mad, a-settin’ up there so peart and brave before ’em, givin’ ’em as good as they sent—givin’ ’em hell right to their faces, you might say, that at last they made for him, some of them that you could see had been puttin’ a new faucet into the cider barrel. I saw they meant to do him a mischief—but Lord! what could I do against fifty, being then in the midst of a chill? Well, they drug him off the seat, and said, ‘Now, you old rat, own up that Holy Joe was a danged fraud;’ or something like that. But he was that sanctified and stubborn—‘Better to suffer stripes for the testimony of Christ,’ he says, ‘than to fall by the sin of denial!’ Then they drug him to the bank, one on each side, and says, ‘We baptise you in the holy name of Brockman,’ and in they dumped him—backwards, mind you! I saw then they was in a slippery place where it was deep and the current awful strong. But they hauled him out, and says again, ‘Do you renounce Holy Joe Smith and all his works?’ The poor old fellow couldn’t talk a word for the chill, but he shook his head like sixty—as stubborn as you’d wish. So they said, ‘Damn you! here’s another, then. We baptise you in the name of James K. Polk, President of the United States!’ and in they threw him again. Whether they done it on purpose or not, I wouldn’t like to say, but that time his coat collar slipped out of their hands and down he went. He came up ten feet down-stream and quite a ways out, and they hooted at him. I seen him come up once after that, and then they see he couldn’t swim a stroke, but little they cared. And I never saw him again. I jest took hold of the team and drove it on the boat, scared to death for what you’d do when you come,—so I kept still and they kept still. But remember, it’s only another debt the blood of the Gentiles will have to pay—” 

 “Either here on earth or in hell,” said the Bishop. 

 “And the soul of your poor pa is now warm and dry and happy in the presence of his Lord God.” 

 

Chapter VI. The Lute of the Holy Ghost Is Further Chastened

 Listening to Keaton’s tale, he had dimly seen the caravan of hunted creatures crawl past him over the fading green of the prairie; the wagons with their bowed white covers; a heavy cart, jolting, creaking, lumbering mysteriously along, a sick driver hidden somewhere back under its makeshift cover of torn counterpanes; a battered carriage, reminiscent of past luxury, drawn by oxen; more wagons, some without covers; a two-wheeled cart, designed in the ingenuity of desperation, laden with meal-sacks, a bundle of bedding, a sleeping child, 

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