He came out of the mysterious South one summer day, driving before him a
few sheep, a cow, and a long-eared mule which carried his tent and other
necessaries, and camped outside the town on a knoll, at the base of
which was a thicket of close shrub. During the first day no one in
Jansen thought anything of it, for it was a land of pilgrimage, and
hundreds came and went on their journeys in search of free homesteads
and good water and pasturage. But when, after three days, he was
still there, Nicolle Terasse, who had little to do, and an insatiable
curiosity, went out to see him. He found a new sensation for Jansen.
This is what he said when he came back:
“You want know ‘bout him, bagosh! Dat is somet’ing to see, dat
man--Ingles is his name. Sooch hair--mooch long an’ brown, and a leetla
beard not so brown, an’ a leather sole onto his feet, and a grey coat to
his ankles--yes, so like dat. An’ his voice--voila, it is like water in
a cave. He is a great man--I dunno not; but he spik at me like dis, ‘Is
dere sick, and cripple, and stay in-bed people here dat can’t get up?’
he say. An’ I say, ‘Not plenty, but some-bagosh! Dere is dat Miss Greet,
an’ ole Ma’am Drouchy, an’ dat young Pete Hayes--an’ so on.’ ‘Well,
if they have faith I will heal them,’ he spik at me. ‘From de Healing
Springs dey shall rise to walk,’ he say. Bagosh, you not t’ink dat true?
Den you go see.”
So Jansen turned out to see, and besides the man they found a curious
thing. At the foot of the knoll, in a space which he had cleared, was
a hot spring that bubbled and rose and sank, and drained away into the
thirsty ground. Luck had been with Ingles the Faith Healer. Whether he
knew of the existence of this spring, or whether he chanced upon it, he
did not say; but while he held Jansen in the palm of his hand, in the
feverish days that followed, there were many who attached mysterious
significance to it, who claimed for it supernatural origin. In any case,
the one man who had known of the existence of this spring was far away
from Jansen, and he did not return till a day of reckoning came for the
Faith Healer.
Meanwhile Jansen made pilgrimage to the Springs of Healing, and at
unexpected times Ingles suddenly appeared in the town, and stood at
street corners; and in his “Patmian voice,” as Flood Rawley the lawyer
called it, warned the people to flee their sins, and purifying their
hearts, learn to cure all ills of mind and body, the weaknesses of the
sinful flesh and the “ancient evil” in their souls, by faith that saves.
“‘Is not the life more than meat’” he asked them. “And if, peradventure,
there be those among you who have true belief in hearts all purged of
evil, and yet are maimed, or sick of body, come to me, and I will lay my
hands upon you, and I will heal you.” Thus he cried.
There were those so wrought upon by his strange eloquence and spiritual
passion, so hypnotised by his physical and mental exaltation, that they
rose up from the hand-laying and the prayer eased of their ailments.
Others he called upon to lie in the hot spring at the foot of the hill
for varying periods, before the laying on of hands, and these also,
crippled, or rigid with troubles’ of the bone, announced that they were
healed.
People flocked from other towns, and though, to some who had been cured,
their pains and sickness returned, there were a few who bore perfect
evidence to his teaching and healing, and followed him, “converted and
consecrated,” as though he were a new Messiah. In this corner of the
West was such a revival as none could remember--not even those who
had been to camp meetings in the East in their youth, and had seen the
Spirit descend upon hundreds and draw them to the anxious seat.
Then came the great sensation--the Faith Healer converted Laura Sloly.
Upon which Jansen drew its breath painfully; for, while it was willing
to bend to the inspiration of the moment, and to be swept on a tide of
excitement into that enchanted field called Imagination, it wanted
to preserve its institutions--and Laura Sloly had come to be an
institution. Jansen had always plumed itself, and smiled, when she
passed; and even now the most sentimentally religious of them inwardly
anticipated the time when the town would return to its normal condition;
and that condition would not be normal if there were any change in
Laura Sloly. It mattered little whether most people were changed or not
because one state of their minds could not be less or more interesting
than another; but a change in Laura. Sloly could not be for the better.
