-up.”
+
+Jane took down the tin dinner horn from its peg, and went to the back
+door with it, and blew a long, loud blast, crumbling away in broken sounds.
+
+The baby was beating the air with its hands up and down, and gurgling its
+delight in the noise when she came back. “Oh, honey, honey, honey!” she
+cooed, catching it up and hugging it to her.
+
+The mother looked at them over her shoulder as she put the cakes of
+grated corn in the skillet, and set it among the coals on the hearth.
+“It's a pity you ha'n't got one of your own.”
+
+“I don't want one of my own,” the girl said.
+
+“I thought, a spell back,”--the woman took up the subject again after a
+decent interval--“that you and Hughey Blake was goin' to make a match.”
+ The girl said nothing, and her aunt pursued, “Was he there, last night?”
+
+“I didn't notice.”
+
+“Many folks?” her aunt asked with whatever change or fulfilment of a
+first intent.
+
+From kneeling over to play with the baby the girl sank back on her heels
+with her hands fallen before her.
+
+“I don't know.”
+
+“What did he preach?”
+
+“The Word of God; God's own words. All Scripture; but it was like as if
+it was the first time you ever heard it.”
+
+The girl was looking at the woman, but seemed rapt from the sight of her
+in a vision of the night before.
+
+“I reckon Satan could make it sound that way,” Nancy said, but her niece
+seemed not to hear her. Nancy stood staring at her, with words bitter
+beyond saying in her heart; words that rose in her throat and choked her.
+When she spoke she only said, “Get up, Jane; your father'll be here in a
+minute.”
+
+“I'm not going to eat anything. I'm going into the woods.” She staggered
+to her feet, and dashed from the door. The child looked after her with
+outstretched arms and whimpered pitifully, but she did not mind its call.
+
+“Where's Jane?” her father said, coming in at the back door.
+
+“Gone into the woods,” she said.
+
+[Illustration: Nancy stood staring at her, with words beyond saying in
+her heart--words that rose in her throat and choked her]
+
+“To pray, I reckon.”
+
+He sat down at the table-leaf lifted from the wall, and his sister served
+him his breakfast. He ate greedily, but his hand trembled so in lifting
+his cup that the coffee spilled from it.
+
+When he had ended and sat leaning back from the board, she asked him:
+“What are you going to do?”
+
+The old man cleared his throat. “Nothing, yet. Let the Lord work His will.”
+
+“And let Joseph Dylks work _his_ will, too! I'll have something to
+say about that.”
+
+“Be careful, woman. Be careful.”
+
+“Oh, I'll be careful. He has as much to lose as I have.”
+
+“No, not half so much.”
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+Where Matthew Braile sat smoking most of the hot forenoon away on the
+porch of his cabin, there came to him rumor of the swift spread of the
+superstition running from mind to mind in the neighborhood, and catching
+like fire in dry grass. The rumor came in different voices, some piously
+meant to shake him with fear in the scorner's seat which he held so
+stubbornly; some in their doubt seeking the help of his powerful unfaith;
+but he required their news from them all with the same mocking. They were
+not of the Scribes and Pharisees, the pillars of the Temple, the wise and
+rich and proud who had been the first to follow Dylks, but the poorer and
+lowlier sort who wavered before the example of their betters, and were
+willing to submit it to the searching of the old Sadducee's scrutiny.
+
+The morning after Abel Reverdy had finished his work at the Cross Roads,
+and had returned to the cares patiently awaiting him at home he rode his
+claybank so hesitantly toward the Squire's cabin that his desire to stop
+and talk was plain, and Braile called to him: “Well, Abel, what do they
+think of the Prophet over at Wilkins's? Many converts? Many dipped or
+sprinkled, as the case required?”
+
+Reverdy drew rein and faced the Squire with a solemnity presently
+yielding to his natural desire to grin at any form of joke, and his belief
+that when the Squire indulged such flagrant irreverence as this he must be
+joking. Yet he answered evasively: “You hearn't he says now he hain't
+never go'n to die?”
+
+“No. But I'm not surprised to hear it; about the next thing on the
+docket. Did he say that at the Cross Roads?”
+
+“Said it right here in Leatherwood. Sally told me the first thing when I
+got home. You wasn't at the Temple last night, I reckon?”
+
+“Well, not _last_ night,” Braile said with an implication that he
+had been at the Temple all the other nights, which made Reverdy laugh with
+guilty joy.
+
+“One o' the Hounds--no, it was Jim Redfield hisself--stopped on the way
+out, and he says, 'What's this I hear? You say you ain't goin' to die.'
+And Dylks he lifts his hands up over his head and he says, 'This shell
+will fall off'; and Jim he says, 'I've got half a mind to _crack_
+your shell,' and the believers they got round, and begun to hustle Jim
+off, but Dylks he told them to let him alone, and he says, 'I can endure
+strong meat, but I must be fed on milk for a while.' What you s'pose he
+meant, Squire?”
+
+Braile took his pipe out and cackled toothlessly. “I'm almost afraid to
+think, Abel. Something awful, though. You say Sally told you?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“I should think Sally would know what he meant, if anybody.” He looked at
+Abel, and Sally's husband joined him in safe derision. “Tell you anything
+else?”
+
+“Well, no, not just in so many words. But it 'pears he's been teachun'
+round all sorts of things in private, like. Who do you reckon he says he
+is?”
+
+“Not John the Baptist, I hope. I don't know where we should get the
+locusts and wild honey for him in _this_ settlement. Might try
+grasshoppers, but the last bee-tree in the Bottom was cut down when I was
+a boy. I got a piece of the comb.”
+
+“I don't know if he said John the _Baptist;_ but it was John,
+anyway. And they say--or that's what Sally hearn tell--that when he was
+off with Enraghty and Hingston on some 'pointments down round Seneca there
+was doun's that 'uld make your hair stand up.”
+
+“You don't happen to know just what the doings were?”
+
+“Well, no, I don't, Squire. But they was doun's to deceive the very
+elec', from all I hearn.”
+
+“That's just what Hingston and Enraghty both are--the very elect. What
+deceived _them_?”
+
+“Oh, pshaw, now, Squire! You know I don't mean they were deceived! That's
+just a Bible sayin'. You see, Brother Briggs was sick and Brother Enraghty
+went along with Dylks and Brother Hingston to preach in his place.”
+
+“Couldn't Dylks have done the preaching?”
+
+“I reckon he could. But there was three 'p'intments, and may be Dylks
+couldn't fill 'em all, and may be he didn't want to. Fust Brother Enraghty
+preached in the Temple at Seneca, and then at Brother Christhaven's house
+off south of that, and then at David Mason's, the local preacher; but
+Brother Mason has got the consumption, and he couldn't preach, so Brother
+Enraghty had to do _all_ the preachun'.”
+
+“I see. Well?”
+
+“Well, that wasn't anything out o' the common, but what Dylks done to the
+Devil beat all the preachun', I reckon.”
+
+“How'd it get out? Devil tell?”
+
+“No. Brother Enraghty told, and Sally she got it putty straight from the
+wife of the man that he told it to.”
+
+“Go on,” Braile said. “I can hardly wait to hear.”
+
+“Well, sir, they had just got acrost the Leatherwood, and Brother
+Enraghty felt as if he was lifted all at once into heaven; air diff'ent,
+and full of joy. Dylks's face got brighter and brighter, and his voice
+sounded like music. When they got to the top of the hill where you can
+look back and see the Temple, Dylks turned his horse and stretched out his
+hands, and says he, 'How ignorant them people is of my true natur'. But
+time will show 'em.' Well, not just them words, you know; more dictionary;
+and they preached with a great outpourun' at Seneca. They didn't go to bed
+that night at all, accordun' to the woman's tell that Enraghty told her
+man; sot up tell mornun' prayun', and singun' hymns and readun' the Bible.
+Next mornun' when they started out Brother Enraghty seen a bright ring
+round Dylks's head, and whenever Dylks got down to pray the ring just
+stayed in the air over the saddle tell he got back, and then it dropped
+round his head ag'in.”
+
+Reverdy stopped for the effect, but Braile only said, “Go on! Go on!”
+
+“Well, sir, so they kep' on all that day and all the next night, prayun',
+and singun', and readun' the Bible. The next mornun' when they started
+Brother Enraghty felt kind o' cold all over, and his teeth chattered, and
+Dylks looked at him hard in the face, and says he, 'Time is precious now.
+This is the time for work. I now reveal unto you that you are Paul the
+Apostle.'”
+
+“And what did Paul the Apostle say? Did he own up that he was Paul?”
+
+Reverdy halted in his tale. “Look here, Squire! I don't feel just right,
+havun' you say such things. It sounds--well, like profane swearun'.”
+
+“Any worse than Dylks or Enraghty? You go right ahead, Abel. I'll take
+the responsibility before the law.”
+
+“Well,” Reverdy continued with a reluctance that passed as he went on,
+“what Dylks told him was that he would increase his faith, so't he could
+see the sights of his power, and glorify him among men, and then Enraghty
+he commenced to git warm ag'in, and Dylks he turned up his eyes and kep'
+still, and it was so bright all round him that it made the daylight like
+dusk, and Dylks made him hark if he didn't hear a kind of rush in the air,
+and Dylks said it was the adversary of souls, but he would conquer him.
+They came into a deep holler in the woods and there they see the devil
+standun' in their way, and Dylks he lights and hollers out, 'Fear not,
+Paul; this day my work is done,' and he went towards Satan and Satan he
+raised his burnun' wings and bristled his scales, and stuck out his forked
+tongue and dropped melted fire from it; and he rolled his eyes in his
+head, hissun' and bubblun' like sinners boilun' in hell's kittles. Then
+Dylks he got down on his knees and prayed, and got up and give his shout
+of Salvation, and the devil's wings fell, and he took in his tongue, and
+his eyes stood still, and Dylks he blowed his breath at him, and Satan he
+turned and jumped, and every jump he give the ground shook, and Dylks and
+the balance of 'em follered him till the devil come to Brother Mason's
+house, and then he jumped through the shut winder out of sight. They found
+Brother Mason's son David in bed sick, but he got up and took Dylks in his
+arms and called him his Savior, and everybody got down on their knees and
+prayed, and their faces was shinun' beautiful, and Dylks he walks round
+David Mason, and rubs his hands over him, and says, 'I bind the devil for
+a thousand years,' and he hugged David, and said, 'The work is done.' And
+he wouldn't stay to preach there, but told 'em they must come back with
+him to the Temple here in Leatherwood. On the way back he wouldn't talk at
+all, hardly, but just kep' sayun', 'The perfect work is done,' and he
+didn't give his shout any more; just snorted.”
+
+Braile's pipe had gone out, but he pulled at it two or three times,
+before he said, “Well, Abel, I don't wonder Sally is excited. I suppose
+_you_ would be, if you believed a word of this yarn?”
+
+“Well, it's poorty cur'ous doun's, Squire,” Reverdy said, daunted between
+his natural bent and his wish to be of the Squire's thinking. “Don't
+_you_ believe it?”
+
+“Oh, yes, _I_ believe it. But you know _I_ believe anything. If
+Dylks did it, and Enraghty says he did it, why there we've got the gospel
+for it--right from St. Paul himself.”
+
+He said no more, and Reverdy lingered a moment in vague disappointment.
+Then he sighed out, “Well, I must be goun', I reckon,” and thumped his
+bare heels into the claybank's ribs and rode away.
+
+Day by day the faith in Dylks spread with circumstance which strengthened
+it in the converts; they accepted the differences which parted husband and
+wife, parent and child, and set strife between brothers and neighbors as
+proof of his divine authority to bring a sword; they knew by the hate and
+dissension which followed from his claim that it was of supernatural
+force, and when the pillars of the old spiritual temple fell one after
+another under his blows, they exalted in the ruin as the foundation of a
+new sanctuary. They drove the worshipers out of the material Temple,
+Methodists and Moravians and Baptists who had used it in common. They met
+to dedicate it solely to the doctrine of the prophet who came teaching
+that neither he nor they should ever die, but should enter in the flesh
+into the New Jerusalem which should come down to them at Leatherwood. His
+steps in passing from teacher to prophet and to Messiah were contested by
+a few with bitter and strenuous dissent, but on the night when Dylks
+proclaimed before the thronging assembly in the stolen Temple, “I am God
+and there is none else,” they pressed round him, men and women and
+children, and worshiped him. “I am God and the Christ in one,” he
+proclaimed. “In me, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are met. There is no
+salvation except by faith in me. They who put their faith in me shall
+never taste death, but shall be translated into the New Jerusalem, which I
+am going to bring down from Heaven.” He snorted; the few unbelievers
+protested in abhorrence; but the Sisters in the faith shrieked and the
+Brothers shouted, “We shall never die!” Dylks came down from the pulpit
+among them, and Enraghty called out, “Behold our God!” and they fell on
+their knees before him. As it had been from the beginning, the wisest and
+best, the first in prayer and counsel, were foremost in the idolatry; and
+young girls, and wives and mothers joined in hailing Dylks as their
+Creator and Savior, and besought him to bless and keep them.
+
+The believers were in such force that none of the Hounds, veteran
+disturbers of camp-meetings and revivals, who were there, dared molest
+them; the few members of the sects expelled from the Temple of their
+common worship held aloof from the tumult in dismay, and made no attempt
+to reclaim the sanctuary. One man, not of any church, but of standing in
+the community, tried to incite the sectarians to assert their rights, but
+found no following among them. They left the Temple together with certain
+others who had been trembling toward belief in Dylks, but whom the
+profanation repelled; when they were gone the tumult sank enough to let
+Enraghty announce another meeting a week hence, and then dismiss the
+congregation.
+
+“An' afore that we're goin' to have a murricle,” Sally Reverdy told
+Squire Braile, sitting early the next morning at the receipt of gossip on
+his cabin porch with his pipe between his teeth; her cow had not come up
+the night before, and Abel had not found her in the woods-pasture when he
+went to look. “An' I couldn't wait all day, an' I just slipped over to git
+some milk of Mis' Braile,” she explained to the Squire as she paused with
+the bucket in her hand. “I told her I'd bring it back the first chance't I
+git at our cow; I reckon Abel will find her some time or 'nuther; and I
+'lowed you had plenty.”
+
+Braile had already heard her explaining all this to his wife, but now he
+kept her for the full personal detail of the last night's event at the
+Temple. She ended an unsparing report of the wonders seen with a prophecy
+of wonders to come.
+
+“Why,” Braile said, “I don't see what you want of a miracle more than
+what you've had already. The fact that your cow didn't come up last night,
+and Abel couldn't find her in the woods-pasture this morning is miracle
+enough to prove that Dylks is God. Besides, didn't he say it himself, and
+didn't Enraghty say it?”
+
+“Well, yes, they did,” Sally assented, overborne for the moment by his
+logic.
+
+“And didn't you all believe them?”
+
+“Well, _we_ all did,” Sally said. “But look here, Squire Braile,
+what about them that didn't believe it?”
+
+“Oh, then there were some there that didn't believe it! Well, I suppose
+nothing less than more miracles will do for _them_. Who were they?”
+
+“Well, of course, there was Jim Redfield; he's been ag'inst him from the
+first; and there was old George Nixon, and there was Hughey Blake, and a
+passel of the Hounds that I don't count.”
+
+“Why, certainly not; the Hounds would doubt anything. But I'm surprised
+at Redfield and Nixon and Hughey Blake. What reason did they give for the
+faith that wasn't in them? When a man stood up and snorted like a horse
+and said he was God, why didn't they believe him? Or the other fellows
+that didn't snort, but said they knew it was God from a sound that he
+made?”
+
+“Oh, pshaw, now, Squire Braile!” Sally gurgled. She did not yield quite
+with Abel's helplessness at a joke, but the Squire's blasphemous irony had
+its force with her too, though she felt it right to bring herself back to
+her religious conviction with the warning, “Some day you'll go too fur.”
+
+“Yes, I'm always expecting the lightning to strike in the wrong place.
+Didn't Nixon or Redfield or Hughey Blake say anything? Or did they just
+look ashamed of you, down there on your knees before a man that you
+worshiped for a God because he snorted like a horse? Didn't anybody in
+their senses say anything, or couldn't those that were out of their senses
+hear anything but their own ravings?”
+
+The old man had pleased himself with his mockeries, but now he let the
+scorn which his irony had hidden blaze out. “Wasn't anybody ashamed of it
+all? Weren't you ashamed yourself, Sally?”
+
+“Well, I dunno,” Sally said, easing herself from one foot to another and
+shifting the milk-bucket from her right hand to her left. “Where everybody
+is goun' one way, you don't know what to think exactly. Jane Gillespie was
+there, and she went on as bad as the best.”
+
+“Jane Gillespie?”
+
+“Yes. She come with me, and she was goun' to come home with me, as fur's
+the door, and she would ha' done it, if it hadn't ha' been for her father.
+He bruk through the believers and drug her up from the floor where she was
+kneelun' and stoopun' her forehead over to the ground, and pulled her out
+through the crowd. 'You come home with me!' says he, kind o' harsh like;
+and if it hadn't ha' been for Nancy Billuns's Joey I'd ha' had to git
+through the woods alone, and the dear knows I'm always skeered enough. But
+Joey and Benny Hingston they come with me, or I don't feel as if I'd been
+here to tell it.”
+
+“You'd have been safe from the devil, though; he stayed with Dylks.
+Didn't David say anything to the girl?”
+
+“Just, 'You come home with me,' and he looked so black that Hughey Blake
+he kind o' started from where he was standun' with the unbelievers, and he
+says, 'Oh, don't, Mr. Gillespie!'--like that--and Jane she said, 'It's my
+father, Hugh,' and she went along with him, kind o' wild lookun', like she
+was walkun' in her sleep. I noticed it at the time.”
+
+“Didn't Dylks do anything--say anything?”
+
+“Well, not that _I_ seen or hearn. But some o' them that was
+standun' nigh him was talkun' about it when we all got out, and they was
+sayun' he said, 'Go with your earthly father; your heavenly father will
+keep you safe!' I don't know whether he did or not; but that's what they
+was sayun.”
+
+“And did Gillespie say anything back?”
+
+“Not't anybody heared. Just give Dylks a look like he wanted to kill him,
+and then Dylks snorted, and yelled 'Salvation!' Squire,” Sally broke off,
+“some of us believers was talkun' it over, when we started home, and
+wonderun' what ought we to call him. Jest Dylks don't sound quite right,
+and you can't say Almighty, to a body, exactly, and you can't say Lord.
+What should you think was the right way?”
+
+Braile got back to his irony. “Well, that's an important question, Sally.
+I should call him Beelzebub, myself; but then I'm not a believer. That
+night when he first came, didn't he tell the people to call him just
+Dylks?”
+
+“Yes, he did, but that was for the present, he said.”
+
+“Has he given himself any other name?”
+
+“Well, no.”
+
+“Then I should let it go at Dylks.”
+
+“Just plain Dylks? Mr. Dylks wouldn't do; or Brother Dylks, wouldn't.
+Father Dylks don't sound quite the thing--”
+
+“Might try Uncle Dylks,” Braile said, cackling round his pipe-stem, and
+now Sally perceived that it was in vain to attempt serious discussion of
+the point with him.
+
+She said, “Oh, pshaw, Squire Braile,” and lankly let herself down
+sidewise from the porch, and flopped away on the road. Then she stopped,
+and called back, “Say, Squire, what do you think of the Good Old Man?”
+
+“What good old man?”
+
+“Why, Dylks. For a name. That's what most of 'em wants to call him.”
+
+“Sounds like a good name for them that like a name like it.”
+
+“He calls _us_ the Little Flock.”
+
+“Well, well! Geese or sheep?”
+
+“Oh, pshaw, now! I wouldn't belong to the Herd of the Lost, anyway.
+That's what he calls the unbelievers.”
+
+“You don't tell me! Well, now I _will_ be scared in the dark.”
+
+Failing of any retort, Sally now flopped definitively beyond calling back.
+
+Braile watched her going with a sardonic smile, but when his wife, after
+waiting for her to be quite gone, came out to him, he was serious enough.
+
+“Did that fool tell you of the goings on at the Temple last night?”
+
+“As much as I would let her. I suppose it had to come to something like
+that. It seems as if the people had gone crazy.”
+
+“Yes,” the Squire sighed heavily, “there's no doubt about that. And it's
+a pity. For such a religious community Leatherwood Creek used to be a very
+decent place to live in. They were a lot of zealots, but they got on well
+with one another; that Temple of theirs kept them together, and they
+didn't quarrel much about doctrine. Now with the Dylksites driving the
+old-fashioned believers out of the sanctuary and dedicating it to the
+exclusive worship of Dylks, the other denominations are going to fight
+among themselves; and there'll be no living with them. And that isn't the
+worst of it. This new deity isn't going to be satisfied with worship
+merely. Money, of course, he'll want and get, and he'll wear purple and
+fine linen, and feed upon fried chicken every day. Still the superstition
+might die out, and no great harm done, if the faith was confined to men.
+But you know what women are, Martha.”
+
+“They're what men make 'em,” Mrs. Braile said sadly.
+
+“It's six of one and half a dozen of another, I'm afraid. But this god of
+theirs is a handsome devil, and some poor fool of a girl, or some bigger
+fool of a married woman, is going to fall in love with him, and then--”
+
+“Did you just think of that? Well, you can't help it by lettin' your
+coffee get cold.”
+
+Braile tilted his chair down and rose from its rebound to follow his wife
+stiffly indoors. “The question is, Who will it be? Which poor girl? Which
+bigger fool? And nothing can be done to prevent it! The Real God put it
+into human nature, and all Hell couldn't stop it. Well, I suppose it's for
+some wise purpose,” he ended, in parody of the pious resignation
+prevailing on the tongues of the preachers.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+David Gillespie woke later than his daughter, and when he had put away
+the shadows of his unhappy dreams he took up the burden of waking thoughts
+which weighed more heavily on him. The sight of his child groveling at the
+feet of that blasphemous impostor and adoring him as her God pitilessly
+realized itself to him as a thing shameful past experience and beyond
+credence, and yet as undeniable as his pulse, his breath, his seeing and
+hearing. The dread which a less primitive spirit would have forbidden
+itself as something too abominable, possessed him as wholly possible. He
+had lived righteously, and he had kept evil from those dear to him, both
+the dead and the quick, by the force of his strong unselfish will; now he
+had seen his will without power upon the one who was dearest, and whom he
+seemed to hold from evil only by the force of his right hand. But his hand
+could not be everywhere and at all times; and then?
+
+The breakfast which the girl had got for him and left on the hearth was
+warm yet, when he put it on the table, and she could not have been gone
+more than a few minutes, but she had gone, he did not know where, without
+waiting to speak with him after the threats and defiances which they had
+slept upon. When he had poured the coffee after the mouthfuls he forced
+down, he acted on the only hope he had and crossed the woods-pasture to
+his sister's cabin.
+
+She understood the glance he gave within from the threshold where he
+paused, and said, “She ain't here, David.” Nancy had cleared her breakfast
+away and was ironing at the shelf where she had eaten; the baby was
+playing on the floor.
+
+Gillespie looked down at it. “I didn't know but what she'd come over to
+dress it; she cares so much for it.”
+
+“It cares for her, too. But what brings you after her?”
+
+“She's gone somewhere without her breakfast. We had high words last night
+after I brought her home.”
+
+“I'm afraid you'll have higher words, yet, David. Joey was at the Temple.”
+
+“Nancy, I don't know what to do about her.”
+
+“You knew what to do about _me_, David.” She gave her stab, and then
+she pitied him, not for the pain she was willing he should feel from it,
+but for the pain he was feeling before. “I know it isn't like that. I'm
+sorry for you both. You haven't come to the end of your troubles.”
+
+“I can't understand the girl,” he said desolately. “Up to a year ago she
+was like she had always been, as biddable as a child, and meek and
+yielding every way. All at once she's got stiff-necked and wilful.”
