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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—shewould 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.
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 thatyou?”
“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, “youdon'tlook 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 somehotpone 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—insin!—and drove him away. But she's as white as any of the saints you lie about. It waslikeyou 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 thatothermorning. 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 Nancyadvise?” 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'tbeginto 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 withthem, 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'tyou 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,yououghtn't to be sent to the penitentiary, or even lynched.Youought 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 atthishour 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'herthat 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 somehotpone. 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 yourhotpone. 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.Iwouldn't, in hisplace.”
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.”
“Itwasa 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. “Ididthink 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—”
“Myprotection?” 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 ofsomekind 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.”
“Andyou, '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,Iam,” 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, butyouare, 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 bitehim.”
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, andI'llsee that nobody disturbs you. Matthew Braile, you send and tell Mr. Hingston,—orgo, 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.”
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; “butIcan'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?”
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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. Nobodycansee 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.
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 youdosweat, 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, hewill; 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! ButIknow! 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.Idon't know why I let him.”