Her father had come to the West in the early days, and had prospered
by degrees until a town grew up beside his ranch; and though he did not
acquire as much permanent wealth from this golden chance as might have
been expected, and lost much he did make by speculation, still he had
his rich ranch left, and it, and he, and Laura were part of the history
of Jansen. Laura had been born at Jansen before even it had a name.
Next to her father she was the oldest inhabitant, and she had a prestige
which was given to no one else.
Everything had conspired to make her a figure of moment and interest.
She was handsome in almost a mannish sort of way, being of such height
and straightness, and her brown eyes had a depth and fire in which
more than a few men had drowned themselves. Also, once she had saved
a settlement by riding ahead of a marauding Indian band to warn their
intended victims, and had averted another tragedy of pioneer life.
Pioneers proudly told strangers to Jansen of the girl of thirteen
who rode a hundred and twenty miles without food, and sank inside the
palisade of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s fort, as the gates closed
upon the settlers taking refuge, the victim of brain fever at last.
Cerebrospinal meningitis, the doctor from Winnipeg called it, and the
memory of that time when men and women would not sleep till her crisis
was past, was still fresh on the tongues of all.
Then she had married at seventeen, and, within a year, had lost both her
husband and her baby, a child bereaved of her Playmates--for her
husband had been but twenty years old and was younger far than she
in everything. And since then, twelve years before, she had seen
generations of lovers pass into the land they thought delectable; and
their children flocked to her, hung about her, were carried off by her
to the ranch, and kept for days, against the laughing protests of their
parents. Flood Rawley called her the Pied Piper of Jansen, and indeed
she had a voice that fluted and piped, and yet had so whimsical a note,
that the hardest faces softened at the sound of it; and she did not keep
its best notes for the few. She was impartial, almost impersonal; no
woman was her enemy, and every man was her friend--and nothing more. She
had never had an accepted lover since the day her Playmates left her.
Every man except one had given up hope that he might win her; and though
he had been gone from Jansen for two years, and had loved her since the
days before the Playmates came and went, he never gave up hope, and was
now to return and say again what he had mutely said for years--what she
understood, and he knew she understood.
Tim Denton had been a wild sort in his brief day. He was a rough
diamond, but he was a diamond, and was typical of the West--its
heart, its courage, its freedom, and its force; capable of exquisite
gentleness, strenuous to exaggeration, with a very primitive religion;
and the only religion Tim knew was that of human nature. Jansen did not
think Tim good enough--not within a comet shot--for Laura Sloly; but
they thought him better than any one else.
But now Laura was a convert to the prophet of the Healing Springs,
and those people who still retain their heads in the eddy of religious
emotion were in despair. They dreaded to meet Laura; they kept away from
the “protracted meetings,” but were eager to hear about her and what
she said and did. What they heard allayed their worst fears. She still
smiled, and seemed as cheerful as before, they heard, and she neither
spoke nor prayed in public, but she led the singing always. Now the
anxious and the sceptical and the reactionary ventured out to see and
hear; and seeing and hearing gave them a satisfaction they hardly dared
express. She was more handsome than ever, and if her eyes glistened
with a light they had never seen before, and awed them, her lips
still smiled, and the old laugh came when she spoke to them. Their awe
increased. This was “getting religion” with a difference.
But presently they received a shock. A whisper grew that Laura was in
love with the Faith Healer. Some woman’s instinct drove straight to the
centre of a disconcerting possibility, and in consternation she told her
husband; and Jansen husbands had a freemasonry of gossip. An hour, and
all Jansen knew, or thought they knew; and the “saved” rejoiced; and the
rest of the population, represented by Nicolle Terasse at one end and
Flood Rawley at the other, flew to arms. No vigilance committee was
ever more determined and secret and organised than the unconverted
civic patriots, who were determined to restore Jansen to its old-time
condition. They pointed out cold-bloodedly that the Faith Healer had
failed three times where he had succeeded once; and that, admitting the
successes, there was no proof that his religion was their cause. There
were such things as hypnotism and magnetism and will-power, and abnormal
mental stimulus on the part of the healed--to say nothing of the Healing
Springs.
