The Bishop of Cottontown: A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills

In the library, Travis and Mrs. Westmore sat for some time in silence. Travis, as usual, smoked, in his thoughtful way watching the firelight which flickered now and then, half lighting up the room. It was plain that both were thinking of a subject that neither wished to be the first to bring up.

“I have been wanting all day to ask you about the mortgage,” she said to him, finally.

“Oh,” said Travis, indifferently enough—“that's all right. I arranged it at the bank to-day.”

“I am so much obliged to you; it has been so on my mind,” said his companion. “We women are such poor financiers, I wonder how you men ever have patience to bother with us. Did you get Mr. Shipton to carry it at the bank for another year?”

“Why—I—you see, Cousin Alethea—Shipton's a close dog—and the most unaccommodating fellow that ever lived when it comes to money. And so—er—well—the truth is—is—I had to act quickly and for what I thought was your interest.”

Mrs. Westmore looked up quickly, and Travis saw the pained look in her face. “So I bought it in myself,” he went on, carelessly flecking his cigar ashes into the fire. “I just had the judgment and sale transferred to me—to accommodate you—Cousin Alethea—you understand that—entirely for you. I hate to see you bothered this way—I'll carry it as long as you wish.”

She thanked him again, more with her eyes than her voice. Then there crept over her face that look of trouble and sorrow, unlike any Travis had ever seen there. Once seen on any human face it is always remembered, for it is the same, the world over, upon its millions and millions—that deadened look of trouble which carries with it the knowledge that the spot called home is lost forever.

There are many shifting photographs from the camera called sorrow, pictured on the delicate plate of the human soul or focused in the face. There is the crushed look when Death takes the loved one, the hardened look when an ideal is shattered, the look of dismay from wrecked hopes and the cynical look from wrecked happiness—but none of these is the numbed and dumb look of despair which confronts humanity when the home is gone.

It runs not alone through the man family, but every other animal as well, from the broken-hearted bird which sits on the nearby limb, and sees the wreck of her home by the ravages of a night-prowling marauder, to the squalidest of human beings, turning their backs forever on the mud-hut that had once sheltered them.

To Mrs. Westmore it was a keen grief. Here had she come as a bride—here had she lived since—here had been born her two children—here occurred the great sorrow of her life.

And the sacredest memory, at last, of life, lies not in the handclasp of a coming joy, but in the footfall of a vanishing sorrow.

Westmoreland meant everything to Mrs. Westmore—the pride of birth, of social standing, the ties of motherhood, the very altar of her life. And it was her husband's name and her own family. It meant she was not of common clay, nor unknown, nor without influence. It was bound around and woven into her life, and part of her very existence.

Home in the South means more than it does anywhere else on earth; for local self-government—wherever the principle came from—finds its very altar there. States-right is nothing but the home idea, stretched over the state and bounded by certain lines. The peculiar institutions of the South made every home a castle, a town, a government, a kingdom in itself, in which the real ruler is a queen.

Ask the first negro or child met in the road, whose home is this, or that, and one would think the entire Southland was widowed.

From the day she had entered it as a bride, Westmoreland, throughout the County, had been known as the home of Mrs. Westmore.

She was proud of it. She loved it with that love which had come down through a long line of cavaliers loving their castles.

And now she knew it must go, as well as that, sooner or later, Death itself must come.

She knew Richard Travis, and she knew that, if from his life were snatched the chance of making Alice Westmore his wife he would sell the place as cold-bloodedly as Shipton would.

Travis sat smoking, but reading her. He spelled her thoughts as easily as if they had been written on her forehead, for he was a man who spelled. He smoked calmly and indifferently, but the one question of his heart—the winning of Alice,—surged in his breast and it said: “Now is the time—now—buy her—the mother. This is the one thing which is her price.”

He looked at Mrs. Westmore again. He scanned her closely, from her foot to the dainty head of beautiful, half-grey hair. He could read her as an open book—her veneration of all Westmoreland things—her vanity—her pride of home and name and position; the overpowering independence of that vanity which made her hold up her head in company, just as in the former days, tho' to do it she must work, scrub, pinch, ay, even go hungry.

He knew it all and he knew it better than she guessed—that it had actually come to a question of food with them; that her son was a geological dreamer, just out of college, and that Alice's meagre salary at the run-down female college where she taught music was all that stood between them and poverty of the bitterest kind.

For there is no poverty like the tyranny of that which sits on the erstwhile throne of plenty.