+
+“She couldn't tell you why, herself, David. We are all that way--good
+little girls--and then all of a sudden wilful women. I don't know what
+changes us. It's harder on us than it is on you. It came on me like a
+thief in the night and stole away my sense. It gave Joseph Dylks his
+chance over me; if it had been sooner or later I should have known he was
+a power of darkness as far as I could see him. But my eyes were holden by
+my self-conceit, and I thought he was an angel of light.”
+
+“He's got past being an angel now,” Gillespie said, forcing himself to
+the real matter of his errand, far from the question of his daughter's
+estrangement from her old self. “Did Joey tell you about--last night?”
+
+Nancy did not quit the psychological question at once. “Up to that time
+we think our fathers and brothers are something above the human; then we
+think they're not even up to the common run of men. We think other men are
+different because we don't know them. Yes,” she returned to his question
+with a sigh, “Joey told me something about it--enough about it. I suppose
+it isn't right to let him be a spy on his father; but I have to. If I
+didn't he might want to go, from the talk of those fools, and get to
+believin' with them. He said there was boys and girls kneelin' with the
+rest--little children, almost, and shoutin' and prayin' to Joseph. Did you
+see 'em?”
+
+“Yes; it was dreadful, Nancy. But it was worse to see the women, the
+grown-up girls, and the mothers of the children. It looked like they had
+been drinking. It fairly turned me sick. And my own daughter groveling on
+her knees with the worst! If I didn't know Dylks for the thing he is,
+without an idea beyond victuals and clothes, I might ha' thought he had
+thrown a spell on 'em, just for deviltry. But they done it all themselves;
+he just gave them the _chance_ to play the fool.”
+
+Nancy resumed from her own more immediate interest, “Well, I let Joey go;
+and I don't know whether it helps or hurts to have him come home feelin'
+about him, and all the goings on, just like I would myself. He always says
+he's glad I wasn't there, and he pities the poor fool women more than he
+despises his father. Or I ortn't to say despise; Joey don't despise
+anybody; he's all good, through and through; I don't know where he gets
+it. He's like Laban, and yet he ain't any kin to Laban.”
+
+“It must be hard on you, Nancy. I don't know how you can bear up the way
+you do. It is like a living streak of fire in me.”
+
+“That's because there's some hope left in you. I can bear what I've got
+to because the feeling is all burnt out of me. It's like as if my soul was
+dead.”
+
+“You mustn't say that, Nancy.”
+
+“I say anything I please, now; anything I think. I'm not afraid any more;
+I hain't got anything left to be afraid of.”
+
+“Well, I have,” David returned. “Something I'm ashamed to be afraid of
+it: his hold on Jane. I don't understand it. We've always thought alike
+and believed alike, and now to see her gone crazy after a thief and liar
+like that! It's enough to drive me mad the other way. I don't only want to
+kill _him_; I want to kill--”
+
+“David!” she stopped him, and in his pause she added, “You're worse than
+what I ever was. Where is your religion?”
+
+“Where is _her_ religion? I raised her to fear God, the Bible God
+that I've prayed to for her since she was a little babe, but now since
+she's turned to this heathen image I begin to turn from _Him_. What's
+_He_ been about if He's All Seeing and All Powerful, to let loose
+such a devil on a harmless settlement like this where we were all brethren
+and dwelt together in unity, no matter whether we believed in dipping or
+sprinkling? We loved one another--in the Scripture sense--and now look!
+Families broken up, brothers not speaking, wives and husbands parting,
+parents cursing the day their children were born, and children flying in
+the face of their parents. Did you hear about Christopher Mills, how he
+come crying to his father and mother and tried to make them believe in
+Dylks, and when his father said it was all a snare and a delusion,
+Christopher went away telling them their damnation was sealed?”
+
+“No,” the woman said with bitter pleasure in the mockery, “but I heard
+how our new Saint Paul Enraghty went over to his uncle's the other day,
+and said he should never see corruption, and should never die, and told
+his uncle he couldn't shoot him. Them that was there say the old man just
+reached for his rifle, and was going to shoot Saint Paul in the legs, and
+then Paul begged off and pretended that he was only in fun!”
+
+She laughed, but David Gillespie looked sadly at her. “I don't believe I
+like to hear you laugh, Nancy.”
+
+“Why, are you turning believer too, David? It'll be time for me next,”
+ she mocked. “I couldn't laugh at Joseph, may be, but Saint Paul Enraghty
+is a bigger rascal or a bigger fool than he is. Some say that Joseph is
+just crazy, and some that he's after money, and that Enraghty's put him up
+to everything.”
+
+“Yes,” David moodily assented to the general tenor of her talk. “The way
+they've roped in between 'em that poor fool Davis who'd been preaching for
+the United Brethren, and now preaches Dylks! First he wouldn't hardly go
+into the same house, and then he wouldn't leave it till he could come with
+Dylks. I don't know how they do it! Sometimes I think the decentest man
+left in the place is that red-mouthed infidel, Matthew Braile! Sometimes
+I'm a mind to go to his house and get him to tell me what Tom Paine would
+do in my place.”
+
+“You _are_ pretty far gone, David. But I don't wonder at it; and I
+don't believe I think so badly of Matthew Braile, either. He may be an
+infidel, but he believes in some kind of a God that wants people to do
+right; he don't believe in mortal sin, and may be that's where he's out;
+and I hear tell he don't think there's going to be any raisin' of the
+body, or any Last Day, or any Hell; but he keeps it to himself unless
+folks pester him. I was afraid once to have Joey talk with him, before the
+plow went over me. But now I let Joey go to him all he wants to. He lets
+Joey come and pet the coon Joey give him because he heard that the
+Squire's little boy used to want one. From all I can make out they don't
+do much but talk about the little boy; he seems to take comfort in Joey
+because Joey's like him, or the Squire thinks so.”
+
+“If Jane had died when she was his little boy's age, I wouldn't feel as
+if I had lost her half as much as I do now.”
+
+Nancy lifted herself from her ironing-board and looked at her brother.
+“You told me what the duty of a woman was that found out she had two
+husbands. Don't you know what the duty of a man is that has a daughter
+turned idolater?”
+
+“No, I don't, Nancy,” David answered doggedly.
+
+“Then, why don't you wrestle with the Lord in prayer? Perhaps He'd make
+you some sign.”
+
+“Oh, prayer! The thought of it makes me sick since I saw them fools
+wallowing round at Dylks's feet, and beseeching that heathen image to save
+them.”
+
+“Then if you hain't got any light of yourself, and you don't believe the
+Lord can give you any, what do you expect _me_ to do for you?”
+
+“I don't expect anything, Nancy. If she was a child I could whip it out
+of her, but when your child has got to be a woman you can't whip her.”
+
+They left the hopeless case, and began to talk of the things they had
+heard, especially the miracle which Dylks had promised to work. “He's
+appointed it for to-night,” Gillespie said, “but I don't believe but what
+he'll put it off, if the coast ain't clear when the time comes. He always
+had the knack of leaving the back door open when he saw trouble coming up
+to the front gate.”
+
+“You can't tell me anything about Joseph Dylks,” Nancy said. She was
+ironing, and at the last word she brought the iron down with the heavy
+thump that women give with it at an emphatic word in their talk. “What I
+wonder is that a man like you, David, could care what people in such a
+place as this would say if they found out that I was livin' with Laban
+when I knowed Dylks was alive. There wouldn't be any trouble with his
+followers, I reckon. He'd just tell 'em he never saw me in his life
+before, and that would do them.”
+
+“Nancy,” her brother turned solemnly upon her, “as sure as I'm standing
+here I don't care for that any more. If you say the word, I'll go and tell
+Laban to come back to you.”
+
+“You're safe there, David. If you've parted with your conscience, I've
+got it from you. I wonder you don't go and follow after Joseph Dylks too.
+All the best and smartest men in the place believe in him. Just look at
+Mr. Enraghty! A man with more brains and book learnin' than all the rest
+put together; willin' to be the Apostle Paul because Joseph Dylks called
+him it, and gets up in the Temple where he used to preach Christ Jesus and
+Him crucified, and tells the people to behold their God in Joseph Dylks!
+There's just one excuse for him: he's crazy. If he ain't he's the
+wickedest man in Leatherwood, the wickedest man in the whole world; he's
+worse than Joseph Dylks, because he knows better. Joseph is such a liar
+that he could always make himself believe what he said. But it's no use
+your stayin' here, David!” She suddenly broke off to turn on her brother.
+“If you're a mind to let Jane come, I'll try what I can do with her.”
+
+The old man faltered at the door. “Are you going to tell her, Nancy?”
+
+“I'm not going to tell _you_, whether I am or not, David!”
+
+Her words began harshly, but ended with his name tenderly, pitifully
+uttered.
+
+She called after him as he moved from her door, heavily, weakly, more
+like an old man than she had noted him yet, “I'll talk to Jane, and
+whatever I say will be for her good.” She watched him out of sight from
+where she was working; then she went to the door, with some mind to call
+more kindly yet to him; but he was not to be seen, and she went back to
+her ironing, and ironed more swiftly than before, moving her lips in a
+sort of wrathful revery. From time to time she changed her iron for one at
+the hearth, which she touched with her wetted finger to test its heat, and
+returned to her table with an unconscious smile of satisfaction in its
+quick responsive hiss. In her movements to and fro she spoke to the baby,
+which babbled inarticulately up to her from the floor. Then she seemed to
+forget it, and it was in one of these moments of oblivion that she was
+startled by a sharp cry of terror from it. A man was looking in at the
+door.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+The man stood with one foot on the log doorstep outside and the other
+planted on the threshold of the cabin.
+
+Nancy came toward him with her iron held at arms' length before her.
+“What do you want?” she demanded fiercely.
+
+“Give me to drink,” he said, with a grin.
+
+“Go round to the well,” she answered.
+
+The man bent his body a little forward, and looked in, but he did not
+venture to lift his other foot to the threshold. “Where is your husband?”
+ he asked.
+
+“I have no husband. What is it to you?”
+
+“'Thou sayest well ... for him whom thou now hast, is not thy husband.'
+You don't look a bit older, and you're as handsome as ever, Nancy. I
+suppose that's his,” he said, turning his eye towards the little one on
+the floor, lifted by her hands half upright, and peering at him, in
+conditional alarm.
+
+“It's mine,” she retorted.
+
+“Oh, anybody could see that. It's the image of you. And so is our Joey.
+You don't let your young ones favor your husbands much, Nancy; and yet you
+was not always so set against me. What's your notion letting Joey come to
+the Temple?”
+
+“To see for himself what you are.”
+
+“That's what I thought, maybe. Well, he don't seem to take to me much, if
+I can judge from his face when he looks my way. I hain't been able to give
+him all the attention I may later. But you needn't be troubled about him.
+I won't do anything to make you anxious. Nancy, I wish you could feel as
+friendly to me as I do to you. Will you let me have something to drink out
+of?”
+
+“Go round,” she said, “and I'll bring the gourd to you.”
+
+Dylks laughed, but he obeyed, and found his way to the well where he
+lowered the bucket at the end of the swoop, and stood waiting for Nancy to
+follow him with the dipper fashioned from a long-necked gourd, as the
+drinking cup oftenest was in the western country of those days. She held
+it out to him with her head turned and he carried it to his lips from the
+brimming bucket.
+
+He drank it empty, and then turned it over with a long, deep “Ah--h--h!”
+ of satisfaction. “That was good! Good as the buttermilk would have been
+that you didn't think to offer me. Well, I thank you for the water,
+anyway, you woman of Samaria.” He held the gourd toward her but she did
+not take it, and he laughed again. “If you could have had your way without
+sin you'd have made it poison, I reckon. Don't you know I could drink
+poison the same as water?”
+
+“_You_ don't,” she said, and as he swung the gourd in tacit question
+what to do with it since she did not offer to take it, she bade him, “Put
+it down.”
+
+He did so, and she set her foot on the thin bowl and crushed it like an
+egg shell. He laughed. “Is that the way you feel about me, Nancy? Pity for
+the gourd, but don't you believe that if I was to will it so, it would
+come good and whole again?”
+
+“_You_ don't believe it,” she said.
+
+“It's not for me to believe or to unbelieve,” he answered. “I am that I
+am.”
+
+“Oh, yes,” she taunted him, “you've tried saying such things, and you're
+not afraid because it ha'n't killed you yet. You think if you _was_
+just a man it would kill you.”
+
+“Who can tell what I think? Perhaps something like what you say has gone
+through my mind. Why, Nancy, if you would listen once, I could convince
+you of it, too. Come, now, look at it in this light! If God lets a man say
+and do what the man pleases--and He _has_ to do it every now and then
+according to what the Book tells--why ain't the man equal with God? You
+believe, maybe, that you would be struck dead if you said the things that
+I do; but why ain't I struck dead? Why, either because it ain't so, at
+all, or because I'm God. It stands to reason, don't it? What is God,
+anyway? If He was so mighty and terrible, wouldn't He have ways of showing
+it in these times just as much as in those old times that we read about in
+the Book?
+
+“Don't you know that if there was anything besides you and me, here now,
+it would have sent the lightning out of this clear sky and blasted me when
+I said, I was God? Well, now we'll try it again. Listen! I _am God_,
+Jehovah, ruler of heaven and earth!” He stood a moment, smiling. “There
+you see! I'm safe and sound as ever. May be you think it would be worse if
+_you_ said I was God. Lots have said it. Last night all Leatherwood
+was hanging to my arms and legs down there in the Temple worshiping me. If
+I hadn't been God it would have made me sick! No mere man could stand the
+praising God gets in the churches all the time. Why that proves I'm what I
+say I am, if nothing else does. I saw it from the first; I felt it; I knew
+it.” He ended with his laugh.
+
+She stayed herself by the trunk of the tree overhanging the well. “Yes,
+you've got all Leatherwood with you, or as good as all, and I don't wonder
+it's made you crazy. But don't you be so sure. Some day there's going to
+be a reckoning with you, and you're going to wake up from this dream of
+yours.” She seemed to gather force as she faced him. “I could feel to be
+glad it _was_ a dream; I could feel to pity you. But don't you
+believe but what it's going to turn against you. Some day, sooner or
+later, some man's going to show the people what you are; some woman--”
+
+[Illustration: “You believe, maybe, that you would be struck dead if you
+said the things that I do; but why ain't I struck dead?”]
+
+“There you've said it,” he broke in. “That's what I've come for. You're
+the only woman that could hurt me, not because you think you know me the
+best, but because you're the bravest woman that ever was. That's why I've
+got to have you with me in my dispensation. Male and female created He
+them in His image. I can swing all Leatherwood by myself, but
+Leatherwood's nothing. If I had you with me we could swing the world!
+Nancy, why don't you come to me?” He flung his arms wide and bent his
+stalwart shape toward her. “Leatherwood's nothing, I tell you. Why, you
+ought to see the towns Over-the-Mountains; you ought to see Philadelphia,
+where I came from the last thing. Everywhere the people are waiting for a
+sign, just as they've always been, and we would come with a sign--plenty
+of signs: the perfect Godhead, male and female, for the greatest sign of
+all. Why, I wonder there's a Christian woman living, with the slur that
+the idea of just one male God throws on women! Don't you know that the
+Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans, and everybody but the Hebrews,
+had a married God, and that the Godhead was husband and wife? If you had
+ever read anything at all you would know that.”
+
+The bad, vulgar beauty of his face, set in its flowing beard and hair,
+glowed on her.
+
+“You needn't look that way at me, Joseph Dylks,” she answered. “I don't
+want any book-l'arning to know what _you_ are. You're what you always
+was, a lazy, good-for-nothing--Oh, I don't say you wasn't handsome; that
+was what done it for me when I made you my God; but I won't make you my
+God now, though you're as handsome as ever you was; handsomer, if that's
+any comfort to you.”
+
+“Nothing to what you're coming to me would be, Nancy.”
+
+“You'll have to do without, then. You think you can twist me round your
+finger, like you used to, if you willed it, but I've outlived you, you and
+your will. Now I want you to go, and not ever come near me again; or I'll
+have Laban here, the next time.”
+
+“Laban? Laban? Oh, the man who is not thy husband! I'm not afraid of your
+having Laban, here; let him come. I've converted worse sinners than
+Laban.” He had remained, bent forward with his gaze still on her; now he
+lifted himself, and said, as if it were another word of his spell, “Come,
+Nancy!”
+
+She answered, “If I thought there was any mercy in you--”
+
+“Why, I'm All-merciful, as well as All-mighty, Nancy!” he jeered.
+
+“No,”--as if concluding her thought, she said, “it's no use! You couldn't
+do a right thing if you wanted to; you can only do wrong things. I see
+that.”
+
+“What is right and what is wrong? When you stand by my side in your half
+of the godhead, you will know that there is no difference. Why, even a
+poor human being can make wrong right by wanting it enough, and with God
+there is nothing but one kind of thing, the thing that God allows. It
+don't matter whether it's letting the serpent tempt that fool woman in
+Eden, or Joseph's brethren selling him into Egypt, or Samuel hewing Agag
+in pieces, or the Israelites smiting the heathen, or David setting Uriah
+in the forefront of the battle, or Solomon having hundreds of wives; it's
+all right if God wills it. You'll say it's put right by what happens to
+them that do wrong. Be God yourself and the right and the wrong will take
+care of themselves. I want you to come and help me. Why, with the sister
+and daughter of old David Gillespie both following me--”
+
+She suddenly shrank from the grandeur of judging of him, to the measure
+of her need of his forbearance. “Oh, why can't you let David alone? What's
+he ever done to you?”
+
+“What have I ever done to him?” Dylks demanded, temporizing on her ground.
+
+“Why can't you let Jane alone?”
+
+He gave his equine snort, as if the sense of his power could best vent
+itself so. “Why can't she let _me_ alone? That girl bothers me worse
+than all the other women in Leatherwood put together. She won't _let_
+me let her alone.”
+
+“She was all right before you came. Why can't you let her go back to
+Hughey Blake?”
+
+“Hughey Blake? Oh! Then it wasn't--” A light of malign intelligence shone
+in his eyes. “Well, I haven't got anything against Hughey Blake.”
+
+“Oh, if you'd only let her go back to Hughey! If you'd only let her
+alone, I'd--”
+
+“You'd what?” He bounded toward her, and at her recoil he laughed and
+said, “I didn't mean to scare you.”
+
+“I wasn't scared. You can't scare _me_, Joseph Dylks. It's past that,
+long ago, with you and me. But if I only knowed what you was up to--what
+you would really take to let David alone; to let her go back to Hughey
+Blake--But there ain't any pity in you!”
+
+“Don't I tell you I'm _full_ of pity? Look here, Nancy; I don't ask
+you to come with me, to be one with me, to go halves in the godhead, all
+at once. It's been step by step with me: first exhorter, then prophet,
+then disciple, then the Son, then the Father: but it's been as easy! You
+don't know how faith, the faith of the elect, helps along; and you would
+have that from the beginning; they would take you on my word, you wouldn't
+have to say or do anything. But that's not what I'm expecting now,” he
+hurried to add, smiling at the cloud of refusal in her face. “I'm not
+fooling; all I ask now is to have you come and see me do a miracle at
+Brother Hingston's to-night. I'll do two miracles if you'll come, and one
+will be sending Jane Gillespie away from me and back to Hughey Blake.
+You'll want to see that, even if you don't want to see me turn a bolt of
+cloth into seamless raiment by the touch of my hand.”
+
+“You are a wicked man, Joseph Dylks,” the woman solemnly answered. “And
+I'm sorry I asked you anything. You _couldn't_ do good, if you
+tried.” She pulled her sunbonnet across her face, as if to hide it for
+shame, and went back slowly toward the cabin.
+
+“Salvation!” Dylks shouted after her, and gave his equine snort. He began
+to sing, as he took his way through the woods,
+
+  “Plunged in a gulf of dark despair
+   We wretched sinners lay.”
+
+At first he sang boldly, filling the woods with the mocking of his hymn.
+But at the sound of footsteps crackling over the dry falling twigs toward
+him intermittently, as if they paused in question, and then resumed their
+course toward him, his voice fell, brokenly silencing itself till at the
+encounter of a man glimpsed through the trees, and pausing in a common
+arrest, it ceased altogether.
+
+“Who are you?” Dylks demanded of the slight, workworn figure before him.
+
+“Laban Billings,” the man faltered.
+
+“Well, then, Laban Billings, make way for the Lord thy God,” Dylks
+powerfully returned, and as if he had borne the man down before him, he
+strode over the place where he had stood, and lost himself in the shadows
+beyond.
+
+Laban hurried on, stumbling and looking back over his shoulder, till he
+found himself face to face with Nancy at the door of the shed behind the
+cabin. She was looking, too, in the direction Dylks had ceased from their
+sight in the woods. They started from each other in mutual fright.
+
+“Nancy!” he entreated. “I didn't see you. I--I wasn't comin' to see you,
+indeed, indeed I wasn't. I just thought I might ketch sight of the
+baby--It's pretty hard to do without you both! And I was just passin'--Well,
+they've knocked off work at the Corners, so's to come to the miracle at
+Hingston's Mill to-night--But I'll go right away again, Nancy.”
+
+“You needn't, Laban. Come in and see the baby.”
+
+“Nancy!” he uttered joyfully. Then he faltered, “Do you think it will be
+right--”
+
+“Oh, who knows what's right?” she retorted. Then at his stare, she
+demanded, “Didn't you run across anybody in the woods?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“What did he look like?”
+
+“Like what they tell the Leatherwood God looks like. They're half crazy
+about him at the Corners. They don't hardly talk about anything else.”
+
+“Did you think he looked like God?”
+
+“More like Satan, I should say. He's handsome enough for Satan.”
+
+“It was Joseph Dylks.”
+
+“Yes, I s'picioned that.”
+
+“And he's been here, wanting me to go away with him--Over-the-Mountains.”
+
+Laban made a dry sound in his throat and it was by a succession of
+efforts that he could say, “And--and--and--”
+
+“Oh, could you _ask_, Laban?” she lamented. “You're my husband,
+don't you know it?” At the sound of her lament a little voice of fear and
+hope answered from the cabin. The father-hunger came into the man's weak
+face, making it strong. “Come in and see our baby, Laban.”
+
+She put out her hand to him innocently like a little girl to a little
+boy, and he took it. “I know it's just for the baby; and I feel to thank
+you, Nancy,” he said, and together they went into the cabin.
+
+At sight of him the baby crowed recognition. “She knowed you in a
+minute,” the mother said, and she straightened the skirt of the little one
+which the father had deranged in lifting the child from the floor. “I
+don't believe she'll ever forget you; I _reckon_ she won't if I have
+any say in it. Me and Joey talks about you every night when we're gettin'
+her to sleep.” She gurgled out a half-sob, half-laugh, as the little one
+pulled and pushed at his face, which he twisted this way and that, to get
+her hand in his mouth. “She always cared more for you than she did for me.
+I'll set you a piece, Laban; I was just going to get me a bite of
+something; I don't take my meals very regular, with you not here.”
+
+“Well, I _am_ a little hungry with the walk from the Corners, after
+such an early breakfast.”
+
+“Well, you just keep her.”
+
+“Oh, _I'll_ keep her,” he exulted.
+
+She hustled about the hearth, getting the simple meal, which she made
+more than she had meant, and they had a joyous strange time together at
+the leaf she stayed from the well.
+
+He kept the baby in his lap while he ate. Then he walked the floor till
+she fell asleep in his arms. When he lifted himself from laying her in the
+rough cradle which he had himself made for her, he said, without looking
+at the mother, “Now, I must be going, Nancy.”
+
+“Don't go on account of me, Laban,” she said with the same fierce courage
+she had shown in driving him from her before. “If it's for me--”
+
+“Nancy, I've thought it all out since I been away. And I reckon I ain't
+your husband, in the sight of God. You was right about that; and I won't
+ever come back again till--as long as--” He glanced wistfully at the
+little one in the cradle, and then he turned to go out of the door.
+“And--and--good-by, Nancy.”
+
+She followed him to the door. “Kiss me, Laban!”