Carefully laying their plans, they quietly spread the rumour that
Ingles had promised to restore to health old Mary Jewell, who had been
bedridden ten years, and had sent word and prayed to have him lay his
hands upon her--Catholic though she was. The Faith Healer, face to face
with this supreme and definite test, would have retreated from it but
for Laura Sloly. She expected him to do it, believed that he could, said
that he would, herself arranged the day and the hour, and sang so much
exaltation into him, that at last a spurious power seemed to possess
him. He felt that there had entered into him something that could be
depended on, not the mere flow of natural magnetism fed by an outdoor
life and a temperament of great emotional force, and chance, and
suggestion--and other things. If, at first, he had influenced Laura,
some ill-controlled, latent idealism in him, working on a latent poetry
and spirituality in her, somehow bringing her into nearer touch with her
lost Playmates than she had been in the long years that had passed; she,
in turn, had made his unrationalised brain reel; had caught him up into
a higher air, on no wings of his own; had added another lover to her
company of lovers--and the first impostor she had ever had. She who
had known only honest men as friends, in one blind moment lost her
perspicuous sense; her instinct seemed asleep. She believed in the man
and in his healing. Was there anything more than that?
The day of the great test came, hot, brilliant, vivid. The air was of
a delicate sharpness, and, as it came toward evening, the glamour of an
August when the reapers reap was upon Jansen; and its people gathered
round the house of Mary Jewell to await the miracle of faith. Apart
from the emotional many who sang hymns and spiritual songs were a few
determined men, bent on doing justice to Jansen though the heavens
might fall. Whether or no Laura Sloly was in love with the Faith
Healer, Jansen must look to its own honour--and hers. In any case, this
peripatetic saint at Sloly’s Ranch--the idea was intolerable; women must
be saved in spite of themselves.
Laura was now in the house by the side of the bedridden Mary Jewell,
waiting, confident, smiling, as she held the wasted hand on the
coverlet. With her was a minister of the Baptist persuasion, who
was swimming with the tide, and who approved of the Faith Healer’s
immersions in the hot Healing Springs; also a medical student who had
pretended belief in Ingles, and two women weeping with unnecessary
remorse for human failings of no dire kind. The windows were open, and
those outside could see. Presently, in a lull of the singing, there was
a stir in the crowd, and then, sudden loud greetings:
“My, if it ain’t Tim Denton! Jerusalem! You back, Tim!”
These and other phrases caught the ear of Laura Sloly in the sick-room.
A strange look flashed across her face, and the depth of her eyes was
troubled for a moment, as to the face of the old comes a tremor at the
note of some long-forgotten song. Then she steadied herself and waited,
catching bits of the loud talk which still floated towards her from
without.
“What’s up? Some one getting married--or a legacy, or a saw-off? Why,
what a lot of Sunday-go-to-meeting folks to be sure!” Tim laughed
loudly.
After which the quick tongue of Nicolle Terasse: “You want know? Tiens,
be quiet; here he come. He cure you body and soul, ver’ queeck--yes.”
The crowd swayed and parted, and slowly, bare head uplifted, face
looking to neither right nor left, the Faith Healer made his way to the
door of the little house. The crowd hushed. Some were awed, some were
overpoweringly interested, some were cruelly patient. Nicolle Terasse
and others were whispering loudly to Tim Denton. That was the only
sound, until the Healer got to the door. Then, on the steps, he turned
to the multitude.
“Peace be to you all, and upon this house,” he said and stepped through
the doorway.
Tim Denton, who had been staring at the face of the Healer, stood for
an instant like one with all his senses arrested. Then he gasped, and
exclaimed, “Well, I’m eternally--” and broke off with a low laugh, which
was at first mirthful, and then became ominous and hard.
“Oh, magnificent--magnificent--jerickety!” he said into the sky above
him.
His friends who were not “saved,” closed in on him to find the meaning
of his words, but he pulled himself together, looked blankly at them,
and asked them questions. They told him so much more than he cared to
hear, that his face flushed a deep red--the bronze of it most like the
colour of Laura Sloly’s hair; then he turned pale. Men saw that he was
roused beyond any feeling in themselves.