He glanced around the room—the hall—the home—in his mind's eye—and wondered how she did it—how she managed that poverty should leave no trace of itself in the home, the well furnished and elegant old home, from its shining, polished furniture and old silver to the oiled floor of oak and ash.

Could he buy her—bribe her, win her to work for him? He started to speak and say: “Cousin Alethea, may not all this be stopped, this debt and poverty and make-believe—this suffering of pride, transfixed by the spears of poverty? Let you and me arrange it, and all so satisfactorily. I have loved Alice all my life.”

There is the fool in every one of us. And that is what the fool in Richard Travis wished him to say. What he did say was:

“Oh, it was nothing but purely business on my part—purely business. I had the money and was looking for a good investment. I was glad to find it. There are a hundred acres and the house left. And by the way, Cousin Alethea, I just added five-hundred dollars more to the principal,—thought, perhaps, you'd need it, you know? You'll find it to your credit at Shipton's bank.”

He smoked on as if he thought it was nothing. As a business fact he knew the place was already mortgaged for all it was worth.

“Oh, how can we ever thank you enough?”

Travis glanced at her when she spoke. He flushed when he heard her place a slight accent on the we. She glanced at him and then looked into the fire. But in their glances which met, they both saw that the other knew and understood.

“And by the way, Cousin Alethea,” said Travis after a while, “of course it is not necessary to let Alice know anything of this business. It will only worry her unnecessarily.”

“Of course not,” said Mrs. Westmore.

CHAPTER X

A STAR AND A SATELLITE

An hour later Mrs. Westmore had gone to her room and Alice had been singing his favorite songs. Her singing always had a peculiar influence over Richard Travis—a moral influence, which, perhaps, was the secret of its power; and all influence which is permanent is moral. There was in it for him an uplifting force that he never experienced save in her presence and under the influence of her songs.

He was a brilliant man and he knew that if he won Alice Westmore it must be done on a high plane. Women were his playthings—he had won them by the score and flung them away when won. But all his life—even when a boy—he had dreamed of finally winning Alice Westmore and settling down.

Like all men who were impure, he made the mistake of thinking that one day, when he wished, he could be pure.

Such a man may marry, but it is a thing of convenience, a matter in which he selects some woman, who he knows will not be his mistress, to become his housekeeper.

And thus she plods along in life, differing eventually only from his mistress in that she is the mother of his children.

In all Richard's longings, too, for Alice Westmore, there was an unconscious cause. He did not know it because he could not know.

Sooner or later love, which is loose, surfeits and sours. It is then that it turns instinctively to the pure, as the Jews, straying from their true God and meeting the chastisement of the sword of Babylon, turned in their anguish to the city of their King.

Nature is inexorable, and love has its laws as fixed as those which hold the stars in their course. And woe to the man or woman who transgresses! He who, ere it is ripe, deflowers the bud of blossoming love in wantonness and waste, in after years will watch and wait and water it with tears, in vain, for that bloom will never come.

She came over by the fire. Her face was flushed; her beautiful sad eyes lighted with excitement.

“Do you remember the first time I ever heard you sing, Alice?”

His voice was earnest and full of pathos, for him.

“Was it not when father dressed me as a gypsy girl and I rode my pony over to The Gaffs and sang from horse-back for your grandfather?”

He nodded: “I thought you were the prettiest thing I ever saw, and I have thought so ever since. That's when I fell in love with you.”

“I remember quite distinctly what you did,” she said. “You were a big boy and you came up behind my pony and jumped on, frightening us dreadfully.”

“Tried to kiss you, didn't I?”

She laughed: “That was ever a chronic endeavor of your youth.”

How pretty she looked. Had it been any other woman he would have reached over and taken her hand.

“Overpower her, master her, make her love you by force of arms”—his inner voice said.

He turned to the musing woman beside him and mechanically reached out his hand. Hers lay on the arm of her chair. The next instant he would have dropped his upon it and held it there. But as he made the motion her eyes looked up into his, so passion-free and holy that his own arm fell by his side.

But the little wave of passion in him only stirred him to his depths. Ere she knew it or could stop him he was telling her the story of his love for her. Poetry,—romance,—and with it the strength of saying,—fell from his lips as naturally as snow from the clouds. He went into the history of old loves—how, of all loves they are the greatest—of Jacob who served his fourteen years for Rachel, of the love of Petrarch, of Dante.