+
+He put away the arms she lifted toward him. “No,” he said, “I reckon it
+wouldn't be right,” and he turned and walked swiftly away, without looking
+back.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+The woman stood watching the man, as long as she could see him, and long
+after, with her left hand lifted to the jamb of the door, higher than her
+head. Then from the distance where he passed from sight over the brow of
+the hill, another figure of a man appeared, and slowly made its way down
+to the cabin. As she knew while he was still far off, it was Matthew
+Braile who, as long as he sat in the seat of the scorner, with his chair
+tilted against the wall, seemed a strong middle-aged man; but when he
+descended from his habitual place, with the crook of his stick, worn
+smooth by use, in his hard palm, one saw that he was elderly and stiff
+almost to lameness. He carried himself with a forward droop, and his gaze
+bent ponderingly on the ground, as if he were not meaning to look her way,
+and would pass without seeing her.
+
+“Squire Braile!” she called to him, and as he straightened himself and
+turned round toward her, she besought him, “Do you believe there's any
+God?”
+
+“Oh!” he answered, and he smiled at the challenge from the somewhat
+lonely elevation which he knew the thoughts of his neighbors kept, aloof
+from the sordid levels of politics and business. “Why, Nancy, haven't we
+got one, right here in Leatherwood?”
+
+“That's what makes me think there ain't any, Squire Braile. If you're not
+in too much of a hurry, I wish you'd stop and talk to me a minute. I'm in
+trouble.”
+
+“Most women are; or men, for the matter of that. What is it, Nancy? I'm
+rather stronger on law than gospel; but if I can be any help, why you know
+your Joey's an old friend of mine, and I'll be glad to help you.”
+
+He came toward her where she had stepped from the threshold and sat
+crouched on the hewn log, and stood looking down at her before he sank at
+her side.
+
+“You may think it's pretty strange, my asking _you_ for help. Won't
+you set? I can't let you come inside because the baby's just got to sleep.”
+
+“Well,” he assented, “if you're not afraid to be seen with such an
+infidel in the full light of day,” he jested, confronting her from the log
+where he sank. “What would Brother Gillespie say?”
+
+She ignored his kindly mockery, and again she began, “What makes you
+believe there's a God? You don't believe in the Bible?”
+
+“Not altogether, Nancy.”
+
+“Do you believe in the Bible God?”
+
+“As much as the Bible'll let me.”
+
+“Then, do you believe in the miracles?”
+
+“What are you after, Nancy Billings?”
+
+“If you saw a miracle, would you believe it?”
+
+“That would depend on who did it. Now, I want you to let _me_ do a
+little of the catechizing. I've liked you and Laban ever since you came to
+Leatherwood, and you know how your Joey has all but brought my boy back to
+me. Well, do _you_ believe in God?”
+
+“No!”
+
+“Why don't you?”
+
+“A God that would let Joseph Dylks claim to be Him, and let them poor
+fools kneel down to him and worship him? Would an all-wise and
+all-powerful God do that?”
+
+“What makes you say all-powerful? Haven't you seen time and time again
+when good didn't prevail against evil, and don't you suppose He'd have
+helped it if He could? And why do you call Him all-wise? Is it because men
+are no-wise? That wouldn't prove it, would it? And about the miracles,
+what does a miracle prove? Does it prove that the person who does it is of
+God, or just that faith is stronger than reason in those who think it's
+happened?”
+
+“But sin: do you think there's such a thing?” Nancy pursued.
+
+“There you are, catechizing _me_ again! Yes, I think there's sin,
+because I've known it in myself, if I haven't in others.”
+
+“And what is it--sin?”
+
+“Well, Nancy, it seems to vary according to the time and place. But I
+should say it was going against what you knew was right at the time being.”
+
+“And do you always know?”
+
+“Always!” the old man answered solemnly. “I never was mistaken in my
+life, whether I went for or against it, and I've done both.”
+
+The woman drew a hapless sigh. “Yes, I reckon it's so.”
+
+Braile was putting out his stick to help himself in rising, after the
+silence she let follow. She came from it, and reached a staying hand
+toward him. “And supposin'--supposin'--there was a woman--that there was a
+woman, and her husband left her, and he kept away years and years, till
+she thought he was dead, and she married somebody else, and then he come
+back, would it be a sin for her to keep on with the other one when she
+knowed the first one was alive?”
+
+“I reckon that's what would be called a sin, Nancy. Not that I'd be very
+quick to condemn her--”
+
+“And supposin' that the first one hadn't claimed her yet, and she'd made
+the other one leave her, and then the first one come and wanted her to
+join him in the wickedest thing that ever was, and she wasn't as strong as
+she had been, and she felt to need the protection-like of the other one:
+would it be a sin for her to take him back?”
+
+Braile made again as if to rise. “I reckon you'd better talk to Mis'
+Braile about a thing like that. You see, a man--”
+
+She stayed him again with a beseeching gesture.
+
+“Squire Braile, do you believe that God is good?”
+
+“Ah, now, I'm more at home in a question like that. You might say that if
+He lets evil prevail, it's either because He can't help it, or because He
+don't care, or even because He thinks it's best for mankind to let them
+have their swing when they choose to do evil. I incline to think that's my
+idea. He's made man, we'll say, made him in His own image, and He's put
+him here in a world of his own, to do the best or the worst with it. The
+way I look at it, He doesn't want to keep interfering with man, but lets
+him play the fool or play the devil just as he's a mind to. But every now
+and then He sends him word. If we're going to take what the Book says, He
+sent him Word made flesh, once, and I reckon He sends him Word made Spirit
+whenever there's a human creature comes into the world, all loving and all
+unselfish--like your Joey, or--my--my Jimmy--”
+
+The old man's voice died in his throat, and the woman laid her hand on
+his knee. He trembled to his feet, now. “When I think of such Spirits
+coming into this world, I'm not afraid of all the devils out of hell
+Dylksing round.”
+
+He walked on down the road, and Nancy went indoors and went about her
+household work. She cleaned the dishes and trimmed the hearth; she spun
+the flax which tufted her wheel; then she took the rags of some garments
+past repair, and in the afternoon shadow of her threshold she cut them
+into ribbons and sewed them end to end and wound them into balls, for
+weaving into carpets.
+
+People, as the evening drew on, went by, singly, in twos, in groups,
+silent for the most part, but some talking seriously. These looked at
+Nancy without speaking, but some asked, “Ain't you goin' to the Miracle?”
+ and she shook her head for answer.
+
+She had brushed her hair and put it up neatly after her indoors work was
+done, but she was in what she would have called her every-day clothes, and
+the passers had on their Sunday clothes; the girls wore their newest
+plaids of linsey-woolsy, and the young men wore tall beaver hats, and long
+high-collared coats, with tight pantaloons, which some pretenders to the
+latest fashions had strapped under their boots. They had on their Sunday
+faces, too; some severe, some sly, some simple and kind, but all with an
+effect of condition for whatever might be going to happen. They went as
+the people of Leatherwood went to the Temple on the Sabbaths before their
+meetings had been turned from the orderly worship of the Most High to the
+riot of emotions raised by the strange man who proclaimed himself God. In
+their expectations of the Sign which he had promised to give them, both
+those who believed and those who denied him found themselves in a sort of
+truce. They were as if remanded to the peace of the time before the
+difference which had rent the community into warring fragments. In this
+truce brothers were speaking who had not spoken since they accepted or
+refused the new God; families walked together in the harmony which he had
+lately counseled; children honored their believing or disbelieving
+parents; fathers and mothers ceased to abhor their children as limbs of
+Satan, according to their faith or unfaith. “Let everybody come to the
+Sign,” he had exhorted them when he promised them the miracle, “just as if
+they had never seen or heard me before, and let His creatures judge their
+Creator with love for one another in their hearts.”
+
+In all there was an air of release, and the young people looked as if
+they were going to one of the social gatherings they would have called a
+frolic, in the backwoods phrase. Nancy heard a girl titter in response to
+her companion's daring whisper, “Wonder if Mis' Hingston's going to pass
+round the apples and cider.” They walked in couples, openly or demurely
+glad of being together for the time; and as if the miracle before them
+were the wonder of coming home through the woods with their arms around
+each other, whether the miracle of the seamless raiment was wrought or not.
+
+It was their elders who were more singly set upon the fulfilment of the
+sign, and who went with a more passionate expectation in the doubt or the
+faith which differenced them; children were more bent upon the affair of
+the evening than the young girls and the young men. They had been
+privileged in being allowed to go with their fathers and mothers when they
+had not been punished in being left at home and they subdued themselves as
+they could to the terms of keeping step beside them with the bare feet
+that felt winged and ached to fly. Old and young they passed Nancy's cabin
+thinly or at intervals, but sometimes in close groups; they glanced kindly
+or unkindly askance at her when they did not question her, and very
+possibly they read in her sitting there boldly aloof from them a defiance
+of the question which had begun to gather about her in the common mind
+since Laban had left her for his work at the Cross Roads, with none of
+those Saturday night returns which it had at first expected. It was known
+that Laban was of the same opposition to Dylks as Nancy and her brother,
+and it could not be that Dylks had caused the break between her and Laban
+which no one would have noticed if it had been an effect of religion. It
+could only be that Laban had left her, or that her temper had driven him
+away.
+
+With the last came a crowd of boys, whose lagging she understood when her
+own boy jumped down from the cabin door beside her.
+
+“Did I scare you, mother?” he asked, at her start.
+
+“No; I was expecting you, and you always come in at the back. You'll want
+your supper, I'll be bound. What made you so late, and all out of breath,
+so?”
+
+“I been running. We just got the last of the tobacco in, this evening,
+and Mis' Hingston made me stay and eat with Benny; she said she'd excuse
+me to you. I just left the other boys up over the hill, and run through
+the woods to get here in time and ask you.”
+
+“To ask me what, Joey dear?” She put her arms fondly round the boy's
+knees, and pulled him down to her.
+
+“The boys said you let me go to the Temple all I want to; but I told them
+the Miracle was different, and I'd have to ask you first. I told Mis'
+Hingston, and I told the boys. Me 'n' Benny got them to come round. Kin I,
+mother? Mis' Hingston thought may be--may be--you might come yourself. But
+I told her I didn't believe you would.”
+
+“No, I won't go, Joey. What makes you want to go?”
+
+“Oh, I don't know. All the boys are goin'. And I never seen a miracle yet.”
+
+“Do you believe he can do a miracle?”
+
+“Well, it would be some fun to see what he would do if he didn't. I'd
+like to hear what he'd say.”
+
+“And what would you think if he did do it? That he was--God?”
+
+“Oh, _no_, mother! He couldn't be. Mr. Dylks couldn't. I ain't ever
+thought for a minute that he was _that_.”
+
+“And if he failed--if he tried, and put himself to shame before
+everybody, how would you feel?”
+
+“Well, mother, nobody as't him to.” Nancy was silent for so long that the
+boy said discouragedly, “But if you don't want me to go--”
+
+Her face hardened from the pity of her inward vision of the man's
+humiliation, as if his own son had judged him justly. “Yes, you can go,
+Joey. But be careful, be careful! And don't stay too late. And if anything
+happens--”
+
+“Oh, surely, mother, nothing will _happen_,” he exulted, and he
+broke from her hold and ran down the road where the group of boys had
+waited for him, and as he ran he leaped into the air, and called to them,
+“She's let me; she's let me!” and the boys leaped up in response, and
+called back, “Hurrah, hurrah!” and when he had come up with them, they all
+tried to get their arms round him, and trod on his heels and toes in
+pushing one another from him.
+
+In the August twilight which now began to pale the hot sunset glow, as if
+she had waited to come alone, in her pride or in her shame, the woman who
+was bearing the body of the miracle to the place where the wonder was to
+be wrought came last of all to pass Nancy where she sat at her door. She
+was that strong believer who in her utter trust, when she heard that cloth
+would be needed for the seamless raiment of his miracle, had offered to
+provide it; and now, neither in pride nor in shame, but in defiance of her
+unbelieving husband, she was bearing away from her house the bolt of
+linsey-woolsey newly home from the weaver, which was to have been cut into
+the winter's clothing of her children. She had spun the threads herself
+and dyed them, and they had become as if they were of her own flesh and
+blood. She carried the bolt wrapped about with her shawl, bearing it
+tenderly in her arms, as if it were indeed her flesh and blood, her babe
+which she was going to lay upon an altar of sacrifice.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+The crowd at Hingston's mill grew with the arrival of the unbelievers as
+well as the believers in Dylks. They came from all sides, sometimes singly
+and sometimes in groups, and the groups came disputing as often as
+agreeing among themselves. When a group was altogether believing they
+exchanged defiances with a party of those religious outcasts, the Hounds,
+disturbers of camp-meetings and baptisms, and notorious mockers, now, of
+the Leatherwood god in his services at the Temple. But the invitation
+given to see the promised miracle had been _to all_; the Hounds had
+felt in it the tenor of a challenge, and they had accepted it defiantly.
+They jeered at the believers as these arrived, sometimes hailing them by
+name; they neighed and whinnied, and shouted “Salvation!” and in the
+intervals of silence they burst out with the first lines of the Believers'
+hymn.
+
+There were those who mocked, “I am God Almighty,” “The Father and the Son
+are one, and I am both of 'em put together,” and “Oh, Dylks, save us!”
+ “Don't leave us, Dylks!” “Make the Devil jump, Joseph! Make him rattle his
+scales for us!” “Fetch on your miracle!” The believing women turned away;
+some of the younger tittered hysterically at a droll profanation of their
+idol's name, and then one of the ruffians applauded. “That's right,
+sisters! We like to have you enjoy yourselves. Promised to let anybody in
+particular see you home to-night?” The girls tried to control themselves,
+and laughed the more, and the Hound called, “Say, girls, let's have a
+dance--a dance before the Lord.”
+
+Jane Gillespie had come with her father in the family pride which forbade
+them to reject each other publicly. The girl stood a little apart from her
+father, and near her hung, wistfully, fearfully, the young farmer whom the
+neighborhood gossip had assigned her for an acceptable if not accepted
+lover. She looked steadfastly away from Hughey Blake, with her head lifted
+and her cheeks coldly flushed under the flame of her vivid hair: she was
+taller than the other girls, and showed above the young man.
+
+“Say, Hughey,” one of the Hounds spoke across the space they had left
+between them and the decent unbelievers, “Can't you gimme a light? Reach
+up!” He held out a cigar, in the joke of kindling it at the girl's hair.
+
+Hughey Blake turned, and his helpless retort, “You ought to be ashamed of
+yourself,” redoubled the joy of the Hounds. The girl glanced quickly at
+him, with what meaning he could not have made out, and it might have been
+fear of her which kept him hesitating whether to cross over and fall upon
+his tormentor. He looked at her as if for a sign, but she made as if she
+had heard nothing; then while he still hesitated a slender, sinewy young
+fellow came down the open ground, with a soft jolt in his gait like that
+of a rangy young horse. He wore high boots with his trousers pushed
+carelessly into their tops, and for a sign of week-day indifference to the
+occasion, a checked shirt, of the sort called hickory; he struck up the
+brim of his platted straw hat in front with one hand, and with the other
+on his hip stood a figure of backwoods bravery, such as has descended to
+the romance of later times from the reality of the Indian-fighting
+pioneers.
+
+“You fellows keep still!” he called out. “If you don't I'll make you.”
+
+Retorts of varied sense and nonsense came from the Hounds, but without
+malice in their note. One voice answered, “I'd like to see you try, Jim
+Redfield!”
+
+The other jolted closer toward the line of the Hounds, and leaned over.
+“Did I hear somebody speak?” he asked.
+
+“I reckon not, Jim,” the voice of his challenger returned. “Come to join
+the band?”
+
+“I didn't come to worry helpless women,” Redfield said.
+
+“That's right, Jim. There's where we're with you. D'you reckon Apostle
+Hingston'll let us in to see the miracle if we'll keep the believers
+straight while the Almighty is at it?”
+
+“I can't say for Mr. Hingston,” Redfield returned. “But if I was in his
+place I'd want to keep my jug out of sight when you fellows were on duty.”
+
+Redfield passed the Gillespies as he lounged back to his place with a
+covert glance at the girl, who made no sign of seeing her champion.
+
+The woman who was bringing the body of the miracle came round the corner
+of the mill, and showed herself in the open space with the bolt of cloth
+borne carefully in her arms.
+
+“Why, it's a baby!” came from that merriest of the Hounds whom Redfield
+had turned from an enemy into a troublesome friend of the believers.
+“Reckon the women'll have something to say to that if he tries to turn
+e'er a baby into seamless raiment.”
+
+The fellow got the laugh he had tried for, and when Redfield looked
+toward him again he said, “All right, Jim. I'm keepin' 'em quiet the best
+I can. But the elect _will_ make a noise, sometimes.”
+
+The woman with her bundle passed through the open door of the house
+behind the mill. The public entrance was at the front where by day the
+bags of grain were lifted by rope and tackle to the upper story, and the
+farmers who brought them climbed up by the inner stairways. The believers
+had expected that they were to come in by way of the dwelling, but now the
+burly figure of the miller, with the light of a candle behind it, showed
+black in the doorway, and he spoke up, in his friendly voice: “Neighbors,
+we want you all to go round to the front of the mill and come in there.
+The miracle is going to be done on the bolting-cloth floor, where there
+will be room for all that wants to see. We don't mean to keep anybody out,
+whether they believe or don't believe. The only thing we want is for you
+all to be quiet, and not make trouble. And now, come in as quick as you
+can, so you can be sure we haven't had time to do anything to the cloth
+that the seamless raiment is going to be made out of.”
+
+“Hounds and everybody?” called that gayest voice among the outcasts.
+
+“Hounds and everybody,” the miller humorously assented, and his black
+bulk melted into the dark as the candle disappeared within.
+
+The dim light from tin lanterns threw the pattern of their perforations
+on the walls and roofs of the interior, and showed the tracery of the
+floury cobwebs. The people could scarcely see their way to the stairs by
+the glimmer, and there was more talking with nervous laughter than there
+had been outside. One of the Hounds called out, “I don't want any of you
+girls to kiss _me!_” and gave the relief of indignation to the
+hysterical emotion of the believers; the more serious of the unbelievers
+found escape in their helpless laughter from their tense expectation of
+triumph in the failure of the promised miracle.
+
+The wide space on the bolting-cloth floor, before the bins mounded high
+with new wheat, and the rows of millstones, motionless under their empty
+hoppers, was lighted by candles in tin sconces, but these were so few that
+they shone only on the foremost faces and left those behind a gleam of
+eyes or teeth. The familiar machinery had put on a grewsome strangeness
+which had its final touch from the roll lying on the table like something
+dead. A table had been set in front of the barrels under the bolting
+cloths, and the muslin funnels, empty of flour, hung down into the barrels
+with the effect of colossal legs standing in them. The air of the hot
+night was close within; a damp odor from the water flowing under the
+motionless mill wheels seemed to cool it, but did not; the perspiration
+shone on the faces where the light fell on them.
+
+The miller and his family had places in the front line of the spectators,
+and with them was the woman who had given the cloth for the miracle; and
+who stood staring at the stuff, which she had known so intimately in every
+thread and fiber, with an air of estrangement.
+
+When the stumbling feet of the last arrivals ceased on the stairs, the
+miller stood out facing the crowd, and told them that he expected the Good
+Old Man, now, any minute, together with the Apostle Paul, whom they all
+knew by his earthly name as their neighbor, Mr. Enraghty. He asked them to
+be as still as they could, and especially after the Good Old Man came, to
+be perfectly silent; not to whisper, and not to move if they could help
+it. There was nothing, though, he said, to hinder the believers from
+joining in their favorite hymn; and at once the wailing of it began to
+fill the place. When it ended, the deep-drawn breath of some wearied
+expectant made itself heard with the shifting of tired feet easing
+themselves. The minutes grew into an hour, with no sign of Dylks or
+Enraghty, and the miller was again forced to ask the patience of his
+neighbors. But there began to be murmurs from the unbelievers, and more
+articulate protests from the Hounds. Some children, whom the believers had
+brought with them to see the divine power manifest itself, whimpered, and
+were suffered to lie down at the feet of their fathers and mothers and
+forget their disappointment in sleep. A babe, too young to be left at
+home, woke and cried, and was suckled to rest again, with ironical
+applause from the Hounds.
+
+At the end of two hours of waiting, relieved with pleas and promises from
+the miller, there was no word from Dylks and no token of his bodily
+presence. With the scoffing of the unbelievers, the prayers of the
+faithful rose. “Come soon, oh Lord!” “Send thy Power!” “Remember thy
+Little Flock!” Upon these at last broke falteringly, stragglingly, a
+familiar voice, the voice of Abel Reverdy, kindly and uncouth as himself,
+and expressive, like his presence, of an impartial interest in the
+feelings of both the faithful and the unfaithful. He was there in the
+company of his wife, who held a steadfast place among the believers, while
+Abel ranged freely from one party to the other, and could not well have
+known himself of either, though friendly with both. He was of a sort of
+disapproving friendship even with the Hounds, and now his voice said in
+impartial suggestion, “Why not somebody go and fetch him?”
+
+“Good for you, Abel!” came from the Hound who was oftenest spokesman for
+the others. “Why don't you go yourself, Abel?”
+
+Other voices applauded, and Abel was beginning to share a general
+confidence in his fitness for the mission, when his wife spoke up, “'Deed
+and 'deed, I can tell you he ain't agoun' to do no such a thing, not if we
+stay here all night, murricle or no murricle. I ain't agoun' to have him
+put his head into the Lion of Judah's mouth, and have it bit off, like as
+not. I can't tell from one minute to another whether he's a believer or
+not, and if anybody is to go for the Good Old Man it's got to be a studdy
+believer, and not a turncoat of many colors like Abel.”
+
+If Sally had satisfied her need of chastizing her husband for his
+variableness, and found a comfort in her scriptural language, not
+qualified by its wandering application, Abel loyally accepted her open
+criticism. “That's so, Sally, I ain't the one to send. I misdoubted it
+myself, or I'd 'a' gone without sayin' nothin' in the first place. But, as
+Sally says,” he addressed the crowd, “it ought to be a believer.”
+
+“Then why not Sally?” a scorner suggested. She did not refuse, and there
+was a whispering between her and those next her in debate of the question.
+But it was closed by the loud, austere voice of one of the believing
+matrons in the apostolic mandate, “Let your women keep silence in the
+churches.” The text was not closely apt; it was not a precept obeyed in
+the revivals of any of the sects in Leatherwood; it was especially ignored
+in the meetings of the Dylks believers; but its proclamation now satisfied
+the yearning always rife in them to affiliate their dispensation with the
+scriptural tradition.
+
+“Well, that settles it, Sister Coombs,” Sally promptly assented, “I
+wasn't agoun' to, anyway, and I ain't agoun' to now, if I stay here all
+night, or the Good Old Man don't ever come.”
+
+“Why not Jim Redfield?” a Hound demanded, and the miller tried to be
+stern in calling out, “No trifling!” but lost effect by gently adding,
+“Friends.” The unbelievers laughed, but the miller's retreat from the bold
+stand he had taken was covered by Redfield's threat that if those fellows
+kept on he would give them something to laugh about.
+
+As he stepped into the neutral space between the friends and enemies of
+Dylks, he had a sort of double fearfulness for the women, because he was
+not only not of their faith, but because he was of no religious sect in a
+community where every one but an open infidel like Matthew Braile was of
+some profession. He came to the Baptist services with his mother, but he
+had not been baptized, and he was not seen at the house to house prayer
+meetings, where the young people came with the old, or at the frolics
+where dancing was forbidden, but not kissing in their games or in their
+walks home through the woods. He was not supposed to be in love with any
+one, and he lived alone on a rich bottom-land farm with his mother, in a
+house which his father had built where his grandfather's log cabin had
+stood. He was of a tradition which held him closer to the wilderness than
+most of the people of Leatherwood; in the two generations before him the
+Redfields had won and held their lands against the Indians, and had fought
+them in the duels, from tree to tree, which the pioneers taught the
+savages, or learned from them, risking their lives and scalps in the same
+chances. He was of the sort of standing which old family gives, even where
+all families are new, and he was now making his way politically, in spite
+of his irreligion; he meant to go to the legislature, eventually, and in a
+leisurely sort he was reading law, and reciting his Blackstone to Matthew
+Braile. As he came and went from the old infidel's house, he was apt to
+stop at the tavern porch, where the few citizens who could detach their
+minds from the things of another world gave them in cloudy conjecture to
+the political affairs of this, or to scrutiny of the real motives
+actuating the occasional travelers who apparently arrived for a meal's
+victuals or a night's lodging. With these Redfield had scarcely a social
+life, but he could talk with them almost to the point of haranguing them,
+for they were men; at the store, where his mother's errands sometimes took
+him, he shrank from the women as timid as they when they dismounted from
+their saddles or wagons, and slipped in with their butter and eggs, and
+passed out again deeply obscured in their sunbonnets.