“‘Sh!” he said. “Let’s see what he can do.” With the many who were
silently praying, as they had been, bidden to do, the invincible ones
leant forwards, watching the little room where healing--or tragedy--was
afoot. As in a picture, framed by the window, they saw the kneeling
figures, the Healer standing with outstretched arms. They heard his
voice, sonorous and appealing, then commanding--and yet Mary Jewell did
not rise from her bed and walk. Again, and yet again, the voice rang
out, and still the woman lay motionless. Then he laid his hands upon
her, and again he commanded her to rise.
There was a faint movement, a desperate struggle to obey, but Nature and
Time and Disease had their way. Yet again there was the call. An agony
stirred the bed. Then another great Healer came between, and mercifully
dealt the sufferer a blow--Death has a gentle hand sometimes. Mary
Jewell was bedridden still--and for ever.
Like a wind from the mountains the chill knowledge of death wailed
through the window, and over the heads of the crowd. All the figures
were upright now in the little room. Then those outside saw Laura Sloly
lean over and close the sightless eyes. This done, she came to the
door and opened it, and motioned for the Healer to leave. He hesitated,
hearing the harsh murmur from the outskirts of the crowd. Once again she
motioned, and he came. With a face deadly pale she surveyed the people
before her silently for a moment, her eyes all huge and staring.
Presently she turned to Ingles and spoke to him quickly in a low voice;
then, descending the steps, passed out through the lane made for her by
the crowd, he following with shaking limbs and bowed bead.
Warning words had passed among the few invincible ones who waited where
the Healer must pass into the open, and there was absolute stillness as
Laura advanced. Their work was to come--quiet and swift and sure; but
not yet.
Only one face Laura saw, as she led the way to the moment’s safety--Tim
Denton’s; and it was as stricken as her own. She passed, then turned,
and looked at him again. He understood; she wanted him.
He waited till she sprang into her waggon, after the Healer had mounted
his mule and ridden away with ever-quickening pace into the prairie.
Then he turned to the set, fierce men beside him.
“Leave him alone,” he said, “leave him to me. I know him. You hear?
Ain’t I no rights? I tell you I knew him--South. You leave him to me.”
They nodded, and he sprang into his saddle and rode away. They watched
the figure of the Healer growing smaller in the dusty distance.
“Tim’ll go to her,” one said, “and perhaps they’ll let the snake get
off. Hadn’t we best make sure?”
“Perhaps you’d better let him vamoose,” said Flood Rawley anxiously.
“Jansen is a law-abiding place!” The reply was decisive. Jansen had
its honour to keep. It was the home of the Pioneers--Laura Sloly was a
Pioneer.
Tim Denton was a Pioneer, with all the comradeship which lay in the
word, and he was that sort of lover who has seen one woman, and can
never see another--not the product of the most modern civilisation.
Before Laura had had Playmates he had given all he had to give; he had
waited and hoped ever since; and when the ruthless gossips had said
to him before Mary Jewell’s house that she was in love with the Faith
Healer, nothing changed in him. For the man, for Ingles, Tim belonged
to a primitive breed, and love was not in his heart. As he rode out to
Sloly’s Ranch, he ground his teeth in rage. But Laura had called him to
her, and: “Well, what you say goes, Laura,” he muttered at the end of a
long hour of human passion and its repression. “If he’s to go scot-free,
then he’s got to go; but the boys yonder’ll drop on me, if he gets away.
Can’t you see what a swab he is, Laura?”
The brown eyes of the girl looked at him gently. The struggle between
them was over; she had had her way--to save the preacher, impostor
though he was; and now she felt, as she had never felt before in the
same fashion, that this man was a man of men.
“Tim, you do not understand,” she urged. “You say he was a landsharp in
the South, and that he had to leave-”
“He had to vamoose, or take tar and feathers.”
“But he had to leave. And he came here preaching and healing; and he is
a hypocrite and a fraud--I know that now, my eyes are opened. He didn’t
do what he said he could do, and it killed Mary Jewell--the shock; and
there were other things he said he could do, and he didn’t do them.