“Do you know Browning's most beautiful poem?” he asked at last. His voice was tenderly mellow:

“Alice,” he said, drawing his chair closer to her, “I know I have no such life to offer as you would bring to me. The best we men can do is to do the best we can. We are saved only because there is one woman we can look to always as our star. There is much of our past that we all might wish to change, but change, like work, is the law of life, and we must not always dream.”

Quietly he had dropped his hand upon hers. Her own eyes were far off—they were dreaming. So deep was her dream that she had not noticed it. Passion practised, as he was, the torch of her hand thrilled him as with wine; and as with wine was he daring.

“I know where your thoughts have been,” he went on.

She looked up with a start and her hand slipped from under his into her lap. It was a simple movement and involuntary—like that of the little brown quail when she slips from the sedge-grass into the tangled depths of the blossoming wild blackberry bushes at the far off flash of a sharp-shinned hawk-wing, up in the blue. Nor could she say whether she saw it, or whether it was merely a shadow, an instinctive signal from the innocent courts of the sky to the brood-children of her innocence below.

But he saw it and said quickly, changing with it the subject: “At least were—but all that has passed. I need you, Alice,” he went on passionately—“in my life, in my work. My home is there, waiting! It has been waiting all these years for you—its mistress—the only mistress it shall ever have. Your mother”—Alice looked at him surprised.

“Your mother—you,—perhaps, had not thought of that—your mother needs the rest and the care we could give her. Our lives are not always our own,” he went on gravely—“oftentimes it belongs partly to others—for their happiness.”

He felt that he was striking a winning chord.

“You can love me if you would say so,” he said, bending low over her.

This time, when his hand fell on hers, she did not move. Surprised, he looked into her eyes. There were tears there.

Travis knew when he had gone far enough. Reverently he kissed her hand as he said:

“Never mind—in your own time, Alice. I can wait—I have waited long. Twenty years,” he added, patiently, even sweetly, “and if need be, I'll wait twenty more.”

“I'll go now,” he said, after a moment.

She looked at him gratefully, and arose. “One moment, Richard,” she said—“but you were speaking of mother, and knowing your zeal for her I was afraid you might—might—the mortgage has been troubling her.”

“Oh, no—no”—he broke in quickly—“I did nothing—absolutely nothing—though I wanted to for your sake.”

“I'm so glad,” she said—“we will manage somehow. I am so sensitive about such things.”

“I'll come to-morrow afternoon and bring your mare.”

She smiled, surprised.

“Yes, your mare—I happened on her quite unexpectedly in Tennessee. I have bought her for you—she is elegant, and I wish you to ride her often. I have given Jim orders that no one but you shall ride her. If it is a pretty day to-morrow I shall be around in the afternoon, and we will ride down to the bluffs five miles away to see the sunset.”

The trotters were at the door. He took her hand as he said good-bye, and held it while he added:

“Maybe you'd better forget all I said to-night—be patient with me—remember how long I have waited.”

He was off and sprang into the buggy, elated. Never before had she let him hold her hand even for a moment. He felt, he knew, that he would win her.

He turned the horses and drove off.

From Westmoreland Travis drove straight toward the town. The trotters, keen and full of play, flew along, tossing their queenly heads in the very exuberance of life.

At The Gaffs, he drew rein: “Now, Jim, I'll be back at midnight. You sleep light until I come in, and have their bedding dry and blankets ready.”

He tossed the boy a dollar as he drove off.

Up the road toward the town he drove, finally slackening his trotters' speed as he came into the more thickly settled part of the outskirts. Sand Mountain loomed high in the faint moonlight, and at its base, in the outposts of the town, arose the smoke-stack of the cotton mills.

Around it lay Cottontown.

Slowly he brought the nettled trotters down to a walk. Quietly he turned them into a shaded lane, overhung with forest trees, near which a cottage, one of the many belonging to the mill, stood in the shadow of the forest.

Stopping his horses in the shadow, he drew out his watch and pressed the stem. It struck eleven.

He drew up the buggy-top and taking the little silver whistle from his pocket, gave a low whistle.

It was ten minutes later before the side door of the cottage opened softly and a girl came noiselessly out. She slipped out, following the shadow line of the trees until she came up to the buggy. Then she threw the shawl from off her face and head and stood smiling up at Travis. It had been a pretty face, but now it was pinched by overwork and there was the mingling both of sadness and gladness in her eyes. But at sight of Travis she blushed joyfully, and deeper still when he held out his hand and drew her into the buggy and up to the seat beside him.