+
+They were mostly women past the time of life when men look at them
+curiously, but once Redfield was startled by meeting a young girl, as he
+was trying to go out, and began losing himself with her in that hopeless
+encounter of people who try to give way to each other and keep passing to
+the same side at once. Her face and her red hair burned one fire, but at
+last she stopped stone still, and let him go by, with a sort of angry
+challenge in her blue eyes. He knew that it was Jane Gillespie without
+knowing her to speak with, as he would have said, and he knew that against
+her father's will she was one of the followers of Dylks. The idolatry was
+not yet open and scandalous, but since then he had heard his mother
+denouncing her as a worthless hussy with the other women who had worshiped
+Dylks in that frenzy at the Temple. He walked up and down, passing near
+where she stood with her father and Hughey Blake, and lost his breath at
+each approach and caught it again at each remove. It so vividly seemed
+that he must speak to her, though he did not know what he wished to say,
+that it was as if he really had done so, when he heard one of the Hounds
+saying, “Well, and what are you goin' to do about it, Jim?”
+
+Then he heard himself boasting, “I'm going after Dylks myself; and if
+he'll come peaceably, and do his miracle I'll take him for my god, and if
+he won't, God have mercy on him!”
+
+He was answering his jeering questioner in his words, but his eyes were
+on the girl; her own eyes were lowered after a glance at her father and
+Hughey Blake, and his vow remained in his ears a foolish vaunt. While he
+stood unable to return to his place, a voice which no one knew, came from
+the darkness outside.
+
+“Behold,” it said, “I am the Presence of the Most High, and I come to you
+with my Peace. The miracle that ye wait to see has been wrought already
+unseen of you. The cloth before you has been touched by my Power, and
+turned into the seamless raiment which ye seek as a sign. But it shall not
+be shown to you now. Ye shall see it seven days and seven nights hence on
+the eighth night at the Temple. Till then, have patience, have faith. Thus
+saith the Lord.”
+
+The voice died from the medley of scriptural phrase and a shiver of awe
+passed over those who had heard. One of the believing women called out,
+“Praise ye the Lord!” Then a yell of mockery broke from the Hounds and
+some one shouted, “Let's have a look!” and the crowd rushed upon the roll
+of cloth which lay on the table, where the woman who had brought it in her
+arms had put it, and had stood patiently, anxiously, trustfully waiting.
+
+She spread her arms out over it, with a piteous gesture, like a mother
+trying to keep her child from harm. “Oh, don't! Oh, don't!” she implored.
+“It's _my_ cloth! I spun it, I wove it, every thread! It's all we've
+got for our clothes this winter! Don't touch it, don't tear it!”
+
+[Illustration: “It's _my_ cloth! I spun it, I wove it, every thread!
+It's all we've got for our clothes this winter!”]
+
+Her prayer was like a signal for its denial. One of the Hounds pushed her
+away and caught the cloth up. “We won't hurt it, Sister Bladen. We just
+want to see what a seamless garment looks like, anyway. Maybe it'll fit
+some of us. Here, boys, take a hold!”
+
+He held by the outer edge of the cloth, and flung the bolt unfurling
+itself toward his fellows over the heads of the believing men who had
+crowded forward to save it from the desecration, while the woman tried to
+seize it from him, beseeching, imploring, “Oh, don't hurt it, Bill Murray!
+Oh, be careful! Don't let it drop! Oh, don't, don't, don't!”
+
+“We can't do it any hurt, Sister Bladen, if it's got a miracle inside of
+it,” one of the ruffians mocked. “_You_ tell her we wont hurt it, Jim
+Redfield! She'll trust _you!_”
+
+The women believers were sobbing; the men gathered themselves for a
+struggle with the surprise sprung upon them, but held back as if in a
+superstitious hope of help from the god whom the women seemed not to trust
+in his failure of them.
+
+“Here, you fellows!” Redfield shouted over the tossing heads before him.
+“What do you want to spoil her cloth for?”
+
+His look and voice had their effect with the angry, pushing, shuffling,
+elbowing, wailing, weeping crowd, in a pause like the arrest of curiosity.
+
+“Let go that cloth, Bill,” he said, not with authority, but in a tone of
+good fellowship.
+
+The miller interposed with his friendly voice, and it seemed as if the
+unbelievers would give way in pity of the poor woman who had brought the
+cloth. Suddenly the bolt of stuff which Murray had conditionally yielded
+was twitched from Redfield in boisterous fun, and then in the frenzy more
+of mischief than malice it was seized by the Hounds, and torn into shreds.
+“Find the seamless raiment!” they yelled to one another. The unbelievers
+stood aside; the believers did nothing, in a palsy of amaze; the poor
+woman, to whom her toil and pride in it had hallowed the stuff, sank down
+staying herself on her hands from the floor, in hapless despair. Her
+moaning and sobbing filled the place after the tumult of destruction had
+been stricken silent. “Oh, I don't care for the miracle,” she kept
+lamenting, “but what are my children going to wear this winter? Oh, what
+will _he_ say to me!” It was her husband she meant.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+The riot in Hingston's Mill, after the failure of Dylks to appear
+personally and work the promised miracle, left the question of his
+divinity where it had been. With no evident change in their numbers on
+either side, the believers assented, the unbelievers denied. The faithful
+held that the miracle had been wrought and the seamless raiment torn to
+pieces by the mob; some declared that they had seen the garments, and
+tried to keep them from the sacrilege but had been overpowered. The
+unfaithful laughed at the pretense, and defied the faithful to show any
+scrap of the cloth having the form of clothing. The pieces remained with
+the poor woman who had brought the cloth for the miracle; she carried them
+weeping home, and she and her husband remained like the rest, believing
+and unbelieving as before; but at every chance she scanned the dishonored
+fragments in secret, and pieced them together, trying to follow the lines
+of imaginary garments in them.
+
+Throughout the week the excitement raged, silently for the most part, in
+the breasts of the two parties, but sometimes breaking out in furious
+affirmation and denial at such points of common meeting as the store, the
+tavern, and the postoffice. There the unbelievers outnumbered the
+believers, who met for mutual support and comfort at one another's houses,
+but appeared nowhere in force until the Sunday night following; then they
+came three to one of the enemy, and filled the Temple to overflowing.
+Dylks was expected to meet them from the concealment or the absence in
+which he had passed the days; the unbelievers said that he was hiding in
+fear and shame; the believers that he was preaching to the heathen in
+other neighborhoods, and would come in power and glory with a great
+multitude of the converted following him. But the meeting in the Temple
+was opened by Enraghty, who, in front of the pulpit, rose saying, “The
+Good Old Man will not be here, to-night, but I will fill his place.” A
+thrill of exultation and disappointment ran through the congregation
+according as they believed or denied, but they all waited patiently.
+
+Among the many families which had come in internecine enmity, Gillespie
+and his daughter strained in the unlove which was like hate up to the door
+of the Temple. He had taunted her with Dylks's failure to work the miracle
+and with his absence during the week. “If I could get my hands on him, I
+would pull him out of his hole, and make him face the people he's
+deceived. I would show him whether he was God or not.”
+
+“If you touched him, your hands would be withered,” she said in an
+ecstasy of faith. “If you will bring me a single hair of his head I will
+deny him.”
+
+“I'll remember that,” he threatened bitterly, and in the loss of all the
+dignity of their relation as parent and child he cast a look of
+contemptuous triumph on her when Enraghty rose and said that he would take
+the place of Dylks for the night.
+
+“Bring me one hair of his head,” she said again.
+
+The people of both sides had supposed that Dylks was sitting behind the
+pulpit, as his habit was, with his head out of sight bowed in meditation.
+But when Enraghty, after a few words, sat down to await the coming of the
+Spirit, suddenly the minister whose turn to preach would have come that
+night, sprang to his full height in the pulpit and denounced Enraghty's
+pretense. The believers rose shouting to their feet, and crying, “He is my
+God!” stormed out of the Temple in the night, where their voices were
+heard repeating, “He is my God!” till they swelled together in the hymn
+which was their confession of Dylks. A few of the unbelievers remained in
+the Temple, amazed, but the greater part followed the believers into the
+night.
+
+They had the courage of their triumph through Dylks's failure to work the
+miracle he had promised, and then his failure to show himself in the
+Temple; but they pushed on with no definite purpose except perhaps to
+break up some meeting of his followers, when one of the Hounds, yelping
+and baying in acceptance of their nickname, broke upon them from the woods
+they were passing with word that they had found Dylks in Enraghty's house,
+where the believers were already gathering.
+
+“We've treed him,” he said, “The whole pack's round the place, and
+there's no limb in reach for him to jump to. I reckon it'll be the best
+coon hunt we've ever had in Leatherwood, yit.”
+
+Redfield put himself in touch rather than in sight amidst the darkness
+which the disembodied voices broke upon. “Enraghty's house? Then we've got
+him. Come on!”
+
+The women of the unbelievers had fallen behind and finally gone home, but
+all the believers, the women as well as the men, had followed their
+apostle, and now their voices, in praying and singing, came from the house
+still hidden by a strip of woodland. In the bewilderment which had fallen
+upon David Gillespie amid the tumultuous rush from the Temple, he had been
+parted from his daughter; now he fumbled forward on the feet of an old
+man, and found himself beside Redfield. “I want you to let me at him
+first, Jim. I just want one hair of his head.”
+
+“Why, don't you know it's death to touch him?” Redfield jeered.
+
+“I know that,” Gillespie assented in the same mood. “But I'll risk dying
+for that one hair.”
+
+“What do you want with one hair? I'll get you a handful,” Redfield said.
+
+“One'll do to work the miracle I'm after.”
+
+“What miracle? None o' your seamless raiment, is it?”
+
+“It's bringing a crazy girl to her senses. She's said if I fetched her a
+single hair of his she'd renounce him.”
+
+“Oh!” Redfield said with respectful understanding. Then he added, “I'll
+get you the hair.”
+
+The unbelievers crowded to the house in the light from the uncurtained
+windows. One of them stood tiptoe peering in while the others waited.
+“It's chuck full,” he reported. “No room for sinners, I reckon.”
+
+“Oh, if Dylks is in there he'll work one of his miracles and _make_
+room,” another of the Hounds answered. Redfield stood trying the door.
+“Locked? Hammer on it! Break it in! Here! Give him a shoulder!”
+
+The mob surged forward, laughing and shouting, and crushed Redfield
+against the door. The panel cracked and groaned; Redfield called to the
+crowd to hold back, but suddenly the door opened, and the fanatical face
+of Enraghty showed itself above Redfield's back.
+
+“What do you want?” he demanded. “This is the Lord's house.”
+
+“Then it's as much ourn as what it is yourn,” some one shouted back.
+
+“We want to see the Lord,” another called. “Just one look, just one lick.”
+
+The old schoolmaster lost his self-control. “There are some of you out
+there that I've licked before now for your mischief.”
+
+“Yes, we know that,” came back. “You didn't lick us enough. We'd like to
+have you give us some more.”
+
+The hindmost of the Hounds surged against those in front, and the whole
+mob fell forward upon Redfield; he staggered over the threshold to save
+himself, and struck Enraghty backward in his helpless plunge.
+
+“Oh, look out there,” the nearest of the mob called back. “Your're
+hurtin' Mr. Enraghty!”
+
+“Well, we don't want to hurt old Saint Paul!” a mocker returned; but they
+pressed on wilfully, helplessly; they pushed those in front, who might
+have held back, and filled the entry-way and the rooms beyond. In a circle
+of his worshipers, kneeling at his feet, stood Dylks, while they hailed
+him as their God and entreated his mercy. At the scramble behind them,
+they sprang up and stood dazed, confronting their enemies.
+
+“We want Dylks! We want the Good Old Man! We want the Lion of Judah! Out
+of the way, Little Flock!” came in many voices; but when the worshipers
+yielded, Dylks had vanished.
+
+A moment of awe spread to their adversaries, but in another moment the
+riot began again. The unbelievers caught the spirit of the worse among
+them and stormed through the house, searching it everywhere, from the
+cellar to the garret. A yell rose from them when they found Dylks half way
+up the chimney of the kitchen. His captors pulled him forward into the
+light, and held him cowering under the cries of “Kill him!” “Tie him to a
+tree and whip him!” “Tar and feather him!” “Ride him on a rail!”
+
+“No, don't hurt him!” Redfield commanded. “Take him to a justice of the
+peace and try him.”
+
+“Yes,” the leader of the Hounds assented. “Take him to Squire Braile.
+He'll settle with him.”
+
+The Little Flock rallied to the rescue, and some of the herd joined them.
+As an independent neutral, Abel Reverdy, whom his wife stirred to action,
+caught up a stool and joined the defenders.
+
+“Why, you fool,” a leader of the Hounds derided him amiably, “what you
+want to do with that stool? If the Almighty can't help himself, you think
+_you're_ goin' to help him?”
+
+Abel was daunted by the reasoning, and even Sally stayed her war cries.
+
+“Well, I guess there's sumpin' _in_ that,” Abel assented, and he
+lowered his weapon.
+
+The incident distracted his captors and Dylks broke from them, and ran
+into the yard before the house. He was covered with soot and dust and his
+clothes were torn; his coat was stripped in tatters, and his long hair
+hung loose over it.
+
+His prophecies of doom to those who should lay hands upon him had been
+falsified, but to the literal sense of David Gillespie he had not yet been
+sufficiently proved an impostor: till he should bring his daughter a
+strand of the hair which Dylks had proclaimed it death to touch, she would
+believe in him, and David followed in the crowd straining forward to reach
+Redfield, who with one of his friends had Dylks under his protection. The
+old man threw himself upon Dylks and caught a thick strand of his hair,
+dragging him backward by it. Redfield looked round. He said, “You want
+that, do you? Well, I promised.” He tore it from the scalp, and gave it
+into David's hand, and David walked back with it into the house where his
+daughter remained with the wailing and sobbing women-worshipers of the
+desecrated idol.
+
+He flung the lock at her feet. “There's the hair that it was death to
+touch.” She did not speak; she only looked at it with horror.
+
+“Don't you believe it's his?” her father roared.
+
+“Yes, yes! I know it's his; and now let's go home and pray for him, and
+for _you_, father. We've both got the same God, now.”
+
+A bitter retort came to the old man's lips, but the abhorrent look of his
+daughter stayed his words, and they went into the night together, while
+the noise of the mob stormed back to them through the darkness, farther
+and farther away.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+The captors of Dylks chose the Temple as the best place for keeping him
+till morning, when they could take him for trial to Matthew Braile; but
+they had probably no sense of the place where he had insolently triumphed
+so often as the fittest scene of his humiliation. They stumbled in a loose
+mob behind and before and beside him through the dim night, and tried to
+pass Redfield's guard to strike him with their hands or the sticks which
+they tore from the wayside bushes. At a little distance, a straggling
+troop of the believers followed, men and women, wailing and sobbing, and
+adoring and comforting their idol with promises of fealty, in terms of
+pathetic grotesqueness. A well-known voice called to him, “Don't you be
+afraid, God Almighty! They can't hurt a hair of your head,” and the burst
+of savage mirth which followed Sally Reverdy's words, drowned the retort
+of a scoffer, “Why, there ain't hardly any left _to_ hurt, Sally.”
+
+The noise of the talking and laughing and the formless progress of the
+mob hushed the nearer night voices of the fields and woods; but from a
+distance the shuddering cry of a screech-owl could be heard; and the
+melancholy call of a killdee in a pasture beside the creek. The people,
+friends and foes together, made their way unlighted except by the tin
+lantern which some one had caught from where it stood on Enraghty's
+gate-post.
+
+With this one of the unbelievers took his stand at the door of the Temple
+after Redfield had passed in with his prisoner, and lifted it successively
+to the faces of those trying to enter. He allowed some and refused others,
+according as they were of those who denied or confessed Dylks, and a Hound
+at his elbow explained, “Don't want any but goats in here, to-night.”
+
+The common parlance was saturated with scriptural phrase, and the gross
+mockery would have been taken seriously if the speaker had not been so
+notoriously irreverent. As it was the words won him applause which
+Redfield and his friends were not able to quell. The joke was caught up
+and tossed back and forth; the Little Flock outside raised their hymn, the
+scoffers within joined in derision, and carried the hymn through to the
+end.
+
+Dylks sat shrunken on the bench below the pulpit, his head fallen forward
+and his face hidden. Redfield and one of his friends sat on either side,
+and others tried to save him from those who from time to time pushed
+forward to strike him. They could not save him from the insults which
+broke again and again upon the silence; when Redfield rose and appealed to
+the people to leave the man to the law, they came back at him with shrieks
+and yells.
+
+“Did the law keep my family from bein' broke up by this devil? My wife
+left me and my own brother won't speak to me because I wouldn't say he was
+my Savior and my God.”
+
+“I'm an old woman, and I lived with my son, but my son has quit me to
+starve, for all he cares, because I believe in the God of Jacob and he
+believes in this snorting, two-legged horse.”
+
+“My sister won't live with me, because I won't fall down and worship her
+Golden Calf.”
+
+“He's spread death and destruction in my family. My daughters won't look
+at me, and my two sons fought till they were all blood, about him.”
+
+The accusings and upbraidings thickened upon him, but Dylks sat silent,
+except for a low groan of what might have seemed remorse. He put his hand
+to the place on his head where the hair had been torn away, and looked at
+the blood on his fingers.
+
+A woman stole under the guard of his keepers, and struck him a savage
+blow on the cheeks, first one and then the other. “_Now_ you can see
+how it feels to have your own husband slap you because you won't say you
+believe in such a God as you are, you heathen pest!”
+
+The guards struggled with her, and a man stooped over Dylks and voided a
+mouthful of tobacco juice in his face; another lashed him on the head with
+a switch of leatherwood: all in a squalid travesty of the supreme tragedy
+of the race. As if a consciousness of the semblance touched the
+gospel-read actors in the drama, they shrank in turn from what they had
+done, and lost themselves in the crowd.
+
+The night wore away and when the red sunrise began to pierce the dusk of
+the Temple, where some had fallen asleep, and others drowsed as they
+walked to and fro to keep themselves awake, Redfield conferred with his
+lieutenants. Then they pulled their captive to his feet, not roughly, and
+moved with him down the aisle and out of the door. They left some of the
+slumberers still sleeping; of the others not all followed them on their
+way to Matthew Braile's, up through the woods and past the cornfields and
+tobacco patches; but with those of the Little Flock who had hung
+night-long about the Temple, singing and praying to their idol, they
+arrived, some before and some after the prisoner, at the log cabin of the
+magistrate. He was sitting after his habit in his splint-bottomed chair
+tilted against the porch wall, waiting for the breakfast which his wife
+was getting within. As the crowd straggled up to the porch, he tilted his
+chair down, and came forward with a frown of puzzle. “What's this?” he
+demanded; then, catching sight of a woman's eager face among the foremost,
+his frown relaxed and he said, “Don't all speak at once, Sally.”
+
+“'Deed and 'deed, I'm not agoun' to speak at all, Squire Braile; but if
+you want to know you can see for yourself that they've got the Good Old
+Man here, and from the tell I've hearn they want you to try him; they've
+been hittun' him over the face and head all night.” She looked defiantly
+round on the unbelievers who so far joined in the Squire's grin as to
+burst into a general laugh, and a cry of “Good for you, Sally. You're
+about right.”
+
+[Illustration: “_Now_ you can see how it feels to have your own
+husband slap you.”]
+
+Braile referred himself to Redfield, who mounted to the porch with the
+other guards, and the tattered and bedraggled Dylks in their midst. “What
+are you doing with this man, Jim?”
+
+“We've brought him to you to find out, Squire Braile. You know who he is,
+and all the mischief he's been making in this settlement. We don't need to
+go into that.”
+
+“Wish you'd step in there,” the Squire said, nodding toward the room
+opposite the kitchen, “and bring me out the Laws of Ohio. You know where
+it is.”
+
+His recognition of Redfield as a law-student pleased the Herd of the
+Lost, and one of the guards said, “All right, Jim. We'll hold him.”
+
+As Redfield disappeared within, the Squire called after him, “Bring out
+my table, too, will you. We'll have the trial here.”
+
+“That's all right as fer as it goes, Squire,” one of the crowd before the
+cabin called out, “but there ain't room enough for us up there.”
+
+“Well,” the Squire answered, “you've got the whole State of Ohio down
+there. I reckon you can find room in it, if you stand close.”
+
+He turned the joke on the crowd; which acquiesced with cheers. When
+Redfield returned with the large book and the small table he had been sent
+for, the Squire drew up to them and proclaimed silence in the Court. Then,
+“Who complains against this man? You, James Redfield?”
+
+“I arrested him, but I don't complain of him more than the rest. You know
+what he's been doing in Leatherwood, as well as other places, for the last
+month or six weeks. We want his mischief stopped; we want to see what the
+law can do about it. We could have lynched him, but that ain't the right
+way, and so we all feel.”
+
+“Well, we've got to make a start, somewhere,” the justice returned.
+“What's he accused of? What do _you_ accuse him of?”
+
+“Well, for one thing,” Redfield said, rather reluctantly, “he professes
+to be Almighty God.”
+
+“And he _is_ God, the Most High Jehovah, Maker of Heaven and Earth,”
+ came in a varying cry, from the believers who had gathered increasingly on
+the skirts of their enemies.
+
+Their voices seemed to put life and courage into the prisoner, who for
+the first time lifted his fallen face and looked at the justice with a
+light of hope in his dulled eyes.
+
+“You hear that,” the old squire addressed him. “Is that your name? Are
+you God?”
+
+“Thou sayest,” the prisoner answered, with a sudden effrontery.
+
+“That will _do_!” the old man shouted. He might have been willing to
+burlesque the case from his own disbelief, but he could not suffer the
+desecration of the hallowed words; and Dylks shrank from his eyes of
+fierce rebuke. “Stand away from him,” he added to the guards. “Now, then,
+have you folks got any other charge against him? Has he stolen anything?
+Like a mule, for instance? Has he robbed a hen-roost? Has he assaulted
+anybody, or set a tobacco-shed on fire? Some one must make a charge; I
+don't much care what it is.”
+
+The old man scowled round on the people nearest him and down on the crowd
+below. The believers waited in anxious silence; the unbelievers applauded
+his humor with friendly laughter, and a kindlier spirit spread through
+them; they were beginning to see Dylks as a joke.
+
+“Redfield,”--the Squire turned to the young man--“let's have a look at
+the Laws of Ohio, in such case made and provided.” He opened the book
+which Redfield put on the table before him, and went carefully through the
+index; then he closed it. “There don't seem,” he said, “to be any charge
+against the prisoner except claiming to be the Almighty; he pleads guilty
+to that, and he could be fined and imprisoned if there was any law against
+a man's being God. But there isn't, unless it's some law of the Bible,
+which isn't in force through reenactment in Ohio. He hasn't offended
+against any of our statutes, neither he nor his followers. In this State
+every man has a right to worship what God he pleases, under his own vine
+and fig-tree, none daring to molest him or make him afraid. With religious
+fanaticism our laws have nothing to do, unless it be pushed so far as to
+violate some public ordinance. This I find the prisoner has not done.
+Therefore, he stands acquitted.”
