“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 afterwards 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 didn’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 frame houses 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.
The figure of a woman who held her hooded shawl under
her chin, stole with steps often checked through the
limp, dew-laden 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 doorstep of the spring-house, and waited rather
than rested in the shelter of the chestnut boughs that
