Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
[Illustration: "_She snatched the automatic pistol from her bosom
and ... fired. The man stumbled back with a cry._"]
THE RIVER PROPHET
By
Raymond S. Spears
Frontispiece by
Ralph Pallen Coleman
Garden City New York
Doubleday, Page & Company
1920
COPYRIGHT, 1918, 1920, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF
TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES,
INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
THE RIVER PROPHET
THE RIVER PROPHET
CHAPTER I
Elijah Rasba lived alone in a log cabin on Temple Run. He was a long,
lank, blue-eyed young man, with curly brown hair and a pale, almost
livid complexion. His eye-brows were heavy and dark brown, and the blue
steel of his gaze was fixed unwaveringly upon any object that it
distinguished.
Two generations before, Old Abe Rasba had built a church on a little
brook, a tributary of Jackson River, away up in the mountains. The
church was laid up of flat stones, gathered in fields, from ledges of
rock and up the wooded mountain side. It was large enough to hold all
the people for miles around, and the roof was supported by massive hewn
timbers, and some few attempts had been made to decorate the structure.
Old Abe had called his church "The Temple," had preached from a big
hollow oak stump, and laid down the Law of the Bible, which he had
memorized by heart, and expounded from experience. Elijah Rasba,
grandson of Old Abe, thus came honestly by reverence and religion, but
the strange glory which had surrounded the old Temple had departed from
the ruin, and of all the congregation, only Elijah remained.
Land-slips had ruined a score of farms cleared on too-steep hills;
lightning had destroyed the overshot grist mill, and the two big stones
had been cracked in the hot flames; a feud had opened graves before the
allotted time of the victims. It seemed to Elijah, sitting there in his
cabin, as though damnation had visited the faithful, and that death was
the reward of belief.
The ruins of the old Temple stood melancholy where the heavy stone wall,
built by a man who believed in broad, firm foundations, had split an
avalanche, but without avail, for the walls had given way and let the
roof beams drop in. No less certain had been the fate of the
congregation; they, too, were scattered or dead. There remained but one
dwelling in the little valley, with a lone occupant, who was wrestling
with his soul, trying to understand, for he knew in his heart that he
must read the truth and discover the meaning of all this trouble,
privation, disaster, and death.
He was quite practical about it. He had a field of corn, and a little
garden full of truck; over his fireplace hung a 32-20 repeating rifle,
and in one corner were a number of steel traps, copper and brass wire
for snares, and a home-made mattock with which a rabbit could be
extricated from a burrow, or a skunk-skin from its den.
An Almanac, a Bible, and a "Resources of Tennessee" comprised the
library on the shelf. The Almanac had come by mail from away off yonder,
about a hundred miles, perhaps--anyhow, from New York. The "Resources of
Tennessee" had come down with a spring freshet in Jackson River, and was
rather stained with mountain clays. The Bible was, of course, an
inheritance.
It was a very small article, apparently, to create all the disturbances
that seemed to have followed its interpretations there on Temple Run.
Elijah would hold it out at arms length and stare at it with those sharp
eyes of his, wondering in his soul how it could be that the fate of
nations, the future of humanity, the very salvation of every soul rested
within the compass of that leather-covered, gilt-edged parcel of thin
paper which weighed rather less than half as much as a box of
cartridges.
Elijah did not spare himself in the least. He toiled at whatever task
appeared for him to do. As he required for his own wants fifty bushels
of corn for a year, he planted enough to shuck a hundred bushels. Once,
in the fervour of the hope that he was called upon to raise corn for
humanity, he raised five hundred bushels, only to give it all away to
poor white trash who had not raised enough for themselves.
Again he felt the call to preach, and he went forth with all the
eagerness of a man who had at last discovered his life's calling. He
went on foot, through storms, over mountains, and into a hundred
schoolhouses and churches, showing his little leather-skinned Bible and
warning sinners to repent, Christians to keep faith, and Baal to lower
his loathly head.
He had returned from his five months' pilgrimage with the feeling that
his utmost efforts had been futile, and that for all his good will, it
had not been vouchsafed him to leave behind one thought in fertile soil.
The matter had been brought home to him by an incident of the last
meeting he had addressed, over on Clinch.
In the Painted Church he had volunteered a sermon, and no sermons had
been preached there in years. Feuds, inextricably tangled, had involved
five different families, and members of all those families were in the
church, answering to his challenge.
They sat there with rifles or shotguns between their knees, with their
pistols on their hips, and eternal vigilance in their eyes. While
listening to his sermon they kept their gaze fastened upon one another,
lest an unwary moment bring upon them the alert shot of an enemy.