+
+A roar of protest, a shout of joy went up from the crowd according to
+their belief and unbelief. After his first plea Dylks had remained silent
+in becoming meekness and self-respect; now he looked wildly round in fear
+and hope; but he did not speak.
+
+“Clear the way, you!” the Squire called to the people about him and below
+him, and he got slowly to his feet. He took the arm of the prisoner at one
+side, and said, “Here, Jim Redfield, you take this fellow's other arm,”
+ and as the young man helplessly obeyed, “Now!” he commanded, and with
+Dylks between them, they left the porch and passed through the severing
+crowd of friends and foes before the cabin. While they hesitated in doubt
+of his purpose, Braile led the way with the prisoner, acquitted, but still
+in custody, toward the turnpike road where the country lane passing the
+cabin joined it a little way off.
+
+The crowd straggled after in patient doubt, but when the Squire halted
+with his captive and bade Redfield move back, the suspicions of the
+unbelievers began to stir.
+
+“Now, put!” the Squire said in a low voice and loosed his hold. Dylks
+lifted his head alertly as he was accustomed to do when he gave his equine
+snort, but now he made no sound. He leaped forward and ran with vast
+bounds up the smooth turnpike toward the wall of woodland, where the
+whiteness of the highway ceased in the shadow of the trees. He far
+outdistanced the foremost of his pursuers, who stopped to gather the
+broken stone heaped along the roadside, and under the rain of these and
+the storm of curses that they sent after him, he escaped into the forest.
+
+“Well, Abel,” the Squire said to Reverdy, whom he found, not
+unexpectedly, at his elbow when he looked round, “he may not be much of a
+god, but he's a good deal of a racehorse, even if he didn't give his
+snort.”
+
+“Look here, Squire Braile,” Redfield broke out in the first realization
+of his defeat, “I'm not sure your decision was just right.”
+
+“Well, you can appeal the case to the Supreme Court, Jim,” the old man
+returned. “It's my _breakfast_ time,” and he stamped stiffly away
+down the pike and up the road to his cabin, followed by the blessings of
+the Little Flock.
+
+The Little Flock had remained in stupefaction at the junction of the
+country road and the turnpike, helplessly watching the flight of their
+idol from the Herd of the Lost. When Dylks vanished in the dusk of the
+forest, and the last of those who had followed him came lagging breathless
+back, and dropped from their hands the broken stone which they had
+unconsciously brought with them, the Little Flock involuntarily raised
+their hymn, as if it had been a song of triumph; an inglorious triumph,
+but an omen of final victory, and of the descent of the New Jerusalem in
+Leatherwood.
+
+“Never mind!” one of the Herd panted. “We'll have him out of that gulf of
+dark despair, yit!”
+
+“The Lord will put forth His might,” one of the Flock defied him. “But if
+you fellows want to feel the arm of flesh, here and now, come on!”
+
+The Squire put himself between the forces. “I want you to keep the peace;
+I command the peace,” he said with magisterial dignity.
+
+“Oh, all right, Squire,” a Hound applauded him. “We know you're on our
+side.”
+
+“Brother Braile is on the side of righteousness,” the champion of the
+Flock answered.
+
+The Squire turned a frowning face upon him. “If the law could have held
+your god, he'd have been on his way to the county jail by this time. Now,
+you fellows, both sides, go home, and look after your corn and tobacco;
+and you women, you go and get breakfast for them, and wash up your
+children and leave the Kingdom of Heaven alone for a while.”
+
+The weight of condemnation was for the Little Flock, but there remained
+discomfort for the Herd of the Lost. “And you,” the Squire turned to them,
+“you let these folks worship any stock or stone they're a mind to; and you
+find out the true God if you can, and stick to Him, and don't bother the
+idolaters. I reckon He can take care of Himself. I command you all to
+disperse. Go home! Get out! Put!”
+
+The saints and the sinners felt alike the mystical force of the law in
+his words and began to move away, not without threats and defiances, more
+or less straggling, and not altogether ceasing even after they had lost
+sight of one another in their parting ways.
+
+Redfield stayed to walk home with the old man. “Of course, Squire
+Braile,” he said, “this ain't the last of Dylks, and it ain't the last of
+_us_. It's a sin and a shame to have the thing going on among us. You
+know that as well as I do. It's got to be stopped. If he'd got his just
+dues from you--”
+
+“You young fool,” the Squire retorted, kindly, “haven't you gone far
+enough yet in your Blackstone to know that justice is one thing and law is
+another? I gave Dylks his legal deserts.”
+
+“Blackstone says the law is the perfection of reason.”
+
+“Well, you think it don't seem to be so in the State of Ohio. But I
+reckon it is, and so long as we look after our own souls, we can't do
+better than let others look after theirs in their own way. Come in and
+have some breakfast!” He paused before his cabin with the young man.
+
+“No, not _this_ morning, Squire Braile,” Redfield lingered a moment,
+and then he said, askingly, “I didn't see old Mr. Gillespie anywhere this
+morning.”
+
+“I didn't notice. Where it comes to a division in public, he doesn't
+usually take sides against his daughter.”
+
+“He won't have to, after this.”
+
+“What do you mean?”
+
+“Didn't you know she told him once that if he would bring her a hair of
+Dylks's head she would deny him? I helped him to a whole lock of it.”
+
+“Oh, _you_ did that?” There was condemnation in the Squire's tone,
+and as if he had been going to express a more explicit displeasure, he
+hesitated. Then he said, “Well, I must be going in,” and turned his back
+upon Redfield, who turned again into the turnpike road and took his way
+homeward past the long and deep stretch of woods where Dylks had found
+refuge.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+In the middle of the forest there was a dense thicket of lower growths on
+a piece of dry land lifted above the waters of a swamp. The place was the
+lair of such small wild things as still survived in the wilderness once
+the haunt of the wolf and the wild cat, and the resort of the bear allured
+by the profusion of the huckleberries which grew there. But, except in the
+early fall when the annual squirrel-hunt swept over the whole country side
+and the summer drought had made the swamp easily passable to the gunners,
+the place was unmolested. Even the country boy who seeks the bounty of
+nature wherever she offers it, and makes the outlying property of man his
+prey where nature has been dispossessed, did not penetrate the thicket in
+his search for hazelnuts or chinquapins; it was proofed against his
+venture by its repute of rattlesnakes and copperheads and the rumor of
+ghosts and witches. Few, of men or boys, knew the approach to the interior
+by the narrow ridge of dry land lifted above the marsh, and Dylks did not
+stop in his flight till he reached the thicket and saw in it his hope of
+securer refuge. He walked round it through the pools which the frog and
+turtle haunted, twice before he found this path, overhung by a tangle of
+grapevines. There his foot by the instinct which the foot has where the
+eye fails of a path, divined the scarcely trodden way, and he found
+himself in a central opening among the thickly growing bushes. It was warm
+there, without the close heat of the woodland, and dry except for the
+spring of clear water that bubbled up in the heart of it, and trickled out
+over green mosses into the outer waters of the swamp.
+
+The man stooped over and drank his fill, and then made his greedy
+breakfast on the berries that grew abundantly round, and nodded hospitably
+to his hand. All the time he wept, and moaned to himself in the self-pity
+of a hunted, fearful wretch. Then he drank again from the spring, and
+without rising from his knees pushed himself back a little from it, and
+fell over in an instant sleep.
+
+He slept through the whole day, and at night, falling early in the
+shadows of the forest which thickened over his retreat, he supped, as he
+had breakfasted, on the wild berries and spring water, but with protesting
+from a stomach habitually flattered by the luxury of fried chicken and
+ham, and corn-pone and shortened biscuit, and hot coffee, which his
+adorers put before him when he laid aside his divinity and descended to
+the gratification of his carnal greed. He was a gross feeder, and in the
+midst of his fear and the joy of his escape, he thought of these things
+and lusted for them with a sort of thankless resentment.
+
+He looked about for something he might kill, and he found a wounded
+pigeon which had fluttered into his refuge from the shot of some gunner.
+But he could not bring himself to eat it raw, and if he could have kindled
+a fire to cook it, he reflected, it would have betrayed him to his
+pursuers who must now be searching the woods for him. He wrung the
+pigeon's neck and flung it into the bushes, and then fell down and wept
+with his face in the grass. He had slept so long that now he could not
+sleep, and when his tears would come no more, he sat up and watched the
+night through till the dawn grayed the blue-black sky. The noises of the
+noiseless woods made themselves heard: the cry of a night hawk, the
+hooting of an owl, the whirring note of the whip-poor-will; the long,
+plunging down-rush of a dead branch breaking the boughs below it; even the
+snapping of twigs as if under the pressure of stealthy feet. These sounds,
+the most delicate of the sounds he heard, shook him most with fear and
+hope, and then with despair. The feet could be the feet of his enemies
+seeking him out, or of his friends coming to succor and save him; then
+they resolved themselves into the light pressure from little paws, the
+paws of the wildcat, or the coon, and there was nothing to be feared or
+hoped from them. The constellations wheeled over him in the clear sky, and
+the planets blazed. He made out the North Star from the lower lines of the
+Dipper; the glowing and fading of the August meteors that flitted across
+the heavens seemed to leave a black trace on his straining eyes. Texts of
+Scripture declaring how the splendors of the day and night showed forth
+the glory of the Being whose name he had usurped to the deceit and shame
+of those who trusted him, glowed and faded in his mind like those shooting
+stars in the sky. At one time he thought he had cried aloud for
+destruction in the sin which could not be forgiven, but it was only a
+dull, inarticulate moan bursting from his tortured breast.
+
+The place where the hair had been torn from his head burned like fire; it
+burned like the wound of a man whom he had once heard tell how it felt to
+be scalped by an Indian; the man had recovered, but the wound had always
+hurt; and Dylks pitied himself that it should be so with him, and cursed
+himself for his unguarded boast that any one who touched a hair of his
+head should perish. He promised that if God would show him a little mercy,
+and send a raven with something for him to eat, something warm, or send
+him a cup of coffee, somehow, or even a raw egg, he would go forth before
+the people; he would get up in the Temple amidst his believers and declare
+himself a false prophet and a false god. He would not care what they did
+to him if only he had something cooked to eat, something hot to drink.
+
+Towards morning he slept, and then for days and nights, how many he did
+not know, it seemed to him that he did not wake but dreamed through a
+changing time when he was dimly aware of contending voices: voices of his
+believers, the Little Flock, and voices of his unbelievers, the Herd of
+the Lost, pleading and threatening in the forest round his place of
+refuge. His followers were trying to bring him food and raiment, and his
+enemies were preventing them and boasting that they would keep guard over
+his refuge till they starved him out. Then all again was a blur, a texture
+of conscious and unconscious misery till a night came when the woof broke
+and trailed away from him, and he lifted himself on his elbow and after he
+had drunk a long draft from the spring, found tremulous strength to get to
+his feet. He tried some steps in the open space, where the light of the
+full moon fell, and found that he could walk. He reached the tangled
+entrance to his covert, and stealthily put the vines aside. He peered out
+into the shadows striped with moonshine and could see no one, and he was
+going to venture farther, when he stopped stone still at the figure of a
+man crouched in the middle of the causeway. The man's head was fallen
+forward and his gun lay across his lap; he must be one of the guards that
+his enemies had set on his refuge to keep him there and starve him out;
+and he must be asleep. Dylks stooped and peered into his face and knew the
+man for one of the Hounds who had often disturbed his meetings, and now he
+looked about in the rage that surged up through his penitence and
+self-pity for a stone or a club to strike him senseless, or dead if need
+be. But there was no such weapon that he could see, and the risk of a
+struggle was greater than the risk of trying to pass the man without
+waking him. After long doubt he tried with one foot and then another and
+the man did not wake; then he crept slowly by, and then with softly
+dragging steps he got farther from the sleeper and pushed on through the
+woods in the direction of the turnpike, as he imagined it. But he came out
+in a clearing where a new log cabin showed clear in the open under the
+moon.
+
+In the single room of the house a woman lay sleeping with a little child
+in its cradle beside her bed. She rose up and put out her hand
+instinctively to still the child, but it was sleeping quietly, and then
+she started up awake, and listened for the voice which she had dreamt was
+calling her. There was no voice, and then there was a voice calling
+hoarsely, weakly, “Nancy! Nancy!”
+
+In her dream she had thought it was the voice of her husband stealing
+back to her in the night, and it was in the terror of her dream that she
+now sprang from her bed, with her heart aching for pity of him, to forbid
+him and rebuke him for breaking his promise, and to scold him away. But as
+she stood listening, and the voice came again she knew it was not the
+voice of Laban. She ran to the ladder which led to the cabin loft, and
+called up through the open trapdoor, “Jane! Jane! Come down here to the
+baby, will you? I've got to leave her a minute.”
+
+“What for?” the girl answered sleepily. Then, “Oh, I'll come. She ain't
+sick, is she, Aunt Nancy? Oh, I do hope she ain't sick!”
+
+“No. She ain't sick,” Nancy said, as she put her hands up to help the
+girl place her feet aright on the rungs of the ladder. “But--listen!” she
+whispered as the voice outside called again. “It's that miser'ble wretch!
+It's Joseph Dylks! I've got to go to him! Don't you say a word, Jane
+Gillespie! He's Joey's father, and he must be at death's door, or he
+wouldn't come to mine.”
+
+She left the girl standing dazed, and ran out and round the cabin. In the
+shadow that it cast in the moon, Dylks crouched close in the angle made by
+the chimney.
+
+“Oh, Nancy!” he implored her, “do give me something to eat! Something
+warm. Coffee, if you've got it. I've been sick, and I'm starving.”
+
+She knew without seeing it in the shadow how he was stretching out
+pleading hands to her, and she had mercy upon him. But she said stonily,
+“Wait a minute. Don't be a cry-baby,” and ran back to the door, and called
+to the girl within, “Rake open the fire, Jane, and set the kittle on.”
+ Then she ran back to Dylks and stood over him. “Where you been? Don't you
+know they'll kill you if they ketch you?”
+
+“Yes, I know it, Nancy. But I knew this would be the last place they
+would come for me. Will the coffee be ready soon? Oh, I'm so faint! I
+reckon I'm going to die, Nancy.”
+
+“I reckon you ain't goin' to die before you get your coffee. It'll be
+ready as soon as the kittle boils.”
+
+She stood looking grimly down at him, while he brokenly told, so far as
+he knew it, the story of the days he had passed in hiding.
+
+“I reckon,” she said, with bitter scorn, “that _I_ could have
+fetched you out. I'd 'a' brought you some hot coffee to the door of your
+den, and you'd 'a' come when you smelt it.”
+
+“Yes, that's true,” he owned in meek acceptance of her scorn.
+
+The child cried, and she went in, but she had no need to comfort it
+except with a word. Jane had come to the little one, and was stooping
+above it, and cooing to it motherwise, and cuddling it to her body while
+it drowsed away to silence.
+
+“You mind her, Jane,” the mother said, and she lifted the pot of coffee
+from the bed of coals, sending a dim glow into the room to meet the dawn
+at the open door. She put some sugar into the bowl she got from its shelf,
+and covered it with a piece of cold corn-pone, and then went out to Dylks
+who had remained on his knees, and now stretched out his trembling hands
+toward her.
+
+She did not speak, but poured the bowl full of the steaming coffee, and
+watched him while he gulped half of it down. Then he reached eagerly for
+the bread. “Is it hot?” he asked.
+
+“No, it ain't,” the woman said. “You can eat cold pone, I reckon, can't
+you?”
+
+“Oh, yes; oh, yes, and glad to get it. Only I thought--” He stopped and
+washed down the mouthful he had torn from the cake with a draft of the
+coffee which emptied the bowl. She filled it mechanically from the pot in
+her hand, and he drank again more slowly, and devoured the pone as he
+drank.
+
+“Now,” he said, “I should be all right if it wasn't for my head where
+they tore out my hair. It burns like fire.”
+
+She bent over him and looked at the wound unflinchingly. “I can't see
+very good in this light; if I only had some goose-grease--but I reckon
+hog's lard will do. Hold on till I can wash it.”
+
+“Oh, Nancy,” he moaned gratefully.
+
+She was gone rather long and there was talk within and the cooing and
+babble of the child. When she came out with a basin of warm water and some
+lard in a broken saucer in her hands, and a towel caught under her arm, he
+suggested, “I heard you talking with some one, Nancy.”
+
+“And I suppose it scared you,” she answered unsparingly. “Well, you may
+thank your stars it wasn't Laban. I do believe he'd kill you, meek as he
+is.”
+
+Dylks drew a quivering breath. “Yes, I reckon he would. I suppose you
+must have told him about me.”
+
+“Of course, I did. Here! Hold still!” She had begun to wash his wound,
+very gently, though she spoke so roughly, while he murmured with the pain
+and with the comfort of the pain. “If you want to know,” she continued,
+“it's Jane. She's been with me ever since that night they caught you. You
+made her ashamed before her father, and between her shame and his pride
+her and him don't speak, or hain't, since then. She stays with me and Joey
+stays with him.”
+
+“Our Joey?” he asked plaintively.
+
+“_My_ Joey!” she returned, and she involuntarily twitched at the
+hair she was smoothing.
+
+“Oh!” he cried from the pain, but she did not mind his pain.
+
+“There!” she said, beginning to put on the lard. Then she bound over the
+wound the soft pledget of old linen she had brought, and tied round his
+head a cotton rag to hold the dressing in place. She said, “There!” again,
+“I reckon that will do.”
+
+He moaned gratefully. “It's the first time I've been out of pain for I
+don't know how many days and nights. Nancy!” he burst out in all
+recognition of her goodness, “I oughtn't to have left you.”
+
+She had been kneeling before him in dressing his hurt, and then in
+critically regarding her handiwork, she got to her feet. “I know you
+oughtn't,” she retorted, “but I'm glad you done it. And I'm thankful every
+breath I draw. And now I want you to _go_. And don't you think I done
+what I done out of love for you, Joseph Dylks. I'd 'a' done it for any
+hurt or hungry dog.”
+
+[Illustration: She had begun to wash his wound, very gently, though she
+spoke so roughly, while he murmured with the pain and with the comfort of
+the pain]
+
+Dylks got to his feet too, with little moans for the stiffness in his
+joints. “I know you would, Nancy,” he said humbly, “but all the same I
+won't forget it. If there was anything I could do to show--”
+
+“There's something you could do besides drownin' yourself in the creek,
+which I don't ask you: in the first place because I don't want your death
+on my hands, and in the next place because you're the un-fittin'est man to
+die that I can think of; but there's something else, and you know it
+without my tellin' you, and that is to stop all this, now and forever.
+Don't you pretend you don't know what I mean!”
+
+“I know what you mean, Nancy, and the good Lord knows I would be glad
+enough to do it if I could. But I wouldn't know how to begin.”
+
+“Begin,” she said with a scornful glance at the long tangle of his hair,
+“begin by cuttin' off that horse's tail of yours, and then stop snortin'
+like a horse.”
+
+He shook his head hopelessly. “It wouldn't do, Nancy. They wouldn't let
+me draw back now. They would kill me.”
+
+“They?”
+
+“The--the--Little Flock,” he answered shamefacedly.
+
+“The Herd of the Lost will kill you if you don't.” She said it not in
+mocking, but in realization of the hopeless case, and not without pity.
+But at his next words, she hardened her heart again.
+
+“I don't know what to do. I don't know where to go. I have nowhere to lay
+my head.”
+
+“Don't you use them holy words, you wicked wretch! And if you're hintin'
+at hidin' in my house, you can't do it--not with Jane here--_she_
+would kill you, I believe--and not without her.”
+
+“No, Nancy. I can see that. But where can I go? Even that place in the
+woods, they're watching that, and they would have me if I tried to go
+back.”
+
+From an impulse as of indifference rather than consideration she said,
+“Go to Squire Braile. He let you off; let him take care of you.”
+
+“Nancy!” he exclaimed. “I thought of that.”
+
+She gathered up the basin and the towel she brought, and without looking
+at him again she said, “Well, go, then,” and turned and left him where he
+stood.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+Matthew Braile was sitting in his wonted place, with his chair tilted
+against his porch wall, smoking. Dylks faltered a moment at the bars of
+the lane from the field of tall corn where he had been finding his way
+unseen from Nancy's cabin. He lowered two of the middle bars and when he
+had put them up on the other side he stood looking toward the old man. His
+long hair hung tangled on his shoulders; the white bandage, which Nancy
+had bound about his head, crossed it diagonally above one eye and gave
+this the effect of a knowing wink, which his drawn face, unshaven for a
+week, seemed to deprecate.
+
+Braile stared hard at him. Then he tilted his chair down and came to the
+edge of his porch, and called in cruel mockery, “Why, God, is that
+_you?”_
+
+“Don't, Squire Braile!” Dylks implored in a hoarse undertone. “They're
+after me, and if anybody heard you--”
+
+“Well, come up here,” the Squire bade him. Dylks hobbled slowly forward,
+and painfully mounted the log steps to the porch, where Braile surveyed
+him in detail, frowning and twitching his long feathery eyebrows.
+
+“I know I don't look fit to be seen,” Dylks began “but--”
+
+“Well,” the Squire allowed after further pause, “you _don't_ look as
+if you had just come 'down from the shining courts above in joyful haste'!
+Had any breakfast?”
+
+“Nancy--Nancy Billings--gave me some coffee, and some cold pone--”
+
+“Well, you can have some _hot_ pone pretty soon. Laban there?”
+
+“No, he's away at work still. But, Squire Braile--”
+
+“Oh, I understand. I know all about Nancy, and her first husband and how
+he left her, and she thought he was dead, and married a good man, and when
+that worthless devil came back she thought she was living in sin with that
+good man--in _sin_!--and drove him away. But she's as white as any of
+the saints you lie about. It was _like_ you to go to her the first
+one in your trouble. Well, what did she say?” “She said--” Dylks stopped,
+his mouth too dry to speak; he wetted his lips and whispered--“She said to
+come to you; that you would know what it was best for me to do; to--” He
+stopped again and asked, “Do you suppose any one will see me here?”
+
+“Oh, like as not. It's getting time for honest folks to be up and going
+to work. But I don't want any trouble about you this morning; I had enough
+that _other_ morning. Come in here!” He set open the door of one of
+the rooms giving on the porch, and at Dylks's fearful glance he laughed,
+not altogether unkindly. “Mis' Braile's in the kitchen, getting breakfast
+for you, though she don't know it yet. Now, then!” he commanded when he
+sat down within, and pushed a chair to Dylks. “Tell me all about it, since
+I saw you going up the pike.”
+
+In the broken story which Dylks told, Braile had the air of mentally
+checking off the successive facts, and he permitted the man a measure of
+self-pity, though he caught him up at the close. “Well, you've got a part
+of what you deserve, but as usually happens with us rascals, you've got
+too much, at the same time. And what did Nancy advise?”
+
+“She told me to come to you--”
+
+“What did Nancy _advise_?” the Squire repeated savagely.
+
+“She advised me to stop all this”--he waved his hands outward, and the
+Squire nodded intelligently--“to tell them it wasn't true; and I was
+sorry; and to go away--”
+
+He stopped, and Braile demanded, “Well, and are you going to do it?”
+
+“I want to do it, and--I can't.”
+
+“You can't? What's to hinder you?”
+
+“I'm afraid to do it.”
+
+“Afraid?”
+
+“They would kill me, if I did.”
+
+“They? Who? The Herd of the Lost?”
+
+“The Little Flock.”
+
+The men were both silent, and then after a long breath, the Squire said,
+“I begin to see--”
+
+“No, no! You don't _begin_ to see, Squire Braile.” Dylks burst out
+sobbing, and uttering what he said between his sobs. “Nobody can
+understand it that hasn't been through it! How you are tempted on, step by
+step, all so easy, till you can't go back, you can't stop. You're tempted
+by what's the best thing in you, by the hunger and thirst to know what's
+going to be after you die; to get near to the God that you've always heard
+about and read about; near Him in the flesh, and see Him and hear Him and
+touch Him. That's what does it with _them_, and that's what does it
+in you. It's something, a kind of longing, that's always been in the
+world, and you know it's in others because you know it's in you, in your
+own heart, your own soul. When you begin to try for it, to give out that
+you're a prophet, an apostle, you don't have to argue, to persuade
+anybody, or convince anybody. They're only too glad to believe what you
+say from the first word; and if you tell them you're Christ, didn't He
+always say He would come back, and how do they know but what it's now and
+you?”
