“No, don’t hurt him!” Redfield commanded.
“Take him to a justice of the peace and try
him.”
“Yes,” the leader of the Hounds assented.
“Take him to Squire Braile. He’ll
settle with him.”
The Little Flock rallied to the rescue, and some of
the herd joined them. As an independent neutral,
Abel Reverdy, whom his wife stirred to action, caught
up a stool and joined the defenders.
“Why, you fool,” a leader of the Hounds
derided him amiably, “what you want to do with
that stool? If the Almighty can’t help himself,
you think you’re goin’ to help
him?”
Abel was daunted by the reasoning, and even Sally
stayed her war cries.
“Well, I guess there’s sumpin’ in
that,” Abel assented, and he lowered his weapon.
The incident distracted his captors and Dylks broke
from them, and ran into the yard before the house.
He was covered with soot and dust and his clothes
were torn; his coat was stripped in tatters, and his
long hair hung loose over it.
His prophecies of doom to those who should lay hands
upon him had been falsified, but to the literal sense
of David Gillespie he had not yet been sufficiently
proved an impostor: till he should bring his daughter
a strand of the hair which Dylks had proclaimed it
death to touch, she would believe in him, and David
followed in the crowd straining forward to reach Redfield,
who with one of his friends had Dylks under his protection.
The old man threw himself upon Dylks and caught a
thick strand of his hair, dragging him backward by
it. Redfield looked round. He said, “You
want that, do you? Well, I promised.”
He tore it from the scalp, and gave it into David’s
hand, and David walked back with it into the house
where his daughter remained with the wailing and sobbing
women-worshipers of the desecrated idol.
He flung the lock at her feet. “There’s
the hair that it was death to touch.” She
did not speak; she only looked at it with horror.
“Don’t you believe it’s his?”
her father roared.
“Yes, yes! I know it’s his; and now
let’s go home and pray for him, and for you,
father. We’ve both got the same God, now.”
A bitter retort came to the old man’s lips,
but the abhorrent look of his daughter stayed his
words, and they went into the night together, while
the noise of the mob stormed back to them through the
darkness, farther and farther away.
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.
