treating. The minister was still hesitating on the pulpit stairs, and he looked at the stranger.

"Will you come up, Brother "Call me Dylks-for the present," the stranger answered with a full voice.

"Brother Dylks," the minister repeated, and he came down, and gave him the right hand of fellowship.

The Gillespies looked on with their different indifference. Dylks turned to them. "Shall I speak?"

"Speak!" the girl said, but her father said nothing.

Dylks ran quickly up the pulpit steps. "We will join in prayer," he called out, and he held the congregation, now returned to their places, in the spell of a quick, short supplication. He ended it with the Lord's Prayer; then he said, "Let us sing," and line after line he gave out the hymn,

Plunged in a gulf of dark despair
We wretched sinners lay.

He expounded each stanza as to the religious sense and the poetic meaning before he led the singing. He gave out a passage of Scripture as a sort of text, but he did not keep to it; he followed with other passages, and his discourse was a rehearsal of these rather than a sermon. His memory in them was unerring. Women who knew their Bibles by heart sighed their satisfaction in his perfectness; they did not care for the relevance or irrelevance of the passages; all was Scripture, all was the one inseparable Word of God, dreadful, blissful, divine, promising heaven, threatening hell. Groans began to go up from the people held in the strong witchery of the man's voice. They did not know whether he spoke long or not. Before they knew, he was as if sweeping them to their feet with a repetition of his opening hymn, and they were singing with him

Plunged in a gulf of dark despair
We wretched sinners lay.

It ended, and he gave his wild, brutish snort, and then his heart-shaking cry of "Salvation!"

Some of the chief men remained to speak with him, to contend for him as their guest; but old David Gillespie did not contend with them. "You can have him," he said to the miller, Peter Hingston, "if he wants to go with you." He was almost rude, and his daughter was not opener with the women who crowded about her trying to make her say something that would feed their hunger to know more. She remained hard and cold, almost dumb; it seemed to them that she was not worthy to have had him under her father's roof. As for her father, they had no patience with him for not putting in a word to claim the stranger while the others were pressing him to come home with them. In spite of the indifference of Gillespie and his girl, Dylks elected to remain with them, and he went away into the night between them.

When Matthew Braile made his escape with his wife from the crowd and began to walk home through the dim, hot night, he said:

"Is Jane Gillespie any particular hand at fried chicken?"

"Now you stop, Matthew!" his wife said.

"Because that would account for it. I reckon it was fried chicken the ravens brought to Elijah. All men of God are fond of fried chicken."

His wife would not dispute directly with his perversity; she knew that in this mood of his it would be useless trying to make him partake the wonder she shared with her neighbors that the stranger had chosen David Gillespie again for his host out of the many leading men who had pressed their hospitality upon him, and that he should have preferred his apathy to their eagerness.

"I wish he had worn his yellow beaver hat in the pulpit," Braile went on. "It must have been a disappointment to Abel Reverdy, but perhaps he consoled himself with a full sight of the fellow's long hair. He ought to part it in the middle, like Thomas Jefferson, and do it up in a knot, like a woman. Well, we can't have everything even in a man of God; but maybe

he is n't really a man of God. That would account for a good many things. But I think he shows taste in preferring old Gillespie to Peter Hingston; next to Abel Reverdy he's the biggest fool in Leatherwood. Maybe the prophet knew by instinct that there would be better fried chicken at Gillespie's."

His wife disdained to make a direct

answer.

"You may be sure they give him of their best, whatever it is. And the Gillespies may be poor, but when it comes to respectability and good works, they 've got a right to hold their heads up with the best in this settlement. That girl has done all the work of the house since her mother died, when she was n't a little thing half grown; and old David has slaved off his mortgage til his farm 's free and clear, and he don't owe anybody a cent."

"Oh, I don't say anything against Gillespie; all I say is that Brother Dylks knows which side his bread is buttered on; inspired, probably."

"What makes you so bitter, to-night, Matthew?" his wife halted him a little with her question.