+
+“Yes, yes,” the Squire said. “Go on.”
+
+“When I said I was God, they hadn't a doubt about it. But it was then
+that the trouble began.”
+
+“The trouble?”
+
+“I had to make some of them saints. I had to make Enraghty Saint Paul,
+and I had to make Hingston Saint Peter. You think I had to lie to them, to
+deceive them, to bewitch them. I didn't have to do anything of the kind.
+They did the lying and deceiving and bewitching themselves, and when they
+done it, they and all the rest of the believers, they had me fast, faster
+than I had them.”
+
+“I could imagine the schoolmaster hanging on to his share of the glory,
+tooth and nail,” the Squire said with a grim laugh. “But old Hingston,
+good old soul, he ought to have let go, if you wanted him to.”
+
+“Oh, you don't know half of it,” Dylks said, with a fresh burst of
+sobbing. “The worst of it is, and the dreadfulest is, that you begin to
+believe it yourself.”
+
+“What's that?” the Squire demanded sharply.
+
+“Their faith puts faith into you. If they believe what you say, you say
+to yourself that there must be some truth in it. If you keep telling them
+you're Jesus Christ, there's nothing to prove you ain't, and if you tell
+them you're God, who ever saw God, and who can deny it? You can't deny it
+yourself--”
+
+“Hold on!” the old man said. He had risen, and he began to walk up and
+down, swaying his figure and tilting his head from side to side, and
+frowning his shaggy eyebrows together in a tangled hedge. Suddenly, he
+stopped before Dylks. “Why, you poor devil, you're not in any unusual fix.
+It must have been so with all the impostors in the world, from Mahomet up
+and down! Why, there isn't a false prophet in the Old Testament that
+couldn't match experiences with you! That's the way it's always gone:
+first the liar tells his lie, and some of the fools believe it, and
+proselyte the other fools, and when there are enough of them, their faith
+begins to work on the liar's own unbelief, till he takes his lie for the
+truth. Was that the way, you miserable skunk?”
+
+“It was exactly the way, Squire Braile, and you can't tell how it gains
+on you, step by step. You see all those educated people like Mr. Enraghty,
+and all those good men like Mr. Hingston taking it for gospel, and you
+can't deny it yourself. They convince you of it.”
+
+“Exactly! And then, when the Little Flock gathers in all the mentally
+lame, halt and blind in the settlement, you couldn't get out of it if you
+had the whole Herd of the Lost to back you, with the Hounds yelping round
+to keep your courage up; you've got to stay just where you put yourself,
+heigh?”
+
+“There wouldn't,” Dylks said, drying his eyes on a tatter of his coat
+sleeve, “be so much trouble if it wasn't for the miracles.”
+
+“Yes,” Braile replied to the thoughtful mood which he had fallen into,
+rather than to Dylks, “the ignorant are sure to want a sign, though the
+wise could get along without it. And you have to promise them a sign; you
+have to be fool enough to do that, though you know well enough you can't
+work the miracle.”
+
+“You ain't sure you can't. You think, maybe--”
+
+“Then, why,” the Squire shouted at him, “why in the devil's name,
+_didn't_ you work the miracle at Hingston's mill that night? Why
+didn't you turn that poor fool woman's bolt of linsey-woolsey into
+seamless raiment?”
+
+Dylks did not answer.
+
+“Why didn't you do it? Heigh?”
+
+“I thought maybe--I didn't know but I did do it.”
+
+“What do you mean?”
+
+“When I came up outside and told them that the miracle had been worked
+and the seamless raiment was inside the bolt, I thought it must be there.”
+
+“Why, in the name of--”
+
+“I had prayed so hard for help to do it that I thought it must be.”
+
+“You prayed? To whom?”
+
+“To--God.”
+
+“To yourself?”
+
+Dylks was silent again in the silence of a self-convicted criminal. He
+did not move.
+
+Braile had been walking up and down again in his excitement, in his
+enjoyment of the psychological predicament, and again he stopped before
+Dylks. “Why, you poor bag of shorts!” he said. “I could almost feel sorry
+for you, in spite of the mischief you've made. Why, _you_ oughtn't to
+be sent to the penitentiary, or even lynched. _You_ ought to be put
+amongst the county idiots in the poorhouse, and--”
+
+There came a soft plapping as of bare feet on the puncheon floor of the
+porch; hesitating about and then pausing at the door of the opposite room.
+Then there came with the increased smell of cooking, the talking of women.
+Presently the talking stopped and the plapping of the bare feet approached
+the door of the room shutting the two men in. The Squire set it slightly
+ajar, in spite of Dylks's involuntary, “Oh, don't!” and faced some one
+close to the opening.
+
+“That you, Sally? You haven't come to borrow anything at _this_ hour
+of the night?”
+
+“Well, I reckon if you was up as early as Mis' Braile, you'd know it was
+broad day. No, I hain't come to borry anything exactly, but I was just
+tellin' _her_ that if she'd lend me a fryun' of bacon, I'd do as much
+for her some day. She ast me to tell you your breakfast was ready and not
+to wait till your comp'ny was gone, but bring anybody you got with you.”
+
+Sally peered curiously in at the opening of the door, and Braile abruptly
+set it wide. “Perhaps you'd like to see who it is.”
+
+Sally started back at sight of the figure within. When she could get her
+breath she gasped, “Well, for mercy's sakes! If it ain't the Good Old Man,
+himself!” But she made no motion of revering or any offer of saluting her
+late deity.
+
+“Well, now, if you've got some bacon for Abel's breakfast you better stop
+and have yours with us,” the Squire suggested.
+
+“No, I reckon not,” Sally answered. “I ain't exactly sure Abel would like
+it. He ain't ever been one of the Flock, although at the same time he
+ain't ever been one of the Herd: just betwixt and between, like.” As she
+spoke she edged away backward. “Well, I must be goun', Squire. Much
+obleeged to you all the same.”
+
+The Squire followed her backward steps with his voice. “If you should
+happen to see Jim Redfield on his way to his tobacco patch, I wish you'd
+tell him to come here; I'd like to see him.”
+
+He went in again to Dylks.
+
+“What are you going to do with me, Squire Braile?” he entreated. “You're
+not going to give me up?”
+
+“I know my duty to my Maker,” the old man answered. “I'll take care of
+you, Jehovah Dylks. But now you better come in to breakfast--get some
+_hot_ pone. I'll bring you a basin of water to wash up in.”
+
+He reopened the door in the face of Sally Reverdy, who gasped out before
+she plapped over to the steps and dropped away, “I just seen Jim Redfield,
+and I tole him you wanted him, and he said he would be here in half an
+hour, or as soon as he could see that the men had begun on his tubbacco. I
+didn't tell him who you had here, and I won't tell anybody else; don't you
+be afraid.”
+
+“Well, that's a good girl, Sally. Abel couldn't have done better
+himself,” the Squire called after her, and then he turned to Dylks. “Come
+along now, and get your _hot_ pone. Jim Redfield won't hurt you; I'll
+go bail for him, and I'll see that nobody else gets at you. I've got a
+loft over this room where you'll be safe from everything but a pet coon
+that your Joey gave my little boy; and I reckon the coon won't bite you.
+_I_ wouldn't, in his _place_.”
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+Redfield came rather later than he had promised, excusing himself for his
+delay. “I was afraid the frost had caught my tobacco, last night; but it
+seems to be all right, as far as I can see; I stayed till the sun was well
+up before I decided.”
+
+“It _was_ a pretty sharp night, but I don't believe there was any
+frost,” the Squire said. “At least Dylks didn't complain of it.”
+
+“Dylks?” Redfield returned.
+
+“Yes. Didn't you know he was out again?”
+
+“No, I didn't. If I had that fellow by the scruff of the neck!”
+
+The Squire knew he meant the sleeping sentinel at the thicket where Dylks
+had been hidden, and not Dylks. But he said nothing, and again Redfield
+spoke.
+
+“Look here, Squire Braile, I think you did a bad piece of business
+letting that fellow go.”
+
+“I know you do, Jim, but I expect you'll think different when you've seen
+him.”
+
+“Seen him? You mean you know where he is?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Well, all I've got to say is that if I can lay hands on that fellow he
+won't give me the slip again.”
+
+“Well, suppose we try,” the Squire said, and he opened the door into the
+room where Dylks was cowering, and remarked with a sort of casualness, as
+if the fact would perhaps interest them both, “Here's one of the Lost,
+Dylks. I thought you might like to see him. Now, sit down, both of you and
+let's talk this thing over.”
+
+He took a place on the side of the bed and the enemies each faltered to
+their chairs in mutual amaze.
+
+“Oh, sit down, sit down!” the Squire insisted. “You might as well take it
+comfortably. Nobody's going to kill either of you.”
+
+“I don't want to do anybody any harm,” Dylks began.
+
+“You'd better not!” Redfield said between his set teeth; his hands had
+knotted themselves into fists at his side.
+
+“I'm all weak yet from the fever I had there, with nothing but water and
+berries,” Dylks resumed in his self-pity. “I _did_ think some of my
+friends might have come--”
+
+“I took good care of that,” Redfield said. “They did come, at first, with
+something to eat, but they knew blame well we'd have wrung their necks if
+we'd 'a' caught 'em. We meant to starve you out, that's what, and we did
+it, and if it hadn't been for that good-for-nothing whelp sleeping over
+his gun you wouldn't have got out alive.”
+
+“Well, that's all right now, Jim, and you'd better forgive and forget,
+both of you,” the Squire interposed. “Dylks has reformed, he tells me;
+he's sorry for having been a god, and he's going to try to be a man, or as
+much of a man as he can. He's going to tell the Little Flock so, and then
+he's going to get out of Leatherwood right off--”
+
+Dylks cleared his throat to ask tremulously, “Did I say that, Squire
+Braile?”
+
+“Yes, you did, my friend, and what's more you're going to keep your word,
+painful as it may be to you. I'll let you manage it your own way, but some
+way you're going to do it; and in the meantime I'm going to put you under
+the protection of Jim Redfield, here--”
+
+“_My_ protection?” Redfield protested.
+
+“Yes, I've sworn you in as special constable, or I will have as soon as I
+can make out the oath, and have you sign it. And Dylks will get out of the
+county as soon as he can--he tells me it won't be so easy as we would
+think; and when he does, it will be much more to the purpose than riding
+on a rail in a coat of tar and feathers. Why!” he broke off, with a stare
+at Dylks as if he saw his raggedness for the first time, “you'll want a
+coat of _some_ kind to show yourself to the Little Flock in; the Herd
+of the Lost won't mind; they don't want to be so proud of you. I must look
+up something for you; or perhaps send to Brother Hingston; he's about your
+size. But that don't matter, now! What I want is your promise, Jim
+Redfield, and I know you'll do what you say, that you won't tell anybody
+that the Supreme Being is hiding in my loft, here, till I say so, and when
+I do, that you'll see no harm comes to him from mortals--from Hounds, and
+such like, or even the Herd of the Lost. Do you promise?”
+
+Redfield hesitated. “If he'll leave the county, yes.”
+
+“And _you_, 'Jehovah, Jove or Lord'?”
+
+“I will, as quick as I can, Squire Braile; I will, indeed.”
+
+The Squire rose from the edge of the bed. “Then this court stands
+adjourned,” he said formally.
+
+Redfield went out with him, leaving Dylks trembling behind. He said, “I
+ain't sure you ain't making a fool of me, Squire Braile.”
+
+“Well, _I_ am,” the Squire retorted. “And don't you make one of
+yourself, and then there won't be any.”
+
+Redfield still hesitated. “I'd just like to had another pull at that
+horse-tail of his,” he said wistfully.
+
+“Well, I knew old man Gillespie hadn't quite the strength. But I thought
+maybe Hughey Blake helped pull--”
+
+“Hughey Blake,” Redfield returned scornfully, “had nothing to do with it.”
+
+“Well, anyway, I hear it's converted Jane Gillespie, and she was worth
+it, though it was rather too much like scalping a live Indian.”
+
+“She's worth more than all the other girls in this settlement put
+together,” Redfield said, without comment on the phase of the act which
+had interested the Squire, and went down the cabin steps into the lane.
+
+Braile turned back and opened the door of the room where Dylks was lurking.
+
+“Better come out, now,” he said, not ungently, “and get into a safe place
+before folks begin to be about much. Or wait--I'll put the ladder up
+first.” He brought the ladder from the kitchen where he exchanged a
+fleeting joke with his wife, still at her work of clearing the breakfast
+things away, and set it against the wall under the trapdoor of the loft.
+“Now, then!” he called and Dylks came anxiously out.
+
+“Ain't you afraid--” he began.
+
+“No, but _you_ are, and that'll do for both of us. There's nobody
+round, and if you'll hurry, nobody'll see you. Push the lid to one side,
+and get in, and you'll be perfectly safe,” he said as Dylks tremulously
+mounted the ladder. “I don't say you'll be very comfortable. There's a
+little window at one end, but it don't give much air, and this August sun
+is apt to get a little warm on the clapboards. And I don't suppose it
+smells very well in there; but the coon can't help that; it's the way
+nature scented him; she hadn't any sweet brier handy at the time. And be
+careful not to step on him. He's not very good-tempered, but I reckon he
+won't bite you if you don't bite _him.”_
+
+The kitchen door opened and Mrs. Braile put her head out. She saw the
+ladder and the two men. Then she came out into the porch. “Well, Matthew
+Braile, I might have knowed from the sound of your voice that you was up
+to some mischief. Was you goin' to send that poor man up into that hot
+loft? Well, I can tell you you're not.” She went into the room they had
+left, and they heard her stirring vigorously about beyond its closed door,
+with a noise of rapid steps and hard and soft thumpings. She came out
+again and said, “Go in there, now, Mr. Dylks, and try to get some rest.
+I've made up the bed for you, and _I'll_ see that nobody disturbs
+you. Matthew Braile, you send and tell Mr. Hingston,--or _go_, if you
+can't ketch anybody goin' past,--and tell him he's here, and bring some
+decent clothes; he ain't fit to be seen.”
+
+“Well, he don't want to be,” the Squire said in the attempt to brave her
+onset. “But I reckon you're right, mother. I should probably have thought
+of it myself--in time. I'll send Sally or Abel, if they go past--and they
+nearly always do--or some of the hands from the tobacco patches. Or, as
+you say, I may go myself, towards evening. He won't want to be troubled
+before then.”
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+At the first meeting in the Temple after the open return of Dylks to his
+dispensation, the Little Flock had apparently suffered no loss in number.
+Some of his followers had left him, but his disciples had been busily
+preaching him during his abeyance, and the defection of old converts was
+more than made up by the number of proselytes. The room actually left by
+the Flock was filled by the Herd of the Lost who occupied all the seats on
+one side of the Temple, with Matthew Braile and his wife in a foremost
+place, the lower sort of them worsening into the Hounds who filled the
+doorway, and hung about the outside of the Temple.
+
+The whole assembly was orderly. Those of the Little Flock who conducted
+the services had a quelled air, which might have been imparted to them by
+the behavior of Dylks; he sat bowed and humble on the bench below the
+pulpit, while Enraghty preached above him. It was rumored that at the
+house-meetings the worship of Dylks had been renewed with the earlier
+ardor; there had been genuflections and prostrations before him, with
+prayers for pardon and hymns of praise, especially from the proselytes.
+Dylks was said to have accepted their adoration with a certain passivity
+but to have done nothing to prevent it; there was not the more scandalous
+groveling at his feet which had stirred up the community to his arrest.
+There was as much decorum as could consist with the sacrilegious rites
+which were still practised with his apparent connivance.
+
+He now sat without apparent restiveness under the eyes of the two men who
+had the greatest right to exact the fulfilment of his promise, to forbid
+this idolatry, to end the infamy of its continuance, and to go out from
+among the people whose instincts and conventions his presence outraged.
+Near Redfield sat David Gillespie with his eyes fixed on Dylks in a stare
+of hungry hate, and with him sat his daughter, who testified by her
+removal from the Little Flock her renunciation of her faith in him.
+Redfield showed greater patience than Gillespie, and at times his eyes
+wandered to the face of the girl who did not seem to feel them on her, but
+sat gazing at her forsaken idol in what might have seemed puzzle for him
+and wonder at herself. Others who had rejected him merely kept away; but
+she came as if she would face down the shame of her faith in him before
+the eyes of her little world. Sometimes Dylks involuntarily put his hand
+to the black silken cap which replaced the bandage Nancy Billings had tied
+over the place where the hair had been torn out. When he did this, the
+girl moved a little; her face hardened, and she stole a glance at Redfield.
+
+The schoolmaster went on and on, preaching Dylks insistently, but not
+with the former defiance. He did not spare to speak of the cruel
+sufferings inflicted upon their Savior and their God, who had borne it
+with the meekness of the Son and the mercy of the Father. The divine being
+who had come to sojourn among them at Leatherwood in the flesh, for the
+purposes of his inscrutable wisdom might have blasted his enemies with a
+touch, a word, but he had spared them; he had borne insult and injury, but
+in the Last Day he would do justice, he the judge of all the earth. Till
+then, let the Little Flock have patience; let them have faith sustained by
+the daily, hourly miracles which he had wrought among them since his
+return to their midst, and rest secure in the strong arms which he folded
+about them.
+
+Dylks sat motionless. “Well, mother,” Matthew Braile hoarsely whispered
+to his wife, “I reckon you'd better have let me put him up with the coon.
+The heat might have tried the mischief out of him. He hasn't kept his
+word.”
+
+“No, Matthew, he hasn't,” she whispered back, “and I think his lying to
+you so is almost the worst thing he's done. The next time you may put him
+with the coon. Only, the coon's too good for him. But I reckon Jim
+Redfield will look out for him.”
+
+“Jim'll have to let him alone. We can't have any more mobbing, and
+there's no law that can touch Dylks in the State of Ohio. We settled that
+the first time.”
+
+Enraghty abruptly closed his discourse with a demand for prayer, and
+addressed his supplication to the Savior and the Judge incarnate there
+among them. The Little Flock sang the hymn which always opened and closed
+its devotions, and at the end, Hingston, who sat by Dylks on the bench
+below the pulpit, made a movement as if to rise. But Dylks put out his
+hand and stayed him. He welcomed Enraghty to the place which he left
+beside Hingston, and slowly, with the step of one in a dream, mounted the
+stairs of the pulpit, amidst the silent amaze of the people. He began
+without preamble in the blend of scriptural text and crude every-day
+parlance which he ordinarily used.
+
+“Ye have heard it said aforetime that the New Jerusalem would come down
+here in Leatherwood, but I say unto you that all that has passed away,
+that the words which were spoken by the prophet might be fulfilled, 'Many
+are called but few are chosen.' Verily, verily, I said unto you, that
+heaven and earth shall pass away, but the words I speak now shall not pass
+away. If the works which have been done in Leatherwood had been done in
+Tyre and Sidon, the New Jerusalem would have come down in both places, for
+they did not stone the prophets as the Herd of the Lost did in
+Leatherwood.”
+
+“He means that morning when he took up the pike and the fellows chased
+him into the tall timber,” Braile whispered to his wife; “but _I_
+can't tell what he's driving at.”
+
+“Be still!” she said.
+
+Many of the Little Flock groaned and cried aloud; the Herd of the Lost,
+except for one shrill note of bitter laughter, were silent, and only those
+who sat near perceived that it was Jane Gillespie who had laughed.
+
+Redfield looked round at her, unconscious of his look.
+
+“I go a long way off,” Dylks proceeded, “and some of my beloved, even my
+Little Flock, cannot follow me; but though they cannot follow me, even the
+lame, halt, and blind shall be with me in the spirit, and shall behold the
+New Jerusalem where I will bring it down.”
+
+Many of the Little Flock at this cried out, “Where will it be, Lord?”
+ “Where will the New Jerusalem come down?” “How shall we see it?”
+
+“With the eyes of faith, even as ye have seen the miracles I have wrought
+among ye, which were shown to babes and sucklings and were hidden from the
+wise of this world. But now I go from you, and my feet shall be upon the
+mountains and shall descend upon the other side and there I will bring
+down the New Jerusalem, and there ye shall be, in the flesh or in the
+spirit, to behold the wonder of it.”
+
+Some of the Little Flock cried out again. “Oh, don't leave us, Father!”
+ “Take us all with you in the flesh!” “We want to be taken up with you!”
+ and then some of them entreated, “Tell us about it; tell us what it will
+be like.”
+
+Dylks lifted his eyes as if in the rapture of the vision. “'Its light
+shall eclipse the splendor of the sun. The temples thereof, and the
+residences of the faithful will be built of diamonds excelling the
+twinkling beauty of the stars. Its walls will be of solid gold, and its
+gates silver. The streets will be covered with green velvet, richer in
+luster and fabric than mortal eye ever beheld. The gardens thereof will be
+filled with all manner of pleasant fruits, precious to the sight, and
+pleasant to the taste. The faithful shall ride in chariots of crimson,
+drawn by jet-black horses that need no drivers; and their joys shall go on
+increasing forever. The air of the city shall be scented with the smell of
+shrubs and flowers, and ten thousand different instruments all tuned to
+the songs of heaven shall fill the courts, and the streets and the
+temples, and the residences, and the gardens with music like ear hath not
+heard, swelling the soul of the saved with perpetual delight.'”
+
+Sighs and groans of ecstasy went up from the Flock at each of the studied
+pauses which Dylks made in recounting the wonders of the heavenly city,
+fancied one after another at the impulse of their expectation. At the end
+they swarmed forward to the altar place and flung themselves on the
+ground, and heaped the pulpit steps with their bodies. “Take us with you,
+Lord!” they entreated. “Take us all with you in the flesh!” “Don't leave
+us here to perish among the heathen and the ungodly when you go.” Then
+some began to ask, as if he had already consented, “But what shall we eat,
+and what shall we drink, and wherewithal shall we be clothed on that far
+journey?”
+
+[Illustration: They swarmed forward to the altar-place and flung
+themselves on the ground, and heaped the pulpit-steps with their bodies]
+
+Dylks leaned forward against the pulpit desk and showed a few coins drawn
+from the pocket of Hingston's pantaloons which he was wearing. “These
+shall be enough, for out of these three rusty old coppers I can make
+millions of gold and silver dollars.”
+
+The frenzy mounted, and the Herd of the Lost who began to tire of the
+sight, left the temple. Redfield followed out behind Matthew Braile and
+his wife. “That settles it,” he said. “I'll see to Mr. Dylks in the
+morning.”
+
+“Now, I look at it differently. He's going, like he said he would, and
+we've got to let him go in his own way, and bring down the New Jerusalem
+Over-the-Mountains, or anywhere else he pleases, so he don't bring it down
+in Leatherwood.”
+
+“I say so, too, Matthew. He's keeping his word the best he can, poor
+lying soul. They wouldn't let him back out now.”
+
+“I don't want you to trouble him, Jim Redfield, till you have a warrant
+from me,” Braile resumed, braced by his wife's support. “And I want you to
+keep the Hounds away, and give Dylks a fair start. You know the law won't
+let you touch him. Now do you hear?”
+
+“I hear,” Redfield said sullenly, with the consent which Braile read in
+his words. “But if there's any more such goings on as we've had here
+to-night, I won't answer for the rest of his scalp.”
+
+He hurried forward from the elderly couple and overtook the Gillespies
+walking rapidly. Hughey Blake had just fallen away from them and stood
+disconsolately looking after them.
+
+“Is that you, James Redfield?” David Gillespie asked, peering at him in
+the night's dimness. “This is the man that helped me to get you a lock of
+that scoundrel's hair,” he said to his daughter.
