“Well, mother, nobody as’t him to.”
Nancy was silent for so long that the boy said discouragedly,
“But if you don’t want me to go—”
Her face hardened from the pity of her inward vision
of the man’s humiliation, as if his own son
had judged him justly. “Yes, you can go,
Joey. But be careful, be careful! And don’t
stay too late. And if anything happens—”
“Oh, surely, mother, nothing will happen,”
he exulted, and he broke from her hold and ran down
the road where the group of boys had waited for him,
and as he ran he leaped into the air, and called to
them, “She’s let me; she’s let me!”
and the boys leaped up in response, and called back,
“Hurrah, hurrah!” and when he had come
up with them, they all tried to get their arms round
him, and trod on his heels and toes in pushing one
another from him.
In the August twilight which now began to pale the
hot sunset glow, as if she had waited to come alone,
in her pride or in her shame, the woman who was bearing
the body of the miracle to the place where the wonder
was to be wrought came last of all to pass Nancy where
she sat at her door. She was that strong believer
who in her utter trust, when she heard that cloth
would be needed for the seamless raiment of his miracle,
had offered to provide it; and now, neither in pride
nor in shame, but in defiance of her unbelieving husband,
she was bearing away from her house the bolt of linsey-woolsey
newly home from the weaver, which was to have been
cut into the winter’s clothing of her children.
She had spun the threads herself and dyed them, and
they had become as if they were of her own flesh and
blood. She carried the bolt wrapped about with
her shawl, bearing it tenderly in her arms, as if
it were indeed her flesh and blood, her babe which
she was going to lay upon an altar of sacrifice.
The crowd at Hingston’s mill grew with the arrival
of the unbelievers as well as the believers in Dylks.
They came from all sides, sometimes singly and sometimes
in groups, and the groups came disputing as often as
agreeing among themselves. When a group was altogether
believing they exchanged defiances with a party of
those religious outcasts, the Hounds, disturbers of
camp-meetings and baptisms, and notorious mockers,
now, of the Leatherwood god in his services at the
Temple. But the invitation given to see the promised
miracle had been to all; the Hounds had felt
in it the tenor of a challenge, and they had accepted
it defiantly. They jeered at the believers as
these arrived, sometimes hailing them by name; they
neighed and whinnied, and shouted “Salvation!”
and in the intervals of silence they burst out with
the first lines of the Believers’ hymn.