"Well, the Temple always leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I hate to see brethren agreeing together in unity. You ought n't to have taken me, Martha."

"I'll never take you again," she said. "And that man 's a rascal, if ever there was one. Real men of God don't wear their hair down to their waists and come snorting and shouting in black broadcloth to a settlement like this for the good of folks' souls."

"You 've got no right to say that, Matthew. And if you go round talking that way, you'll make yourself more unpopular than you are already."

"Oh, I'll be careful, Martha. I'll just think it, and perhaps put two or three of the leading intellects like Abel and Sally on their guard. But come, Martha, you know as well as I do he 's a rascal. Don't you believe it?"

"I believe in giving everybody a chance. Don't your own law-books say a man's innocent till he 's proved guilty?"

"Something like that. And I'm not trying Brother Dylks in open court at present. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt if he 's ever brought before my judgment-seat; but you 've got to allow, Martha, that his long hair and black broadcloth and his snort and shout are against him."

"I don't believe in them any more than you do," she owned. "But don't you persecute him because he 's religious, Matthew."

"Oh, I don't object to him because he 's religious, though I think there's more religion in Leatherwood already than any ten towns would know what to do with. He's got to do more than preach his brand of religion before I 'd want to trouble him."

They were at the hewn log which formed the step to the porch between the rooms of their cabin. A lank hound rose from the floor, and pulled himself back from his forward-planted paws, and whimpered a welcome to them; a captive coon rattled his chain from his corner under the porch roof.

"Why don't you let that poor thing go, Matthew?" Mrs. Braile asked.

"Well, I will some day; but the little chap that brought it to me was so much like our

He stopped; both were thinking the same thing and knew they were.

"I saw the likeness from the first, too," the wife said.

III

THE Gillespies arrived at their simpler log cabin half an hour later than the Brailes at theirs. It was on the border of the settlement, and beyond it for a mile there was nothing but woods, - walnut and chestnut and hickory,-not growing thickly, as the primeval forest grew to the northward along the lake, but standing openly about in the pleasant park-like freedom of the woods-pastures of that gentler latitude. Beyond the wide stretch of trees and meadow-lands the corn-fields and tobacco-patches opened to the sky again. On their farther border stood a new log cabin,

defined by its freshly barked logs in the hovering dark.

Gillespie pulled the leatherwood latchstring which lifted the catch of his door, and pushed it open.

"Go in, Jane," he said to his daughter, and the girl vanished slimly through, with a glance over her shoulder at Dylks, where he stood aloof a few steps from her father. Gillespie turned to his guest. "Did you see her?" he asked.

"Yes, I walked over to her house this morning."

"Did any one see you?"

"No. Her man was away."

Gillespie turned with an effect of helplessness, and looked down at the woodpile where he stood.

"I don't know," he said, "what keeps me from splitting your head open with that ax."

"I do," Dylks said.

"Man!" the old man threatened, "don't go too far!"

you

"It was n't the fear of God, which pretend is in your heart, but the fear of man." Dylks added, with a vulgar drop from the solemn words: "You would hang for it. I haven't put myself in your power without counting all the costs to both of us."

Gillespie waved his answer off with an impatient hand.

"Did she know you?"

"Why not? It has n't been so long. I have n't changed so much. I wear my hair differently, and I dress better since I've been in Philadelphia. She knew me in a minute as well as I knew her. I did n't ask for her present husband; I thought one at a time was enough."

"What are you going to do?"

"Nothing-first. I might have told her she had been in a hurry; but if she don't bother me, I won't her. We got as far as that. And I reckon she won't; but I thought we'd better have a clear understanding, and she knows now it's bigamy in her case, and bigamy 's a penitentiary offense. I made that clear. And now see here, David: I 'm going to stay here in this settlement, and I don't want any

trouble from you, no matter what you think of my doings, past, present, or future. I don't want you to say anything or look anything. Don't you let on, even to that girl of yours, that you ever saw me before in your life. If you do, you'll wish you had split my head open with that But I'm not afraid; I 've got you safe, and I 've got your sister safe." Gillespie groaned. Then he said desperately:

ax.

