The captors of Dylks chose the Temple as the best place for keeping him
till morning, when they could take him for trial to Matthew Braile; but
they had probably no sense of the place where he had insolently triumphed
so often as the fittest scene of his humiliation. They stumbled in a loose
mob behind and before and beside him through the dim night, and tried to
pass Redfield's guard to strike him with their hands or the sticks which
they tore from the wayside bushes. At a little distance, a straggling
troop of the believers followed, men and women, wailing and sobbing, and
adoring and comforting their idol with promises of fealty, in terms of
pathetic grotesqueness. A well-known voice called to him, “Don't you be
afraid, God Almighty! They can't hurt a hair of your head,” and the burst
of savage mirth which followed Sally Reverdy's words, drowned the retort
of a scoffer, “Why, there ain't hardly any left _to_ hurt, Sally.”
The noise of the talking and laughing and the formless progress of the
mob hushed the nearer night voices of the fields and woods; but from a
distance the shuddering cry of a screech-owl could be heard; and the
melancholy call of a killdee in a pasture beside the creek. The people,
friends and foes together, made their way unlighted except by the tin
lantern which some one had caught from where it stood on Enraghty's
gate-post.
With this one of the unbelievers took his stand at the door of the Temple
after Redfield had passed in with his prisoner, and lifted it successively
to the faces of those trying to enter. He allowed some and refused others,
according as they were of those who denied or confessed Dylks, and a Hound
at his elbow explained, “Don't want any but goats in here, to-night.”
The common parlance was saturated with scriptural phrase, and the gross
mockery would have been taken seriously if the speaker had not been so
notoriously irreverent. As it was the words won him applause which
Redfield and his friends were not able to quell. The joke was caught up
and tossed back and forth; the Little Flock outside raised their hymn, the
scoffers within joined in derision, and carried the hymn through to the
end.
Dylks sat shrunken on the bench below the pulpit, his head fallen forward
and his face hidden. Redfield and one of his friends sat on either side,
and others tried to save him from those who from time to time pushed
forward to strike him. They could not save him from the insults which
broke again and again upon the silence; when Redfield rose and appealed to
the people to leave the man to the law, they came back at him with shrieks
and yells.
“Did the law keep my family from bein' broke up by this devil? My wife
left me and my own brother won't speak to me because I wouldn't say he was
my Savior and my God.”
“I'm an old woman, and I lived with my son, but my son has quit me to
starve, for all he cares, because I believe in the God of Jacob and he
believes in this snorting, two-legged horse.”
“My sister won't live with me, because I won't fall down and worship her
Golden Calf.”
“He's spread death and destruction in my family. My daughters won't look
at me, and my two sons fought till they were all blood, about him.”
The accusings and upbraidings thickened upon him, but Dylks sat silent,
except for a low groan of what might have seemed remorse. He put his hand
to the place on his head where the hair had been torn away, and looked at
the blood on his fingers.
A woman stole under the guard of his keepers, and struck him a savage
blow on the cheeks, first one and then the other. “_Now_ you can see
how it feels to have your own husband slap you because you won't say you
believe in such a God as you are, you heathen pest!”
The guards struggled with her, and a man stooped over Dylks and voided a
mouthful of tobacco juice in his face; another lashed him on the head with
a switch of leatherwood: all in a squalid travesty of the supreme tragedy
of the race. As if a consciousness of the semblance touched the
gospel-read actors in the drama, they shrank in turn from what they had
done, and lost themselves in the crowd.
The night wore away and when the red sunrise began to pierce the dusk of
the Temple, where some had fallen asleep, and others drowsed as they
walked to and fro to keep themselves awake, Redfield conferred with his
lieutenants. Then they pulled their captive to his feet, not roughly, and
moved with him down the aisle and out of the door. They left some of the
slumberers still sleeping; of the others not all followed them on their
way to Matthew Braile's, up through the woods and past the cornfields and
tobacco patches; but with those of the Little Flock who had hung
night-long about the Temple, singing and praying to their idol, they
arrived, some before and some after the prisoner, at the log cabin of the
magistrate. He was sitting after his habit in his splint-bottomed chair
tilted against the porch wall, waiting for the breakfast which his wife
was getting within. As the crowd straggled up to the porch, he tilted his
chair down, and came forward with a frown of puzzle. “What's this?” he
demanded; then, catching sight of a woman's eager face among the foremost,
his frown relaxed and he said, “Don't all speak at once, Sally.”