As he had stood there, gaunt in frame, famished of soul, driven by the
torments of an ambition to see the right, to do it, it seemed to him as
though the final burden had been heaped upon him, and that he must
break under the weight on his mind.
"What can I say to you all?" he burst out with sudden passion. "Theh yo'
set with guns in yo' hands an' murder in yo' souls--to listen to the
word of God! How do yo' expect the Prince of Peace to come to yo' if yo'
set there thataway?"
His indignation rose as he saw them, and his scorn unbridled his tongue,
so that in a few minutes the congregation watched one another less, the
preacher more, and all settled back, to listen and blink under his
accusations and his declarations. It really seemed, for the time, as
though he had caught and engaged their attention. But when the sermon
ended and he had taken his departure, before he was a hundred yards down
the road he heard loud words, angry shouts, and then the scream of a
woman.
The next instant there came a salvo of gun and pistol shots and in all
directions up and down the cross-roads people fled on horseback. Three
men had been killed, five wounded and a dozen become fugitives from
justice at the end of the church service.
Elijah Rasba fled homeward, his will and hopes broken, and sank
dejectedly into a slough of despondency. All his good intentions, all
the inspiration of his endeavour, his very spiritual exaltation had
terminated in a tragedy, as inexplicable as it was depressing.
His conscience would neither let him rest nor work. He looked at his
Bible, inside and out, the very fibres of his brain struggling by
reason, by effort, by main strength, to discover what his duty was. No
answer soothed his waking hours or gave him rest from his dreams. On him
rested a kind of superstitious scorn and fear, and he began to believe
the whisperings of his neighbours which reached his ears. They said:
"He's possessed!"
To his own freighted mind the statement seemed to be true. He did not
know what new sin he had committed, nor could he look back on long years
of his youth and young manhood and discover any sin which he had not
already expiated, over and over again. He had obeyed the scriptural
injunctions to the best of his knowledge, and the reward was this daily
and nightly torment, the scorn of his fellows, and the questioning of
his own soul.
Worst of all, constructively, he had given feud fighters the chance to
do murder upon one another. Under the guise of preaching for them for
the good of their souls, he had enabled them to meet in antagonism,
watch in wrath, and kill without mercy. Too late he realized that he
should have foreseen the tragedy, and that he should have provided
against it by going first to each faction, preaching to each family, and
then, when he had brought them to their knees, united them in the common
cause of religion.
"On me is Thy wrath!" he cried out in the anguish of his soul. "Give thy
tortured slave something good to do, ere I go down!"
There was no reply, immediate or audible; he was near the limits of his
endurance; he drew his arm back to throw the Bible into the flames of
his fireplace, but that he could not do. He tossed it upon the shelf,
drew his hat down upon his ears and at the approach of night started
over the ridges to the Kalbean stillhouse.
He stalked down a ridge into that split-board shack of infamy. He found
five or six men in the hot, sour-smelling place. They started to their
feet when they saw the mountain preacher among them.
"Gimme some!" he told Old Kalbean. "I'm a fool! I'm damned. I'll go with
the rest of ye to Hell! Gimme some!"
"Wha--What?" Old Kalbean choked with horror. "Yo' gwine to drink,
Parson?"
"Suttinly!" Rasba cried. "Hit ain' no ust for me to preach! I preach,
an' the congregation murders one anotheh! Ef I don't preach, I cayn't
live peaceable! They say hit makes a man happy--I ain' be'n happy, not
in ten, not in twenty yeahs!"
He caught up the jug that rested on the floor, threw the tin cup to one
side, up-ended the receptacle, and the moonshiner and his customers
stared.
"Theh!" Rasba grunted, when he had to take the jug down for breath. He
reached into his pocket, drew out a silver dollar, and handed it to the
amazed mountain man.
"Theh!" he repeated, defiantly. "I've shore gone to Hell, now, an' I
don't give a damn, nuther. S'long, boys! D'rectly, yo'l heah me jes' a
whoopin', yas suh! Jes' a whoopin'!"
He left them abruptly and he went up into the darkness of the laurels.
They heard him crashing away into the night. When he was gone the men
looked at one another:
"Yo' 'low he'll bring the revenuers?" one asked, nervously.
"Bring nothin'!" another grinned. "No man eveh lived could drink fifteen
big gulps, like he done, an' git furder'n a stuck hog, no, suh!"
They listened for the promised whoops; they strained their ears for the
cries of jubilation; but none came.
"Co'rse," the stiller explained, as though an explanation were needed,
"Parson Rasba ain' used to hit; he could carry more, an' hit'll take him
longer to get lit up. But, law me, when hit begins to act! That's three
yeah old, boys, mild, but no mewl yo' eveh saw has the kick that's got,
apple an' berry cider, stilled down from the ferment!"