+
+She answered nothing in acknowledgment of the introduction, but Redfield
+said, coming round to her side and suiting his step to hers, “I would like
+to go home with you till my road passes yours.”
+
+“Well,” she said, “if you ain't ashamed to be seen with such a fool.
+Nobody _can_ see you to-night,” she added, bitterly, including him in
+her self-scorn.
+
+“You needn't imply that I like it to be in the dark. I would like to walk
+with you in broad day past all the houses in Leatherwood. But I don't
+suppose you'd let me.” She did not say anything, and he added, “I'm going
+to ask you to the first chance.” Still she did not say anything, though
+her father had fallen behind and left the talk wholly to them.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+Nancy sat at her door in the warm September evening when the twilight was
+beginning to come earlier than in the August days, and her boy rushed
+round the corner of the cabin in a boy's habitual breathlessness from
+running.
+
+“Oh, mother, mother!” he called to her, as if he were a great way off.
+“Guess what!” He did not wait for her to guess. “The Good Old Man is goin'
+to leave Leatherwood and go Over the Mountains with the Little Flock, and
+he says he's goin' to bring down the New Jerusalem at Philadelphy, and all
+that wants to go up with him kin go. Mr. Hingston's goin' with him, and
+he's goin' to let Benny. Benny don't know whether he can get to go up in
+the New Jerusalem or not, but he's goin' to coax his father the hardest
+kind.”
+
+He stopped panting at his mother's knees where she sat on the cabin
+threshold nearly as high as he stood. She put up her hand and pushed the
+wet hair from his forehead. “How you _do_ sweat, Joey! Go round and
+wash your face at the bench. Maybe Jane will give you a drink of the milk,
+while it's warm yet, before she lets it down in the well. She's just
+through milkin'.”
+
+The boy tore himself away with a shout of “Oh, goody!” and his mother
+heard him at the well. “Wait a minute, Jane! Mother said I could have a
+drink before you let it down,” and then she heard him, between gulps,
+recounting to the girl's silence the rumors she had already heard from
+him. He came running back, with a white circle of milk round his lips.
+“Mother,” he began, “have you ever been Over-the-Mountains?”
+
+“No, I've never been anywhere but just here in the country, and where you
+was born, back where we moved from.”
+
+“Well, mother, how old am I now?”
+
+“You're goin' on twelve, Joey dear.”
+
+“Yes, that's what I thought. Benny ain't on'y ten. And he ain't as big
+for his age as what I am. He's been to the circus, though; his father took
+him to it at Wheeling that time when he went on the steamboat. I wisht I
+could go to a circus.”
+
+“Well, maybe you kin when you grow up. Circuses ain't everything.”
+
+“No,” the boy relucted. “Benny says the New Jerusalem will be a good deal
+like the circus. That's the reason he coaxed his father to let him go. Is
+Philadelphy as far as Wheeling?”
+
+“A good deal further, from what I've heard tell,” his mother said; she
+smiled at his innocently sinuous approach to his desire.
+
+He broke out with it. “Mother, what's the reason I can't go with Benny,
+and Mr. Hingston, and the Little Flock? They'd take good care of me, and I
+wouldn't make Mr. Hingston any trouble. Me 'n' Benny could sleep together.
+And the Good Old Man he's always been very pleasant to me. Patted my head
+oncet, and ast me what my name was.”
+
+“Did you tell him it was Billings?” his mother asked uneasily.
+
+“No, just Joseph; and he said, well, that was his name, too. Don't you
+think the Good Old Man is good?”
+
+“We're none of us as good as we ought to be, Joey. No, he ain't a good
+man, I'm afraid.”
+
+“My!” the boy said, and then after a moment: “I don't want to go, Mother,
+unless you want to let me go.”
+
+His mother did not speak for a while, and it seemed as if she were not
+going to speak at all, so that the boy said, with a little sigh of
+renunciation, “I didn't expect you would. But I'd be as careful! And even
+if the Good Old Man ain't so very good, Mr. Hingston is, and he wouldn't
+let anything happen to me.”
+
+The woman put her hand under the boy's chin, and looked into his eager
+eyes which had not ceased their pleading. At last she said, “You can go,
+Joey!”
+
+“Mother!” He jumped to his feet from his crouching at hers. “Oh, glory to
+God!”
+
+“Hush, Joey, you mustn't say things like that. It's like swearing, dear.”
+
+“I know it is, and I didn't mean to. Of course it's right, in meetin',
+and it kind of slipped out when I wasn't thinkin'. But I won't say any bad
+things, you needn't be afraid. Oh, I'll be as good! But look a'here,
+mother! Why can't you come, too?”
+
+“And leave your little sister?” She smiled sadly.
+
+“I didn't think of that. But couldn't Jane take care of her? She's always
+carryin' her around. And Uncle David could come here, and live with them.
+He wouldn't want to stay there without me, or no one.”
+
+“It wouldn't do, Joey dear.”
+
+“No,” the boy assented.
+
+“You can go and tell Benny I said you might go, if his father will have
+you.”
+
+“Oh, he _will_; he said so; Benny's ast him! And he said he'd take
+good care of us both.”
+
+“I'm not afraid. You know how to take care of yourself. And, Joey--”
+
+She stopped, and the boy prompted her, “What, mom?”
+
+“When I said the Good Old Man wasn't a good man, I didn't want to set you
+against him. I want you to be good to him.”
+
+“Yes, mother,” the boy assented in a puzzle. “But if he ain't good--”
+
+“He ain't, Joey. He's a wicked man. Sometimes I think he's the wickedest
+man in the world. But I want you to watch out, and if ever you can help
+him, or do anything for him, remember that I wanted you to do it: a boy
+can often help a man.”
+
+“I will, mother. But I don't see the reason, if he's so very wicked, why--”
+
+“That's the very reason, Joey dear. And go and tell Benny now that I let
+you go. And--don't tell him what I said about the Good Old Man.”
+
+“Oh, I woon't, I woon't, mom! Oh, glory--Oh, I didn't mean to say it, and
+I didn't, really, did I? But I'm so glad, and Benny'll be, too! Can I tell
+him now? To-night?”
+
+“Yes. Run along.”
+
+He hesitated; then he leaped into the air with a joyful yell and vanished
+round the corner of the cabin into the dusk.
+
+His mother did not leave her place on the threshold, but sat with her
+face bowed in her hands. By and by Jane Gillespie came to the door from
+within, and then Nancy lifted her head and made room for her to sit beside
+her. She told her what had passed, and Jane said, “If I was a man I
+would--Well, I know what I would do!”
+
+She did not sit down, but stood behind Nancy and talked down over her
+shoulder. “Yes,” Nancy said, “that's what I used to say when I was a girl.
+But now I'm glad I ain't a man, for I wouldn't know what to do.”
+
+“Well, I wouldn't 'a' left a hair in his head. I'd 'a'--I'd 'a' half
+killed him! Oh, when I think what a fool that man made of me!”
+
+“Don't let Jim Redfield make a fool of you, then.”
+
+“Who said I'm letting him?” the girl demanded fiercely.
+
+“Nobody. But don't.”
+
+“Aunt Nancy! If it was anybody but you said such a thing! But _I_
+know! It's because you're so set on Hughey Blake. Hughey Blake!” she ended
+scornfully, and went back into the cabin.
+
+Nancy rose from her place with a sigh. “Oh, I 'spose you're right about
+my lettin' Joey go. _I_ don't know why I let him.”
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+The meetings of the Little Flock had continued ever since the
+reappearance of Dylks, and in the earlier spirit. But the spring was
+broken, and since he had said that the New Jerusalem would not come down
+at Leatherwood, many had lost not faith but hope. Few could have the hope
+of following him as far as far-off Philadelphia, and sharing the glories
+which he promised them there. For a pioneer community the people were none
+of them poor; some were accounted rich, and among the richest were many
+followers of Dylks. But most of the Flock were hardworking farmers who
+could not spare the time or the money for that long journey
+Over-the-Mountains, even with the prospect of the heavenly city at the
+end. Yet certain of the poorest set their houses in order, and mortgaged
+their lands, and went with the richest, when on a morning after the last
+great meeting in the Temple, the Little Flock assembled for parting, some
+to go and some to stay.
+
+Nancy did not come with her boy for the farewell. They had kissed each
+other at the cabin door, and then he had run light-heartedly away, full of
+wild expectation, to find Benny Hingston at the Cross Roads and then race
+with him to join the crowd before the Temple, where the Little Flock stood
+listening to the last words which the Good Old Man should speak to them in
+Leatherwood. Many wept; Dylks himself was crying. The enemies of their
+faith did not molest them except for a yelp of derision now and then, and
+a long-drawn howl from the Hounds, kept well back by the Herd of the Lost,
+under the command of Redfield. He stood in the chief place among these,
+and at his right hand Matthew Braile leaned on his stick.
+
+When the last prayer had been said, and they who were going had kissed or
+shaken hands with those who were staying, and friends and foes had both
+scattered, Braile said to the young man whom he now faced, “Well, that's
+the last of him.”
+
+Redfield's jaw was still set from the effort of seeing the affair through
+in as much decency as he had been able to enforce. “It ain't the last of
+_them_. But I reckon, now he's gone, they'll behave themselves. None
+of the saints that are left will make trouble.”
+
+“No, with Enraghty out of the way and that kind old fool Hingston, with
+his example of mistaken righteousness, we can get along fairly enough with
+the old dispensation. Well, Abel,” he called to Reverdy, who was lounging
+about in the empty space which the crowd had left, unwilling to leave the
+scene of so much excitement for the dull labors of the field, “you thought
+you wouldn't go to see the New Jerusalem come down, after all. How's the
+Good Old Man goin' to work it without you?”
+
+“He's had to work things 'thout me for a good while now, Squire,” Abel
+returned, not with perfect satisfaction in the part assigned him by the
+irony of the Squire. “Ever sence that night at Mr. Enraghty's, I been
+putty much done with him. A god that couldn't help hisself in a little
+trouble like that, he ain't no god for me.”
+
+“Oh, I remember. But what about Sally? She didn't go with the Little
+Flock, either?”
+
+“I reckon me 'n' Sally thinks putty much alike about the Little Flock,”
+ Abel said with as much hauteur as a man in his bare feet could command.
+“We hain't either of us got any use for Little Flocks, any more.”
+
+“Well, I'm glad of it. But I thought she might have come to see them off.”
+
+Abel relented. “Sally ain't very well, this mornin'. Up all night with
+the toothache.” Redfield had turned from them, and Abel now remarked, “I
+_was_ wonderin' whether I couldn't borry a little coffee from Mis'
+Braile for breakfast; I been so took up 'ith all these goun's on that I
+hain't had no time to go to the store.”
+
+“Why, certainly,” the Squire replied, “and you'd better come and have
+breakfast with us on the way home. I came down without mine so as to see
+the Ancient of Days off, and make sure of his going.”
+
+“Pshaw, Squire, it don't seem quite right to have you usin' them old
+Bible sayun's so common like.”
+
+“Well, Abel, perhaps it isn't quite the thing. But you must make
+allowance for my being in such high spirits. I haven't breathed so free in
+a coon's age. I _would_ like to have stowed Dylks for a little while
+in the loft with ours! But Mis' Braile wouldn't hear of it. Well, we've
+seen the last of him, I hope. And now we're hearing the last of him.” He
+halted Abel in their walk, at a rise in the ground where they caught the
+sound of the hymn which the Little Flock, following Dylks for a certain
+way, were singing. “'Sounds weel at a distance,' as the Scotchman said of
+the bagpipes. And the farther the better. I don't believe I should care if
+I _never_ heard that tune again.” They reached Braile's cabin, and he
+said, “Well, now come in and have something to stay your stomach while
+you're waiting for Sally to make the coffee you're going to borrow.”
+
+“No, I reckon not, Squire,” Abel loyally held out.
+
+“Well, then, come in and get the coffee, anyhow.”
+
+“I reckon that's a good idea, Squire,” Abel assented with a laugh for the
+joke at his cost. As they mounted the steps, Braile stopped him at the
+sound of voices in the kitchen.
+
+A prevalent voice was the voice of Sally. “Well, just one _sup_
+more, Mis' Braile. You do make the _best_ coffee! I believe in my
+heart that it's took my toothache all away a'ready, and I suppose poor
+Abel'll be goun' up home with some of that miser'ble stuff he gits at the
+store, and expectun' to find me there in bed yit. I thought I'd jest slip
+down, and borry a little o' your'n to surprise him with, but when I smelt
+it, I jest couldn't hold out. I don't suppose but what he stayed to see
+the Little Flock off, anyway, and you say Squire Braile went. Well, I
+reckon he had to, justice o' the peace, that way. I'm thankful the Good
+Old Man's gone, for one, and I don't never want to see hide or hair of him
+ag'in in Leatherwood. There's such a thing as gittun' enough of a thing,
+and I've got enough of strange gods for one while.”
+
+Murmurs of reply came from Mrs. Braile at times, but Sally mainly kept
+the word.
+
+“Well, and what do you think of Nancy Billun's lettun' her Joey go off
+with the Little Flock, her talkun' the way she always done about 'em? Of
+course he's safe with Mr. Hingston and Benny, and they'll bring him back
+all right, but don't you think she'd be afeared that he might be took up
+in the New Jerusalem when it riz ag'in?”
+
+“Abel,” the Squire said, “I don't like this. We seem to be listening. I
+don't believe Sally will like our overhearing her; and we ought to warn
+her. It's no use your stamping your bare feet, for they wouldn't make any
+noise. I'll rap my stick on the floor.” He also called out, “Hello, the
+house!” and Sally herself came to the kitchen door. She burst into her
+large laugh. “Well, I declare to goodness, if it ain't Abel and the
+Squire! Well, if this ain't the best joke on _me!_ Did you see Dylks
+off, Squire Braile? And a good riddance to bad rubbage, _I_ say.”
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+Hughey Blake, long-haired, barefooted and freckled, hung about the door
+of Nancy's cabin, where she sat with her little girl playing in the weedy
+turf at her foot. The late October weather was sometimes hot at noon, but
+the evenings were cool and the evening air was sweet with the scent of the
+ripened corn, and the faint odor of the fallen leaves. The grasshoppers
+still hissed; at moments the crickets within and without the cabin creaked
+plaintively.
+
+“I just come,” Hughey said, “to see if you thought she wouldn't go to the
+Temple with me, to-night. The Flock lets us have our turn reg'lar now, and
+we're goin' to have Thursday evenin' meetin' like we used to.” In a
+discouraging silence from Nancy, he went on, “I'm just on my way home,
+now, and I'll git my shoes there; and I don't expect to wear this hickory
+shirt, and no coat--”
+
+“Yes, I know, Hughey, but I don't believe it'll be any use. You can try;
+but I don't believe it will. I reckon you'd find out that she's goin' with
+Jim Redfield, if anybody. She's been off with him 'most the whole
+afternoon, gatherin' pawpaws--he knows the best places; I should think
+they could have got all the pawpaws in Leatherwood by this time. You know
+I've always liked you, Hughey, and so has her father, and you've played
+together ever since you was babies, and you've always been her beau from
+childern up. There ain't a person in Leatherwood that don't respect you
+and feel to think that any girl might be glad to get you; but I'm afraid
+it's just your cleverness, and bein' so gentle like--”
+
+“Do you 'spose, Nancy,” the young man faltered disconsolately, “it's had
+anything to do with my not gettin' her that hair? I could 'a' done it as
+easy as Jim Redfield; but to tear it right out of his head, that way, I
+couldn't; it went ag'in my stommick.”
+
+“I don't believe it's that, Hughey. If you must know, I believe it's just
+Jim Redfield himself. He's bewitched her and she's got to be bewitched by
+somebody; if it ain't one it's another; it was _him_ then, and it's
+Jim, now.”
+
+“I see,” the young man assented sadly.
+
+“She ain't good enough for you, that's the truth, Hughey, though I say
+it, her own kith and kin. I can't make you understand, I know; but she's
+got to have somebody that she can feel the power of.”
+
+“I'd do anything for her, Nancy.”
+
+“That's just it! She don't want that kind of lovin', as you may call it.
+I don't believe my brother's a very easy man to turn, but Jane has always
+done as she pleased with him; he's been like clay in the hands of the
+potter with her. Many another girl would have been broken into bits before
+now; but she's just as tough as so much hickory. I don't say but what
+she's a good girl; there ain't a better in Leatherwood, or anywheres.
+She's as true as a die, and tender as anything in sickness, and'd lay down
+and die where she saw her duty, and'd work till she dropped if need be;
+but, no, she ain't one that wants softness in her friends. Well, she won't
+git any too much of it in Jim Redfield. They're of a piece, and she
+_may_ find out that she's made a mistake, after all.”
+
+“Has she--she hain't promised to marry him yit?”
+
+“No, I don't say that. But ever since that night at the Temple he's been
+round after her. He's been here, and he's been at her father's, and she
+can't go down to the Corners for anything but what he comes home helpin'
+her to bring it. You seen yourself, how he always gets her to come home
+from meetin'.”
+
+“Yes,” Hughey assented forlornly. “I'm always too late at the door; he's
+with her before a body can git the words out.”
+
+“Well, that's it. I don't say she ain't a good girl, one of the very
+best, but she's hard, hard, hard; and I don't see what's ever to break
+her.”
+
+The girl's voice came from round the cabin, calling, “Honey, honey,
+honey!” and the little one started from her play at her mother's feet, and
+ran toward the voice, which Jane now brought with her at the corner, and
+chuckling, and jug-jugging, birdlike, for joy, threw herself at Jane's
+knees.
+
+“See what I brought you, honey. It's good and ripe, but it ain't half as
+good as my honey, honey, honey!” She put the pawpaw into the child's hands
+and mumbled her, with kisses of her eyes, cheeks, hair, and neck. “Oh, I
+could eat you, _eat_ you!”
+
+She must have seen the young fellow waiting for her notice, but Nancy had
+to say, “Here's Hughey, Jane,” before she spoke to him.
+
+“Oh! Hughey,” she said, not unkindly, but as if he did not matter.
+
+He stood awkward and Nancy judged it best for all the reasons to add,
+“Hughey wants you to go to the Temple with him to-night,” and the young
+fellow smiled gratefully if not hopefully at her.
+
+The girl stiffened herself to her full height from the child she was
+stooping over. She haughtily mounted the steps beside Nancy, and without
+other recognition of Hughey in the matter she said, “I've _got_
+company,” and disappeared into the cabin.
+
+“Well, Hughey?” Nancy pityingly questioned.
+
+“No, no, Nancy,” he replied with a manful struggle for manfulness,
+“I--I--It's meant, I reckon,” and slunk away from the girl's brutality as if it
+were his own shame.
+
+Nancy picked up her little one, and followed indoors.
+
+“Don't you talk to me, Aunt Nancy!” the girl cried at her. “What does he
+keep askin' me for?”
+
+“He won't ask you any more, Jane,” the woman quietly returned.
+
+They joined in putting the little one to bed. Then, without more words,
+Jane kissed the child, and came back to kiss her again when she had got to
+the door. “Aunt Nancy, I hate you,” she said as she went out and left the
+woman alone.
+
+Ever since Joey went away with the believers to see the New Jerusalem
+come down in Philadelphia, Jane had been sleeping at her father's cabin in
+resentful duty to his years and solitude. She got him his breakfast and
+left it for him before she went to take her own with Nancy, and she had
+his dinner and supper ready for his return from the field, but she did not
+eat with him, and he was abed before she came home at night.
+
+Joey had been gone nearly a month, and no word had come back from any of
+the Little Flock who went with Dylks. It was not the day of letters by
+mail; if some of the pilgrims had sent messages by the wagoners returning
+from their trips Over the Mountains, they had not reached the families
+left behind, and no angel-borne tidings came to testify of the wonder at
+Philadelphia. Those left behind waited in patience rather than anxiety;
+where life was often hard, people did not borrow trouble and add that
+needless debt to their load of daily cares. Nancy said to others that she
+did not know what to think, and others said the same to her, and they got
+what comfort they could out of that.
+
+Now she did not light the little rag-lamp which she and Jane sometimes
+sat by with their belated sewing or darning if they had not kept the
+hearth-fire burning. She went to bed in the dark, and slept with the
+work-weariness which keeps the heart-heavy from waking.
+
+She had work in her tobacco patch to do, as well as in the house, where
+Jane helped her; she would not let the girl help her get the logs and
+brush together on the clearing which Laban had begun burning to enrich the
+soil for the planting of the next year's crop with the ashes.
+
+She must have slept long hours when she heard the sound of a cry from the
+dark without.
+
+“Mother! Mother! _Oh_, mother!” it came nearer and nearer, till it
+beat with the sound of a fist on the cabin door. In the piecing out of the
+instant dream which she started from, she thought as that night when Dylks
+called her, that it must be Laban; he sometimes called her mother after
+the baby came, and now she called back, “Laban! Laban!” but the voice came
+again, “It ain't father; it's me, mother; it's Joey!”
+
+“Oh, dear heart!” she joyfully lamented, and flung herself from her bed,
+and reeled still drunk with slumber, and pulled up the latch, and flung
+open the door, and caught her boy to her breast.
+
+“Oh, mother!” he said, laughing and crying. “I'm so hungry!”
+
+“To be sure you're hungry, child; and I'll have you your supper in half a
+minute, as soon as I can rake the fire open. Lay down on mother's bed
+there, and rest while I'm gettin' ready for you. The baby won't wake, and
+I don't care if she does.”
+
+“I s'pose she's grown a good deal. But I _am_ tired,” the boy said,
+stretching himself out. “Me 'n' Benny run all the way as soon as we come
+in sight of the crick, and him 'n' Mis' Hingston wanted me to stay all
+night, but I wouldn't. I wanted to see you so much, mother.”
+
+“Did Mr. Hingston come back with you? Or, don't tell me anything; don't
+speak, till you've had something to eat.”
+
+“I woon't, mother,” the boy promised, and then he said, “But you ought to
+see Philadelphy, mother. It's twenty times as big as Wheeling, Benny says,
+and all red brick houses and white marble steps.” He was sitting up, and
+talking now; his mother flew about in the lank linsey-woolsey dress she
+had thrown over her nightgown in some unrealized interval of her labors
+and had got the skillet of bacon hissing over the coals.
+
+“And to think,” she bleated in self-reproach, “that I'll have to give you
+_rye_ coffee! You know, Joey dear, there hain't very much cash about
+this house, and the store won't take truck for coffee. But with good cream
+in it, the rye tastes 'most as good. Set up to the table, now,” she bade
+him, when she had put the rye coffee with the bacon and some warmed-up
+pone on the leaf lifted from the wall.
+
+She let the boy silently glut himself till he glanced round between
+mouthfuls and said, “It all looks so funny and little, in here, after
+Philadelphy.”
+
+Then she said, “But you don't say anything about the New Jerusalem.
+Didn't it come down, after all?” She smiled, but sadly rather than gladly
+in her skepticism.
+
+“No, mother,” the boy answered solemnly. Then after a moment he said, “I
+got something to tell you, mother. But I don't know whether I hadn't
+better wait till morning.”
+
+“It's most morning, now, Joey, I reckon, if it ain't already. That's the
+twilight comin' in at the door. If you wouldn't rather get your sleep
+first--”
+
+“No, I can't sleep till I tell you, now. It's about the Good Old Man.”
+
+“Did he--did he go up?” she asked fearfully.
+
+“No, mother, he didn't. Some of them say he was took up, but, mother,
+_I_ believe he was drownded!”
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+“Drownded?” the boy's mother echoed. “What do you mean, Joey? What makes
+you believe he was drownded?”
+
+“I seen him.”
+
+“Seen him?”
+
+“In the water. We was all walkin' along the river bank, and some o' the
+Flock got to complainin' because he hadn't fetched the New Jerusalem down
+yit, and wantin' to know when he was goin' to do it, and sayin' this was
+Philadelphy, and why didn't he; and Mr. Hingston he was tryin' to pacify
+'em, and Mr. Enraghty he scolded 'em, and told 'em to hesh up, or they'd
+be in danger of hell-fire; but they didn't, and the Good Old Man he begun
+to cry. It was awful, mother.”