Perhaps he is all bad, as you say--I don’t think so. But he did some
good things, and through him I’ve felt as I’ve never felt before about
God and life, and about Walt and the baby--as though I’ll see them
again, sure. I’ve never felt that before. It was all as if they were
lost in the hills, and no trail home, or out to where they are. Like as
not God was working in him all the time, Tim; and he failed because he
counted too much on the little he had, and made up for what he hadn’t by
what he pretended.”
“He can pretend to himself, or God Almighty, or that lot down there”--he
jerked a finger towards the town--“but to you, a girl, and a Pioneer--”
A flash of humour shot into her eyes at his last words, then they
filled with tears, through which the smile shone. To pretend to “a
Pioneer”--the splendid vanity and egotism of the West!
“He didn’t pretend to me, Tim. People don’t usually have to pretend to
like me.”
“You know what I’m driving at.”
“Yes, yes, I know. And whatever he is, you’ve said that you will
save him. I’m straight, you know that. Somehow, what I felt from his
preaching--well, everything got sort of mixed up with him, and he
was--was different. It was like the long dream of Walt and the baby, and
he a part of it. I don’t know what I felt, or what I might have felt
for him. I’m a woman--I can’t understand. But I know what I feel now.
I never want to see him again on earth--or in Heaven. It needn’t be
necessary even in Heaven; but what happened between God and me through
him stays, Tim; and so you must help him get away safe. It’s in your
hands--you say they left it to you.”
“I don’t trust that too much.”
Suddenly he pointed out of the window towards the town. “See, I’m right;
there they are, a dozen of ‘em mounted. They’re off, to run him down.”
Her face paled; she glanced towards the Hill of Healing. “He’s got an
hour’s start,” she said; “he’ll get into the mountains and be safe.”
“If they don’t catch him ‘fore that.”
“Or if you don’t get to him first,” she said, with nervous insistence.
He turned to her with a hard look; then, as he met her soft, fearless,
beautiful eyes, his own grew gentle. “It takes a lot of doing. Yet I’ll
do it for you, Laura,” he said. “But it’s hard on the Pioneers.” Once
more her humour flashed, and it seemed to him that “getting religion”
was not so depressing after all--wouldn’t be, anyhow, when this nasty
job was over. “The Pioneers will get over it, Tim,” she rejoined.
“They’ve swallowed a lot in their time. Heaven’s gate will have to be
pretty wide to let in a real Pioneer,” she added. “He takes up so much
room--ah, Timothy Denton!” she added, with an outburst of whimsical
merriment.
“It hasn’t spoiled you--being converted, has it?” he said, and gave a
quick little laugh, which somehow did more for his ancient cause with
her than all he had ever said or done. Then he stepped outside and swung
into his saddle.
It had been a hard and anxious ride, but Tim had won, and was keeping
his promise. The night had fallen before he got to the mountains, which
he and the Pioneers had seen the Faith Healer enter. They had had four
miles’ start of Tim, and had ridden fiercely, and they entered the gulch
into which the refugee had disappeared still two miles ahead.
The invincibles had seen Tim coming, but they had determined to make a
sure thing of it, and would themselves do what was necessary with the
impostor, and take no chances. So they pressed their horses, and he saw
them swallowed by the trees, as darkness gathered. Changing his course,
he entered the familiar hills, which he knew better than any pioneer of
Jansen, and rode a diagonal course over the trail they would take.
But night fell suddenly, and there was nothing to do but to wait till
morning. There was comfort in this--the others must also wait, and the
refugee could not go far. In any case, he must make for settlement or
perish, since he had left behind his sheep and his cow.
It fell out better than Tim hoped. The Pioneers were as good hunters as
was he, their instinct was as sure, their scouts and trackers were many,
and he was but one. They found the Faith Healer by a little stream,
eating bread and honey, and, like an ancient woodlander drinking from
a horn--relics of his rank imposture. He made no resistance. They tried
him formally, if perfunctorily; he admitted his imposture, and begged
for his life. Then they stripped him naked, tied a bit of canvas round
his waist, fastened him to a tree, and were about to complete his
punishment when Tim Denton burst upon them.