“'Deed and 'deed, I'm not agoun' to speak at all, Squire Braile; but if
you want to know you can see for yourself that they've got the Good Old
Man here, and from the tell I've hearn they want you to try him; they've
been hittun' him over the face and head all night.” She looked defiantly
round on the unbelievers who so far joined in the Squire's grin as to
burst into a general laugh, and a cry of “Good for you, Sally. You're
about right.”
[Illustration: “_Now_ you can see how it feels to have your own
husband slap you.”]
Braile referred himself to Redfield, who mounted to the porch with the
other guards, and the tattered and bedraggled Dylks in their midst. “What
are you doing with this man, Jim?”
“We've brought him to you to find out, Squire Braile. You know who he is,
and all the mischief he's been making in this settlement. We don't need to
go into that.”
“Wish you'd step in there,” the Squire said, nodding toward the room
opposite the kitchen, “and bring me out the Laws of Ohio. You know where
it is.”
His recognition of Redfield as a law-student pleased the Herd of the
Lost, and one of the guards said, “All right, Jim. We'll hold him.”
As Redfield disappeared within, the Squire called after him, “Bring out
my table, too, will you. We'll have the trial here.”
“That's all right as fer as it goes, Squire,” one of the crowd before the
cabin called out, “but there ain't room enough for us up there.”
“Well,” the Squire answered, “you've got the whole State of Ohio down
there. I reckon you can find room in it, if you stand close.”
He turned the joke on the crowd; which acquiesced with cheers. When
Redfield returned with the large book and the small table he had been sent
for, the Squire drew up to them and proclaimed silence in the Court. Then,
“Who complains against this man? You, James Redfield?”
“I arrested him, but I don't complain of him more than the rest. You know
what he's been doing in Leatherwood, as well as other places, for the last
month or six weeks. We want his mischief stopped; we want to see what the
law can do about it. We could have lynched him, but that ain't the right
way, and so we all feel.”
“Well, we've got to make a start, somewhere,” the justice returned.
“What's he accused of? What do _you_ accuse him of?”
“Well, for one thing,” Redfield said, rather reluctantly, “he professes
to be Almighty God.”
“And he _is_ God, the Most High Jehovah, Maker of Heaven and Earth,”
came in a varying cry, from the believers who had gathered increasingly on
the skirts of their enemies.
Their voices seemed to put life and courage into the prisoner, who for
the first time lifted his fallen face and looked at the justice with a
light of hope in his dulled eyes.
“You hear that,” the old squire addressed him. “Is that your name? Are
you God?”
“Thou sayest,” the prisoner answered, with a sudden effrontery.
“That will _do_!” the old man shouted. He might have been willing to
burlesque the case from his own disbelief, but he could not suffer the
desecration of the hallowed words; and Dylks shrank from his eyes of
fierce rebuke. “Stand away from him,” he added to the guards. “Now, then,
have you folks got any other charge against him? Has he stolen anything?
Like a mule, for instance? Has he robbed a hen-roost? Has he assaulted
anybody, or set a tobacco-shed on fire? Some one must make a charge; I
don't much care what it is.”
The old man scowled round on the people nearest him and down on the crowd
below. The believers waited in anxious silence; the unbelievers applauded
his humor with friendly laughter, and a kindlier spirit spread through
them; they were beginning to see Dylks as a joke.
“Redfield,”--the Squire turned to the young man--“let's have a look at
the Laws of Ohio, in such case made and provided.” He opened the book
which Redfield put on the table before him, and went carefully through the
index; then he closed it. “There don't seem,” he said, “to be any charge
against the prisoner except claiming to be the Almighty; he pleads guilty
to that, and he could be fined and imprisoned if there was any law against
a man's being God. But there isn't, unless it's some law of the Bible,
which isn't in force through reenactment in Ohio. He hasn't offended
against any of our statutes, neither he nor his followers. In this State
every man has a right to worship what God he pleases, under his own vine
and fig-tree, none daring to molest him or make him afraid. With religious
fanaticism our laws have nothing to do, unless it be pushed so far as to
violate some public ordinance. This I find the prisoner has not done.
Therefore, he stands acquitted.”
A roar of protest, a shout of joy went up from the crowd according to
their belief and unbelief. After his first plea Dylks had remained silent
in becoming meekness and self-respect; now he looked wildly round in fear
and hope; but he did not speak.
“Clear the way, you!” the Squire called to the people about him and below
him, and he got slowly to his feet. He took the arm of the prisoner at one
side, and said, “Here, Jim Redfield, you take this fellow's other arm,”
and as the young man helplessly obeyed, “Now!” he commanded, and with
Dylks between them, they left the porch and passed through the severing
crowd of friends and foes before the cabin. While they hesitated in doubt
of his purpose, Braile led the way with the prisoner, acquitted, but still
in custody, toward the turnpike road where the country lane passing the
cabin joined it a little way off.