+
+“Go on, Joey. Don't stop.”
+
+“Well, he'd been prayin' a good deal, off and on, and actin' like he
+wasn't in his right senses, sometimes, talkin' to hisself, and singin' his
+hymn--that one, you know--”
+
+“Never mind, Joey dear,” his mother said, “keep on.”
+
+“And all at once, he up and says, 'If I want to, I can turn this river
+into a river of gold,' and one o' the Flock, about the worst one, he
+hollers back, 'Well, why don't you do it, then?' and Mr. Enraghty--well,
+they call him Saint Paul, you know--he told him to shut his mouth; and
+they got to jawin', and I heard a rattlin' of gravel, like it was slippin'
+down the bank, and then there was the Good Old Man in the water, hollerin'
+for help, and his hat off, floatin' down stream, and his hair all over his
+shoulders. And before I knowed what to think, he sunk, and when he come
+up, I was there in the water puttin' out for him.”
+
+“Yes, Joey--”
+
+“I can't remember how I got there; must 'a' jumped in without thinkin';
+he'd been so good to me, all along, and used to come to me in the
+nighttime when he 'sposed I was asleep, and kiss me; and cry--But I'd 'a'
+done it for anybody, anyway, mother.”
+
+“Yes. Go--”
+
+“Some of 'em was takin' their shoes and coats off to jump in, and some
+jest standin' still, and hollerin' to me not to let him ketch holt o' me,
+or he'd pull me under. But I knowed he couldn't do that, becuz I could
+ketch him by one arm, and hold him off--me 'n' Benny's practised it in the
+crick--and I swum up to him; and he went down ag'in, and when he come up
+ag'in, his face was all soakin' wet like he'd been cryin' under the water,
+and he says, kind o' bubblin'--like this,” the boy made the sound. “He
+says, 'Oh, my son, God help--bub-ub--bless you!' and then he went down,
+and I swum round and round, expectin' he'd come up somewheres; but he
+didn't come up no more. It was awful, mother, becuz that didn't seem to be
+the end of it; and it was. Just didn't come up no more. They jawed some,
+before they _got_ over the mountains,” the boy said reminiscently.
+“They hadn't brung much money; even Mr. Hingston hadn't, becuz they
+expected the Good Old Man to work miracles, and make silver and gold money
+out of red cents, like he said he would. All the nights we slep' out o'
+doors, and sometimes we had to ast for victuals; but the Good Old Man he
+always found places to sleep, nice caves in the banks and holler trees,
+and wherever he ast for victuals they give plenty. And Mr. Enraghty he
+said it was a miracle if he always knowed the best places to sleep, and
+the kindest women to ast for victuals. Do you believe it was, mother?”
+
+Nancy said, after an effort for her voice, “He might have been there
+before.”
+
+“Well, that's so; but none of 'em thunk o' that. And what Mr. Enraghty
+said stopped the jawin' at the time. It all begun ag'in, worse than ever
+when we got almost to Philadelphy; and he said some of 'em must take the
+south fork of the road with Saint Paul and keep on till they saw a big
+light over Philadelphy, where the New Jerusalem was swellin' up, and the
+rest would meet 'em there with him and Saint Peter. They said, 'Why
+couldn't we all go together?' And it was pretty soon after that that he
+slipped into the river. Stumbled on a round stone, I reckon.”
+
+[Illustration: “And he went down ag'in, and when he come up ag'in, his
+face was all soakin' wet, like he'd been crying under the water”]
+
+The woman sat slowly smoothing the handle of the coffee-pot up and down,
+and staring at the boy; but she did not speak.
+
+“Benny jumped in by that time, but it wasn't any use. Oh! I seen the
+ocean, mother! Mr. Hingston took me 'n' Benny down on a boat; and I seen a
+stuffed elephant in a show, or a museum, they called it. Benny said it was
+just like the real one in the circus at Wheeling. Mother, do you believe
+he throwed hisself in?”
+
+“Who, Joey?” she faintly asked.
+
+“Why, the Good Old Man. That's what some of 'em said, them that was
+disappointed about the New Jerusalem. But some said he did fetch it down;
+and they seen it, with the black horses and silver gates and velvet
+streets, and everything just the way he promised. And the others said he'd
+fooled 'em, or else they was just lyin'. And they said he'd got to the end
+of his string; and that was why he throwed himself in, and when he got in,
+he was scared of drowndin' and that was why he hollered for help. But I
+believe he just slipped in. Don't you, mother?”
+
+“Yes, Joey.”
+
+“Mother, I don't believe the Good Old Man had a grea' deal of courage.
+All the way Over the Mountains, he'd seem to scare at any little noise,
+even in broad daylight. Oncet, when we was goin' along through the woods,
+a pig jumped out of some hazel-nut bushes, and scared him so that he
+yelled and fell down in a fit, and they was a good while fetchin' him to.
+Do you think he was God, mother?”
+
+“No, Joey.”
+
+“Well, that's what I think, too. If he was God, he wouldn't been afeared,
+would he? And in the night sometimes he'd come and git me to come and lay
+by him where he could put his arm round my neck, and feel me, like as if
+he wanted comp'ny. Well, now, that wasn't much like God, was it? And when
+he thought I was asleep, I could hear him prayin', 'O merciful Savior!'
+and things like that; and if he was God, who could he pray _to_? It
+wasn't sense, was it? Well, I just believe he fell in, and he was afeared
+he was drowndin' and that's why he hollered out. Don't you, mother?”
+
+“Yes, I do, Joey.”
+
+“And you think I done right, don't you, to try to help him, even if it
+_was_ some resk?”
+
+“Oh, yes.”
+
+“I knowed it was _some_ resk, but I didn't believe it was much, and
+I kind of thought you'd want me to.”
+
+“Oh, yes, yes,” his mother said. “You did right, Joey. And you're a good
+boy, and--Joey dear,”--and she rose from the bench where she was sitting
+with him--“I believe I'll go and lay down on the bed a minute. Bein' up,
+so--”
+
+“Why, yes, mother! You lay down and I'll clear up the breakfast, or
+supper if it's it. It'll be like old times,” he said in the pride of his
+long absence from home. His mother lay down on the bed with her face to
+the wall, and he went very quietly about his work, so as not to wake the
+baby. But after a moment he went to his mother, and whispered hoarsely,
+“You don't suppose I could go and see Benny, a minute, after I've got
+done? It's 'most broad day, and I know he'll be up, too.”
+
+“Yes, go,” she said, without turning her face to him.
+
+He kept tiptoeing about, and when he had finished, he stood waiting to be
+sure whether she was sleeping before he opened the door. Now she turned
+her face, and spoke: “Joey?”
+
+“Yes, mother?” he whispered back, and ran to her softly, in his bare feet.
+
+“Did you get to like him any better?”
+
+He seemed not to take her question as anything strange, or to be in doubt
+of whom she meant.
+
+“Why, there in the water, at the very last, when he kep' goin' down, I
+liked him. Yes, I must have. But all along, I felt more like sorry for
+him. He seemed so miser'ble, all the time, and so--well--scared.”
+
+“Yes.” She had got the boy's hand, and without turning her body with her
+face she held his hand in hers closely under her arm. “Joey, I told you he
+was a wicked man. I can't tell you any different now. But I'm glad you was
+sorry for him. I am sorry too. Joey--he was your father.” She pressed his
+hand harder.
+
+“Goodness!” he said, but he did not suffer himself to say more.
+
+“He went away and left me when you was a little baby, and he never come
+back till he come back here. I never had any word from him. For all I
+could tell he was dead. I never wanted him to be dead,” she defended
+herself to herself in something above the intelligence of the boy. “I
+married Laban, who's been more of a father to you than what _he_ was.”
+
+“Oh, _yes_, mother!”
+
+“When your _real_ father come here, I made your _true_ father
+go away.” Now she turned and faced her son, keeping his hand tighter in
+hers. “Joey, I want to have you go and tell him to come back.”
+
+“Right away, Mother?”
+
+“Why, yes?” she said with question in her answer.
+
+“I thought maybe you'd let me see Benny, first,” he suggested a little
+wistfully.
+
+She almost laughed. “You dear boy! Go and see Benny on your way. Take him
+with you, if his father will let him go. You're both such great travelers.
+Your father's at the Wilkinses' yit, I reckon; they hain't finished with
+their cider, I don't believe. Go, now!”
+
+The boy had been poising as if on winged feet, and now he flew. He came
+back to say at the door, “I don't believe I'll want any breakfast, mother;
+we had such a late supper.”
+
+It was a thoughtful suggestion, and she said “No,” but before her answer
+came he had flown again.
+
+The baby woke, and she cooed to it, and she went about the one room of
+the little cabin trying to put it more in order than before. Some pieces
+of the moss in the chinking of the round logs near the chimney seemed
+loose, and she packed them tighter. As she worked she sang. She sang a
+hymn, but it was a hymn of thanksgiving.
+
+The doorway darkened, and she turned to see the figure of her brother
+black in the light.
+
+“I see, you've heard the news,” he said grimly. “I was afraid I might
+find you making a show of mourning. _I_ don't pretend to any. I
+haven't had such a load off me since that rascal first come back.”
+
+She answered resentfully, “What makes _you_ so glad, David? He
+didn't come back to make _you_ drive _your_ husband away!”
+
+“I was always afraid he might make me kill him. He tried hard enough, and
+sometimes I thought he might. But blessed be the Lord, he's dead. They're
+holding a funeral for him in the Temple. The news is all through the
+Creek. I suppose you know how Jane has fixed it up with James Redfield. I
+feel to be sorry for Hughey Blake; but he never could have mastered her.
+She's got an awful will, Jane has. But James has got an awful will too, as
+strong as Jane--”
+
+Nancy cut him short: “David, I don't care anything about Jane--now.”
+
+“No,” he assented. “Where's Joey?” he asked, leaning inward with his
+hands resting on either jamb of the door.
+
+“Gone for Laban.”
+
+“Well,” David said, with something like grudge. “You hain't lost much
+time. But I don't know as I blame you,” he relented.
+
+“I wouldn't care if you did, David,” she answered.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+Late in the long twilight of the early spring day a stranger who was
+traveling in the old fashion on horseback, with his legs swathed in green
+baize against the mud of the streaming roads, and with his spattered
+saddle-bags hung over the pommel before him, was riding into Leatherwood.
+He paused in a puddle of the lane that left the turnpike not far off, and
+curved between the new-plowed fields in front of a double log cabin, which
+had the air of being one of the best habitations of its time though its
+time was long past; the logs it was built of were squared; the chimneys at
+either end were of stone masonry instead of notched sticks laid in clay.
+Against the wall of the porch between the two rooms of the cabin an old
+man sat tilted back in his chair, smoking a pipe which he took from his
+mouth at sight of the stranger's arrest.
+
+“Can you tell me, please, which is my way to the tavern, or some place
+where I can find a night's lodging?”
+
+The old man dropped his chair forward, and got somewhat painfully out of
+it to toddle to the edge of his porch. “Why, there isn't a tavern, rightly
+speaking, in Leatherwood, now, though for the backwoods we had a very
+passable one, once. I wish,” he said after a moment, “that we could offer
+you a lodging here; but if you'll light and throw your horse's rein over
+the peg in this post, I would be pleased to have you stay to supper with
+us. My wife is just getting it.”
+
+“Why, thank you, thank you,” the stranger said. “I mustn't think of
+troubling you. I dare say I can get something to eat at your tavern. I've
+often been over night in worse places, no doubt. I've been traveling
+through your State, and I've turned a little out of my way to stop at
+Leatherwood, because I've been interested in a peculiar incident of your
+local history.”
+
+The two men perceived from something in each other's parlance, though one
+spoke with the neat accent of the countries beyond the Alleghanies, and
+the other with the soft slurring Ohio River utterance, that they were in
+the presence of men different by thinking if not by learning from most men
+in the belated region of a new country.
+
+“Oh, yes,” the old man said with instant intelligence, “the Leatherwood
+God.”
+
+“Yes,” the other eagerly assented. “I was told, at your county seat, that
+I could learn all about it if I asked for Squire Braile, here.”
+
+“I am Matthew Braile,” the old man said with dignity, and the stranger
+returned with a certain apology in his laugh:
+
+“I must confess that I suspected as much, and I'm ashamed not to have
+frankly asked at once.”
+
+“Better 'light,”--the Squire condoned whatever offense there might have
+been in the uncandor. “I don't often get the chance to talk of our famous
+imposture, and I can't let one slip through my fingers. You must come in
+to supper, and if you smoke I can give you a pipe of our yellow tobacco,
+afterwards, and we can talk--”
+
+“But I should tire you with my questions. In the morning--”
+
+“We old men sometimes have a trick of not living till morning. You'd
+better take me while you can get me.”
+
+“Well, if you put it in that way,” the stranger said, and he slipped down
+from his saddle.
+
+The old man called out, “Here, Abel!” and the figure of what seemed an
+elderly boy came lurching and paddling round the corner of the cabin, and
+ducked his gray head hospitably toward the stranger. “Give this horse a
+feed while we're taking ours.”
+
+“All right, Squire. Jest helpin' Sally put the turkey-chicks to bed out
+o' the cold, or I'd 'a' been round at the first splashin' in the road.”
+
+“And now come in,” the Squire said, reaching a hand of welcome from the
+edge of the porch to the stranger as he mounted the steps. “Old neighbors
+of ours,” he explained Abel and the unseen Sally. “We've known them, boy
+and girl, from the beginning, and when their old cabin fell down in the
+tail-end of a tornado a few years back, we got them here in a new one
+behind ours, to take care of them, and let them take care of us. They
+don't eat with us,” he added, setting open the kitchen door, and ushering
+the stranger into the warm glow and smell of the interior. “Mis' Braile,”
+ he said for introduction to his wife, and explained to her, “A friend that
+I caught on the wing. I don't know that I _did_ get your name?”
+
+“Mandeville--T. J. Mandeville; I'm from Cambridge.”
+
+“Thomas Jefferson, I suppose. Cambridge, Ohio--back here?”
+
+“Massachusetts.”
+
+“Well, you didn't sound like Ohio. I always like to make sure. Well, you
+must pull up. Mother, have you got anything fit to eat, this evening?”
+
+“You might try and see,” Mrs. Braile responded in what seemed their
+habitual banter.
+
+“Well, don't brag,” the Squire returned, and between them they welcomed
+the stranger to a meal that he said he had not tasted the like of in all
+his Western travel.
+
+It seemed that their guest did not smoke, and the Squire alone lighted
+his pipe. Then he joked his wife. “Mother, will you let us stay by the
+fire here--it's a little chilly outdoors, and those young frogs do take
+the heart of you with their peeping--if we don't mind your bothering
+round? Mr. Mandeville wants to hear all about our Leatherwood God.”
+
+“He'll hear more about him than he wants to if he listens to all you
+tell, Matthew,” Mrs. Braile retorted.
+
+“Oh, no; oh, no,” the stranger protested, and the Squire laughed.
+
+“You wanted to know,” he said, well after the beginning of their talk,
+“whether there were many of the Little Flock left. Well, some; and to
+answer your other question, they're as strong in the faith as ever. The
+dead died in the faith; the living that were young in it in the late
+eighteen-twenties are old in it now in the first of the fifties. It's
+rather curious,” the Squire said, with a long sigh of satisfaction in the
+anomaly, “but after the arrest of Dylks, and his trial and acquittal
+before this court,” the Squire smiled, “when he came out of the tall
+timber, and had his scalp mended, and got into a whole suit of Saint
+Peter's clothes, he didn't find the Little Flock fallen off a great deal.
+They were a good deal scared, and so was he. That was the worst of the
+lookout for Dylks; his habit of being afraid; it was about the best thing,
+too; kept him from playing the _very_ devil. There's no telling how
+far he might have gone if he hadn't been afraid: I mean, gone in personal
+mischief.”
+
+“Yes,” the stranger assented. “And his failure in all his miracles had no
+effect on his followers?”
+
+The Squire laughed, with a rattling of loose teeth on his pipe-stem.
+“Why, he didn't fail according to the Little Flock; it was only the
+unbelievers that disbelieved in the miracles. Even those that went with
+him Over-the-Mountains to see the New Jerusalem come down got to having
+seen it as time went on, though some had their doubts when they first came
+back. Before they died, they'd all seen him go up in a chariot of fire
+with two black horses and no driver. Nobody but those two purblind
+ignorant boys that tried to keep him from drowning, when he fell into the
+river, could be got to say that the heavenly city didn't come down and
+suck him up. Why, seven or eight years after he left there was a preacher
+who was one of his followers came back here, and preached in the Dylks
+Temple--the old Temple burned down, long ago and was never rebuilt--preached
+the divinity of Dylks, and said there was no true religion that
+didn't recognize him as God. As for Christianity, he said it was just a
+hotch-potch of Judaism and heathenism. _He_ saw the Good Old Man go
+right up into heaven, and said he was going to come back to earth before
+long and set up his kingdom here. He's never done it, and that slick
+preacher never came back, either, after the first. He was very well
+dressed and looked as if he had been living on the fat of the land,
+somewhere, among the faithful Over-the-Mountains, I reckon. Knew where the
+fried chickens roosted. Excuse me, mother. She's heard that joke before,”
+ he explained to their guest.
+
+“I've heard it too often to mind it,” Mrs. Braile mocked back.
+
+“Well, it seems to be new to our friend here.”
+
+Mr. Mandeville was laughing, but he controlled himself to ask, “And had
+the fellow no progressive doctrine, no steps of belief, no logical
+formulation of his claims? He couldn't have been merely a dunder-headed,
+impudent charlatan, who expected to convince by the miracles he didn't do?”
+
+“Oh, no; oh, no. I didn't mean to imply that,” the Squire explained. “He
+was a cunning rascal in his way, and he had the sort of brain that has
+served the purpose of the imposter in all ages. He had a plan of belief,
+as you may call it, which he must have thought out before he came here, if
+he hadn't begged, borrowed, or stolen it from somebody else. At first he
+called himself a humble teacher of Christianity, but it wasn't a great
+while before he pretended to be Jesus Christ who died on Calvary. That
+didn't satisfy him long, though. When he had convinced some that he was
+Christ, he began to teach that the Christ who was crucified, though he was
+a _real_ Messiah, was not a _perfect_ Messiah, because he had
+died and been buried, and death had had power over him just as it has over
+any mortal. But the real Messiah would never taste death, and he was that
+Messiah. Dylks would never taste death, and as the real Messiah, he would
+be one with God, and in fact he was the one and only God. These were the
+steps, and the way to belief in the godhead was clear to the meanest
+understanding. The meaner the understanding, the clearer,” the Squire
+summed up, with another tattoo on his pipe-stem. “You see,” he resumed
+after a moment, “life is hard in a new country, and anybody that promises
+salvation on easy terms has got a strong hold at the very start. People
+will accept anything from him. Somewhere, tucked away in us, is the
+longing to know whether we'll live again, and the hope that we'll live
+happy. I've got fun out of that fact in a community where I've had the
+reputation of an infidel for fifty years; but all along I've felt it in
+myself. We want to be good, and we want to be safe, even if we are not
+good; and the first fellow that comes along and tells us to have faith in
+him, and he'll make it all right, why we have faith in him, that's all.”
+
+“Well, then,” the stranger said, holding him to the logic of the facts,
+as he leaned toward him from his side of the fireplace, and fixed him with
+an eager eye, “I can't see why he didn't establish his superstition in
+universal acceptance, as, say, Mahomet did.”
+
+“I'm glad you came to that,” the Squire blandly submitted. “For one
+thing, and the main thing, because he was a coward. He had plently of
+audacity but mighty little courage, and his courage gave out just when he
+needed it the most. And perhaps he hadn't perfect faith in himself; he was
+a fool, but he wasn't a crazy fool. Then again, my idea is that the scale
+was too small, or the scene, or the field, or whatever you call it. The
+backwoods, as Leatherwood was then, was not the right starting point for a
+world-wide imposture. Then again, as I said, Dylks was timid. He was not
+ready to shed blood for his lie, neither other people's nor his own; and
+when it came to fighting for his doctrine, he was afraid; he wanted to
+run. And, in fact, he did run, first and last. No liar ever had such a
+hold on them that believed his lie; they'd have followed him any lengths;
+but he hadn't the heart to lead them. When Redfield and I got hold of him,
+after he had tasted the _fear_ of death, there that week in the tall
+timber, he was willing to promise anything we said. And he kept his
+promise; he wouldn't if he could have helped it, but he knew Jim Redfield
+would hold him to it, if he squeezed his life out doing it.”
+
+The stranger was silent, but not apparently convinced, and meanwhile he
+took up another point of interest in the story which he heard from the
+Squire. “And whatever became of his wife, and her 'true' husband?”
+
+“Oh, they lived on together. Not very long, though. They died within a
+week of each other, about. Didn't they, mother?”
+
+“Just a week,” Mrs. Braile said, animated by the human touch in the
+discussion. “They lived mighty happy together, and it was as good a death
+as a body could want to die. It was that summer when the fever mowed the
+people down so. They took their little girl with them,” she sighed from a
+source of hidden sorrow. “They all went together.”
+
+Braile took his pipe out and gulped before he could answer the stranger's
+next question. “And the boy? Dylks's son, is he living?”
+
+“Oh, yes.” At the pleasant thought of the boy, the Squire began to smile.
+“He and Hingston's son took over the mill from Hingston, after he got too
+old for it, and carried it on together. Hingston wasn't one that hung on
+to the faith in Dylks, but he never made any fuss about giving it up. Just
+staid away from the Temple that the Little Flock built for themselves.”
+
+“And is young Dylks still carrying on the milling business?”
+
+“Who? Joey? Oh, yes. He married Benny Hingston's sister. Benny's wife
+died, and he lives with them.”
+
+“And there ain't a better man in the whole of Leatherwood than Joey
+Billin's, as we always call him,” Mrs. Braile put in. “He was the best boy
+anywhere, and he's the best man.”
+
+“Well, it's likely to come out that way, sometimes,” the Squire said with
+tender irony.
+
+“And you can't say,” Mrs. Braile continued with a certain note of
+indignation as for unjust neglect of the pair, “but what James Redfield
+and Jane has got along very well together.”
+
+“Oh, yes, they've got along,” the Squire assented. “He's got along with
+her, and she's got along with the children--plenty of them. I reckon she's
+what _he_ wanted, and they're what _she_ did.”
+
+The stranger looked a little puzzled.
+
+“That instinct of maternity,” the Squire explained. “You may have noticed
+it in women--some of them.”
+
+“Oh! Oh, yes,” Mr. Mandeville assented. He did not seem greatly
+interested.
+
+“She's always been just crazy about 'em,” Mrs. Braile explained.
+“Beginnin' with Nancy Billin's's little girl. Well!”
+
+“Yes,” the Squire amplified. “It was the best thing, or at least the
+strongest thing in Jane. I don't say anything against it, mother,” he said
+tenderly to his wife. “Jane was a good girl, especially after she got over
+her faith in Dylks, and she's a good woman. At least, Jim thinks so.”
+
+Mrs. Braile contented herself as she could with his ironical concession.
+
+The stranger looked at his watch; he jumped to his feet. “Nine o'clock!
+Mrs. Braile, I'm ashamed. But you must blame your husband, partly. Good
+night, ma'am; good--Why, look here, Squire Braile!” he arrested himself in
+offering his hand. “How about the obscurity of the scene where Joe Smith
+founded his superstition, which bids fair to live right along with the
+other false religions? Was Leatherwood, Ohio, a narrower stage than
+Manchester, New York? And in point of time the two cults were only four
+years apart.”
+
+“Well, that's a thing that's occurred to me since we've been talking.
+Suppose we look into it to-morrow? Come round to breakfast--about six
+o'clock. One point, though: Joe Smith only claimed to be a prophet, and
+Dylks claimed to be a god. That made it harder, maybe for his
+superstition.”
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Leatherwood God, by William Dean Howells
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