Whether the rage Tim showed was all real or not; whether his accusations
of bad faith came from so deeply wounded a spirit as he would have them
believe, he was not likely to tell; but he claimed the prisoner as his
own, and declined to say what he meant to do.
When, however, they saw the abject terror of the Faith Healer as he
begged not to be left alone with Tim--for they had not meant death,
and Ingles thought he read death in Tim’s ferocious eyes--they laughed
cynically, and left it to Tim to uphold the honour of Jansen and the
Pioneers.
As they disappeared, the last thing they saw was Tim with his back to
them, his hands on his hips, and a knife clasped in his fingers.
“He’ll lift his scalp and make a monk of him,” chuckled the oldest and
hardest of them.
“Dat Tim will cut his heart out, I t’ink-bagosh!” said Nicolle Terasse,
and took a drink of white-whiskey. For a long time Tim stood looking at
the other, until no sound came from the woods, whither the Pioneers
had gone. Then at last, slowly, and with no roughness, as the
terror-stricken impostor shrank and withered, he cut the cords.
“Dress yourself,” he said shortly, and sat down beside the stream, and
washed his face and hands, as though to cleanse them from contamination.
He appeared to take no notice of the other, though his ears keenly noted
every movement.
The impostor dressed nervously, yet slowly; he scarce comprehended
anything, except that he was not in immediate danger. When he had
finished, he stood looking at Tim, who was still seated on a log plunged
in meditation.
It seemed hours before Tim turned round, and now his face was quiet,
if set and determined. He walked slowly over, and stood looking at his
victim for some time without speaking. The other’s eyes dropped, and
a greyness stole over his features. This steely calm was even more
frightening than the ferocity which had previously been in his captor’s
face. At length the tense silence was broken.
“Wasn’t the old game good enough? Was it played out? Why did you take to
this? Why did you do it, Scranton?”
The voice quavered a little in reply. “I don’t know. Something sort of
pushed me into it.”
“How did you come to start it?”
There was a long silence, then the husky reply came. “I got a sickener
last time--”
“Yes, I remember, at Waywing.”
“I got into the desert, and had hard times--awful for a while. I hadn’t
enough to eat, and I didn’t know whether I’d die by hunger, or fever, or
Indians--or snakes.”
“Oh, you were seeing snakes!” said Tim grimly.
“Not the kind you mean; I hadn’t anything to drink--”
“No, you never did drink, I remember--just was crooked, and slopped over
women. Well, about the snakes?”
“I caught them to eat, and they were poison-snakes often. And I wasn’t
quick at first to get them safe by the neck--they’re quick, too.”
Tim laughed inwardly. “Getting your food by the sweat of your brow--and
a snake in it, same as Adam! Well, was it in the desert you got your
taste for honey, too, same as John the Baptist--that was his name, if I
recomember?” He looked at the tin of honey on the ground.
“Not in the desert, but when I got to the grass-country.”
“How long were you in the desert?”
“Close to a year.”
Tim’s eyes opened wider. He saw that the man was speaking the truth.
“Got to thinking in the desert, and sort of willing things to come to
pass, and mooning along, you, and the sky, and the vultures, and the hot
hills, and the snakes, and the flowers--eh?”
“There weren’t any flowers till I got to the grass-country.”
“Oh, cuss me, if you ain’t simple for your kind! I know all about that.
And when you got to the grass-country, you just picked up the honey, and
the flowers, and a calf, and a lamb, and a mule here and there, ‘without
money and without price,’ and walked on--that it?”
The other shrank before the steel in the voice, and nodded his head.
“But you kept thinking in the grass-country of what you’d felt and said
and done--and willed, in the desert, I suppose?”
Again the other nodded.
“It seemed to you in the desert, as if you’d saved your own life a
hundred times, as if you’d just willed food and drink and safety to
come; as if Providence had been at your elbow?”
“It was like a dream, and it stayed with me. I had to think in the
desert things I’d never thought before,” was the half-abstracted answer.
“You felt good in the desert?” The other hung his head in shame.