The crowd straggled after in patient doubt, but when the Squire halted
with his captive and bade Redfield move back, the suspicions of the
unbelievers began to stir.
“Now, put!” the Squire said in a low voice and loosed his hold. Dylks
lifted his head alertly as he was accustomed to do when he gave his equine
snort, but now he made no sound. He leaped forward and ran with vast
bounds up the smooth turnpike toward the wall of woodland, where the
whiteness of the highway ceased in the shadow of the trees. He far
outdistanced the foremost of his pursuers, who stopped to gather the
broken stone heaped along the roadside, and under the rain of these and
the storm of curses that they sent after him, he escaped into the forest.
“Well, Abel,” the Squire said to Reverdy, whom he found, not
unexpectedly, at his elbow when he looked round, “he may not be much of a
god, but he's a good deal of a racehorse, even if he didn't give his
snort.”
“Look here, Squire Braile,” Redfield broke out in the first realization
of his defeat, “I'm not sure your decision was just right.”
“Well, you can appeal the case to the Supreme Court, Jim,” the old man
returned. “It's my _breakfast_ time,” and he stamped stiffly away
down the pike and up the road to his cabin, followed by the blessings of
the Little Flock.
The Little Flock had remained in stupefaction at the junction of the
country road and the turnpike, helplessly watching the flight of their
idol from the Herd of the Lost. When Dylks vanished in the dusk of the
forest, and the last of those who had followed him came lagging breathless
back, and dropped from their hands the broken stone which they had
unconsciously brought with them, the Little Flock involuntarily raised
their hymn, as if it had been a song of triumph; an inglorious triumph,
but an omen of final victory, and of the descent of the New Jerusalem in
Leatherwood.
“Never mind!” one of the Herd panted. “We'll have him out of that gulf of
dark despair, yit!”
“The Lord will put forth His might,” one of the Flock defied him. “But if
you fellows want to feel the arm of flesh, here and now, come on!”
The Squire put himself between the forces. “I want you to keep the peace;
I command the peace,” he said with magisterial dignity.
“Oh, all right, Squire,” a Hound applauded him. “We know you're on our
side.”
“Brother Braile is on the side of righteousness,” the champion of the
Flock answered.
The Squire turned a frowning face upon him. “If the law could have held
your god, he'd have been on his way to the county jail by this time. Now,
you fellows, both sides, go home, and look after your corn and tobacco;
and you women, you go and get breakfast for them, and wash up your
children and leave the Kingdom of Heaven alone for a while.”
The weight of condemnation was for the Little Flock, but there remained
discomfort for the Herd of the Lost. “And you,” the Squire turned to them,
“you let these folks worship any stock or stone they're a mind to; and you
find out the true God if you can, and stick to Him, and don't bother the
idolaters. I reckon He can take care of Himself. I command you all to
disperse. Go home! Get out! Put!”
The saints and the sinners felt alike the mystical force of the law in
his words and began to move away, not without threats and defiances, more
or less straggling, and not altogether ceasing even after they had lost
sight of one another in their parting ways.
Redfield stayed to walk home with the old man. “Of course, Squire
Braile,” he said, “this ain't the last of Dylks, and it ain't the last of
_us_. It's a sin and a shame to have the thing going on among us. You
know that as well as I do. It's got to be stopped. If he'd got his just
dues from you--”
“You young fool,” the Squire retorted, kindly, “haven't you gone far
enough yet in your Blackstone to know that justice is one thing and law is
another? I gave Dylks his legal deserts.”
“Blackstone says the law is the perfection of reason.”
“Well, you think it don't seem to be so in the State of Ohio. But I
reckon it is, and so long as we look after our own souls, we can't do
better than let others look after theirs in their own way. Come in and
have some breakfast!” He paused before his cabin with the young man.
“No, not _this_ morning, Squire Braile,” Redfield lingered a moment,
and then he said, askingly, “I didn't see old Mr. Gillespie anywhere this
morning.”
“I didn't notice. Where it comes to a division in public, he doesn't
usually take sides against his daughter.”
“He won't have to, after this.”
“What do you mean?”
“Didn't you know she told him once that if he would bring her a hair of
Dylks's head she would deny him? I helped him to a whole lock of it.”
“Oh, _you_ did that?” There was condemnation in the Squire's tone,
and as if he had been going to express a more explicit displeasure, he
hesitated. Then he said, “Well, I must be going in,” and turned his back
upon Redfield, who turned again into the turnpike road and took his way
homeward past the long and deep stretch of woods where Dylks had found
refuge.