"Listen here, Joseph Dylks! I know what you 're after here, because you always was-other people's money. I 've got three hundred dollars saved up since I paid off the mortgage. If you'll take it and go-"

"Three hundred dollars! No, no! Keep your money, old man. I don't rob the poor." Dylks lifted himself, and said with that air of mysterious mastery which afterward won so many to his obedience: "I work my work. Let no man gainsay me or hinder me." He walked to and fro in the starlight, swelling, with his head up, and his mane of black hair cloudily flying over his shoulders as he turned. "I come from God."

Gillespie looked at him as he paced back and forth.

"If I did n't know you for a common scoundrel that married my sister against my will, and lived on her money till it was gone, and then left her and let her believe he was dead, I might believe you did come from God-or the devil, you-you turkey cock, you stallion! But you can't prance me down or snort me down. I don't agree to anything. I don't say I won't tell who you are when it suits me. I won't promise to keep it from this one or that one or any one. I'll let you go just so far, and then-"

"All right, David; I 'll trust you, as I trust your sister. Between you I 'm safe. And now you lay low! That's my advice." He dropped from his mystery and his mastery to a level of colloquial teasing. "I'm going to rest under your humble roof to-night, and to-morrow I'm going to the mansion of Peter Hingston. His gates will be set wide for me, and all

the double log-cabin palaces and framehouses of this royal city of Leatherwood will hunger for my presence. You could always hold your tongue, David, and you can easily leave all the whys and wherefores to me. I won't go from your hospitality with an ungrateful tongue; I will proclaim before the assembled multitudes in your Temple that I left you secure in the faith, and that I turned to others because they needed me more. I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance; they will understand that. So good night, David, and good morning. I shall be gone before even you are up."

Gillespie made no answer as he followed his guest indoors. Long before he slept he heard the man's powerful breathing, like that of some strong animal in its sleep, an ox lying in the field or a horse standing in its stall. At times it broke chokingly, and then he snorted it smooth and regular again. At daybreak Gillespie thought of rising, but he drowsed, and he was asleep when his daughter came to the foot of the ladder which climbed to his chamber in the cabin loft and called to him that his breakfast was ready.

IV

THE figure of a woman who held her hooded shawl under her chin stole with steps often checked through the limp, dewladen grass of the woods-pasture and slipped on the rotting logs. But she caught herself from tumbling, and safely gained the border of Gillespie's corn-field. There she sat down trembling on the stone door-step of the spring-house, and waited rather than rested in the shelter of the chestnut-boughs that overhung the roof. She was aware of the spring gurgling under the stone on its way into the sunshine from the crocks of cream-covered milk and of butter in the cool dark of the hut, she sensed the thick August heat of the sun already smiting its honeyed odors from the corn, she heard the scamper of the squirrels preying upon the ripening ears and whisking in and out of the woods or dropping into the field from the tips of the boughs overhanging the nearer rows;

but it all came blurred to her conscious

ness.

She was recognizably Gillespie's sister, but her eyes and hair were black. She was wondering how she could get to speak with him when Jane was not by. He would send the girl away at a sign from her, but she could not have that; the thing must be kept from the girl, but not seem to be kept.

She let her arms rest on her knees; her helpless hands hung heavy from them; her head was bowed: and her whole body drooped under the burden of her heart, as if it physically dragged her down. Jane would be coming soon with the morning's milk to pour into the crocks. She heard a step; the girl was coming; but she must

"What do you want me to do, Nancy?" "I don't know, I don't know. I have n't slept all night."

"You must n't give way like this. Don't you see any duty for you in this matter?"

"Duty? O David!" Her heart foreboded the impossible demand upon it. Gillespie set his bucket of milk down beside the spring.

"Nancy," he said, "a woman cannot have two husbands. It's a crime against the State; it's a sin against God."