“Makes you seem pretty small, doesn’t it? You didn’t stay long enough,
I guess, to get what you were feeling for; you started in on the new
racket too soon. You never got really possessed that you was a sinner. I
expect that’s it.”
The other made no reply.
“Well, I don’t know much about such things. I was loose brought up; but
I’ve a friend”--Laura was before his eyes--“that says religion’s all
right, and long ago as I can remember my mother used to pray three times
a day--with grace at meals, too. I know there’s a lot in it for them
that need it; and there seems to be a lot of folks needing it, if I’m
to judge by folks down there at Jansen, specially when there’s the
laying-on of hands and the Healing Springs. Oh, that was a pigsty game,
Scranton, that about God giving you the Healing Springs, like Moses and
the rock! Why, I discovered them springs myself two years ago, before I
went South, and I guess God wasn’t helping me any--not after I’ve kept
out of His way as I have. But, anyhow, religion’s real; that’s my sense
of it; and you can get it, I bet, if you try. I’ve seen it got. A friend
of mine got it--got it under your preaching; not from you; but you
was the accident that brought it about, I expect. It’s funny--it’s
merakilous, but it’s so. Kneel down!” he added, with peremptory
suddenness. “Kneel, Scranton!”
In fear the other knelt.
“You’re going to get religion now--here. You’re going to pray for what
you didn’t get--and almost got--in the desert. You’re going to ask
forgiveness for all your damn tricks, and pray like a fanning-mill for
the spirit to come down. You ain’t a scoundrel at heart--a friend of
mine says so. You’re a weak vessel, cracked, perhaps. You’ve got to
be saved, and start right over again--and ‘Praise God from whom all
blessings flow!’ Pray--pray, Scranton, and tell the whole truth, and
get it--get religion. Pray like blazes. You go on, and pray out loud.
Remember the desert, and Mary Jewell, and your mother--did you have a
mother, Scranton--say, did you have a mother, lad?”
Tim’s voice suddenly lowered before the last word, for the Faith Healer
had broken down in a torrent of tears.
“Oh, my mother--O God!” he groaned.
“Say, that’s right--that’s right--go on,” said the other, and drew back
a little, and sat down on a log. The man on his knees was convulsed with
misery. Denton, the world, disappeared. He prayed in agony. Presently
Tim moved uneasily, then got up and walked about; and at last, with a
strange, awed look, when an hour was past, he stole back into the shadow
of the trees, while still the wounded soul poured out its misery and
repentance.
Time moved on. A curious shyness possessed Tim now, a thing which he
had never felt in his life. He moved about self-consciously, awkwardly,
until at last there was a sudden silence over by the brook.
Tim looked, and saw the face of the kneeling man cleared, and quiet and
shining. He hesitated, then stepped out, and came over.
“Have you got it?” he asked quietly. “It’s noon now.”
“May God help me to redeem my past,” answered the other in a new voice.
“You’ve got it--sure?” Tim’s voice was meditative. “God has spoken to
me,” was the simple answer. “I’ve got a friend’ll be glad to hear that,”
he said; and once more, in imagination, he saw Laura Sloly standing at
the door of her home, with a light in her eyes he had never seen before.
“You’ll want some money for your journey?” Tim asked.
“I want nothing but to go away--far away,” was the low reply.
“Well, you’ve lived in the desert--I guess you can live in the
grass-country,” came the dry response. “Good-bye-and good luck,
Scranton.”
Tim turned to go, moved on a few steps, then looked back.
“Don’t be afraid--they’ll not follow,” he said. “I’ll fix it for you all
right.”
But the man appeared not to hear; he was still on his knees.
Tim faced the woods once more.
He was about to mount his horse when he heard a step behind him. He
turned sharply--and faced Laura. “I couldn’t rest. I came out this
morning. I’ve seen everything,” she said.
“You didn’t trust me,” he said heavily.
“I never did anything else,” she answered.
He gazed half-fearfully into her eyes. “Well?” he asked. “I’ve done my
best, as I said I would.”
“Tim,” she said, and slipped a hand in his, “would you mind the
religion--if you had me?”