“Maggie”—was all he whispered. Then he kissed her passionately on her lips. “I am glad I came,” he went on, as he put one arm around her and drew her to him—“you're flushed and the ride will do you good.”

She was satisfied to let her head lie on his shoulder.

“They are beauties”—she said after a while, as the trotters' thrilling, quick step brought the blood tingling to her veins.

“Beauties for the beauty,” said Travis, kissing her again. Her brown hair was in his face and the perfume of it went through him like the whistling flash of the first wild doe he had killed in his first boyish hunt and which he never forgot.

“You do love me,” she said at last, looking up into his face, where her head rested. She could not move because his arm held her girlish form to him with an overpowering clasp.

“Why?” he asked, kissing her again and in sheer passionate excess holding his lips on hers until she could not speak, but only look love with her eyes. When she could, she sighed and said:

“Because, you could not make me so happy if you didn't.”

He relaxed his arm to control the trotters, which were going too fast down the road. She sat up by his side and went on.

“Do you know I have thought lots about what you said last Saturday night?”

“Why, what?” he asked.

She looked pained that he had forgotten.

“About—about—our bein' married to each other—even—even—if—if—there's no preacher. You know—that true love makes marriages, and not a ceremony—and—and—that the heart is the priest to all of us, you know!”

Travis said nothing. He had forgotten all about it.

“One thing I wrote down in my little book when I got back home an' memorized it—Oh, you can say such beautiful things.”

He seized her and kissed her again.

“I am so happy with you—always—” she laughed.

He drove toward the shaded trees down by the river.

“I want you to see how the setting moonlight looks on the river,” he said. “There is nothing in all nature like it. It floats like a crescent above, falling into the arms of its companion below. All nature is love and never fails to paint a love scene in preference to all others, if permitted. How else can you account for it making two lover moons fall into each other's arms,” he laughed.

She looked at him enraptured. It was the tribute which mediocrity pays to genius.

Presently they passed by Westmoreland, and from Alice's window a light shone far out into the golden tinged leaves of the beeches near.

Travis glanced up at it. Then at the pretty mill-girl by his side:

“A star and—a satellite!”—he smiled to himself.

CHAPTER XI

A MIDNIGHT BURIAL

It was growing late when the old preacher left Westmoreland and rode leisurely back toward the cabin on Sand Mountain. The horse he was riding—a dilapidated roan—was old and blind, but fox-trotted along with the easy assurance of having often travelled the same road.

The bridle rested on the pommel of the saddle. The old man's head was bent in deep thought, and the roan, his head also down and half dreaming, jogged into the dark shadows which formed a wooded gulch, leading into the valley and from thence into the river.

There is in us an unnameable spiritual quality which, from lack of a more specific name, we call mental telepathy. Some day we shall know more about it, just as some day we shall know what unknown force it is which draws the needle to the pole.

It is the border land of the spiritual—a touch of it, given, to let us know there is more and in great abundance in the country to which we ultimately shall go,—a glimpse of the kingdom which is to be.

To-night, this influence was on the old man. The theme of his thoughts was, Captain Tom. Somehow he felt that even then Captain Tom was near him. How—where—why—he could not tell. He merely felt it.

And so the very shadows of the trees grew uncanny to him as he rode by them and the slight wind among them mourned Captain Tom—Captain Tom.

It was a desolate place in the narrow mountain road and scarcely could the old man see the white sand which wound in and through it, and then out again on the opposite side into the clearing beyond the scraggy side of Sand Mountain. But the horse knew every foot of the way, and though it was always night with him, instinct had taught him a sure footing.

Suddenly the rider was awakened from his reverie by the old horse stopping so suddenly as almost to unseat him. With a snort the roan had stopped and had thrown up his head, quivering with fear, while with his nose he was trying to smell out the queer thing which stood in his path.

The moon broke out from behind a cloud at the same moment, and there, in the middle of the road, not ten yards from him, stood a heavily built, rugged, black-bearded man in a ragged slouched hat and pointing a heavy revolver at the rider's head.

“Hands up, Hillard Watts!”

The old man looked quietly into the muzzle of the revolver and said, with a laugh:

“This ain't 'zactly my benediction time, Jack Bracken, an' I've no notion of h'istin' my arms an' axin' a blessin' over you an' that old pistol. Put it up an' tell me what you want,” he said more softly.

