The Leatherwood God eBook

The miller interposed with his friendly voice, and it seemed as if the unbelievers would give way in pity of the poor woman who had brought the cloth.  Suddenly the bolt of stuff which Murray had conditionally yielded was twitched from Redfield in boisterous fun, and then in the frenzy more of mischief than malice it was seized by the Hounds, and torn into shreds.  “Find the seamless raiment!” they yelled to one another.  The unbelievers stood aside; the believers did nothing, in a palsy of amaze; the poor woman, to whom her toil and pride in it had hallowed the stuff, sank down staying herself on her hands from the floor, in hapless despair.  Her moaning and sobbing filled the place after the tumult of destruction had been stricken silent.  “Oh, I don’t care for the miracle,” she kept lamenting, “but what are my children going to wear this winter?  Oh, what will he say to me!” It was her husband she meant.

XIII

The riot in Hingston’s Mill, after the failure of Dylks to appear personally and work the promised miracle, left the question of his divinity where it had been.  With no evident change in their numbers on either side, the believers assented, the unbelievers denied.  The faithful held that the miracle had been wrought and the seamless raiment torn to pieces by the mob; some declared that they had seen the garments, and tried to keep them from the sacrilege but had been overpowered.  The unfaithful laughed at the pretense, and defied the faithful to show any scrap of the cloth having the form of clothing.  The pieces remained with the poor woman who had brought the cloth for the miracle; she carried them weeping home, and she and her husband remained like the rest, believing and unbelieving as before; but at every chance she scanned the dishonored fragments in secret, and pieced them together, trying to follow the lines of imaginary garments in them.

Throughout the week the excitement raged, silently for the most part, in the breasts of the two parties, but sometimes breaking out in furious affirmation and denial at such points of common meeting as the store, the tavern, and the postoffice.  There the unbelievers outnumbered the believers, who met for mutual support and comfort at one another’s houses, but appeared nowhere in force until the Sunday night following; then they came three to one of the enemy, and filled the Temple to overflowing.  Dylks was expected to meet them from the concealment or the absence in which he had passed the days; the unbelievers said that he was hiding in fear and shame; the believers that he was preaching to the heathen in other neighborhoods, and would come in power and glory with a great multitude of the converted following him.  But the meeting in the Temple was opened by Enraghty, who, in front of the pulpit, rose saying, “The Good Old Man will not be here, to-night, but I will fill his place.”  A thrill of exultation and disappointment ran through the congregation according as they believed or denied, but they all waited patiently.