4001
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. “Youtell her we wont hurt it, Jim Redfield! She'll trustyou!”
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 willhesay to me!” It was her husband she meant.
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 andmakeroom,” 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 thinkyou'regoin' to help him?”
Abel was daunted by the reasoning, and even Sally stayed her war cries.
“Well, I guess there's sumpin'inthat,” 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 foryou, 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.
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 lefttohurt, 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. “Nowyou 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.”
5001
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 doyouaccuse him of?”
“Well, for one thing,” Redfield said, rather reluctantly, “he professes to be Almighty God.”
“And heisGod, 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 willdo!” 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 mybreakfasttime,” 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 ofus. 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, notthismorning, 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,youdid 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.
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, “thatIcould 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.
“MyJoey!” 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 togo. 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.”