“Well, you do know me,” said the man, coming forward and thrusting his pistol into its case. “I wa'nt sho' it was you,” he said, “and I wa'nt sho' you'd kno' me if it was. In my business I have to be mighty keerful,” he added with a slight laugh.

He came up to the saddle-skirt and held out his hand, half hesitatingly, as he spoke.

The Bishop—as every one knew him—glanced into the face before him and saw something which touched him quickly. It was grief-stricken, and sorrow sat in the fierce eyes, and in the shadows of the dark face. And through it all, a pleading, beseeching appeal for sympathy ran as he half doubtingly held out his hand.

“Why,—yes—, I'll take it, Jack, robber that you are,” said the old man cheerily. “You may not be as bad as they say, an' no man is worse than his heart. But what in the worl' do you want to hold up as po' a man as me—an' if I do say it, yo' frien' when you was a boy?”

“I know,” said the other—“I know. I don't want yo' money, even if you had it. I want you. You've come as a God-send. I—I couldn't bury him till you'd said somethin'.”

His voice choked—he shook with a suppressed sob.

The bishop slid off his horse: “What is it, Jack? You hain't kilt anybody, have you?”

“No—no”—said the other—“it's little—little Jack—he's dead.”

The Bishop looked at him inquiringly. He had never before heard of little Jack.

“I—I dunno', Jack,” he said. “You'll have to tell me all. I hain't seed you sence you started in your robber career after the war—sence I buried yo' father,” he added. “An' a fine, brave man he was, Jack—a fine, brave man—an' I've wondered how sech a man's son could ever do as you've done.”

“Come,” said the other—“I'll tell you. Come, an' say a prayer over little Jack fust. You must do it”—he said almost fiercely—“I won't bury him without a prayer—him that was an angel an' all I had on earth. Hitch yo' hoss just outer the road, in the thicket, an' follow me.”

The Bishop did as he was told, and Jack Bracken led the way down a rocky gulch under the shaggy sides of Sand Mountain, furzed with scraggy trees and thick with underbrush and weeds.

It was a tortuous path and one in which the old man himself, knowing, as he thought he did, every foot of the country around, could easily have been lost. Above, through the trees, the moon shone dimly, and no path could be seen under foot. But Jack Bracken slouched heavily along, in a wabbling, awkward gait, never once looking back to see if his companion followed.

For a half mile they went through what the Bishop had always thought was an almost impenetrable cattle trail. At last they wound around a curve on the densely wooded side of the mountain, beyond which lay the broad river breathing out frosty mist and vapor from its sleeping bosom.

Following a dry gulch until it ended abruptly at the river's bluff, around the mouth of which great loose rocks lay as they had been washed by the waters of many centuries, and bushes grew about, the path terminated abruptly. It overlooked the river romantically, with a natural rock gallery in front.

Jack Bracken stopped and sat down on one of the rocks. From underneath he drew forth a lantern and prepared to light it. “This is my home,” he said laconically.

The Bishop looked around: “Well, Jack, but this is part of my own leetle forty-acre farm. Why, thar's my cabin up yander. We've wound in an' aroun' the back of my place down by the river! I never seed this hole befo'.”

“I knew it was yo's,” said the outlaw quietly. “That's why I come here. Many a Sunday night I've slipped up to the little church winder an' heard you preach—me an' po' little Jack. Oh, he loved to hear the Bible read an' he never forgot nothin' you ever said. He knowed all about Joseph an' Moses an' Jesus, an' last night when he died o' that croup befo' I c'ud get him help or anything, he wanted you, an' he said he was goin' to the lan' where you said Jesus was—”

He broke down—he could not say it.

Stepping into the mouth of the cave, he struck a match, when out of sight of the entrance way, and stepping from stone to stone he guided the Bishop down some twenty feet, following the channel the water had cut on its way underground to the river. Here another opening entered into the dry channel, and into it he stepped.

It was a nicely turned cave—a natural room,—arched above with beautiful white lime-rock, the stalactites hanging in pointed clusters, their starry points twinkling above like stars in a winter sky. Underneath, the soft sand made a clean, warm floor, and the entire cave was so beautiful that the old man could do nothing but look and admire, as the light fell on stalagmite and ghostly columns and white sanded floors.

“Beautiful,” he said—“Jack, you cudn't he'p gettin' relig'un here.”

“Little Jack loved 'em,” said the outlaw. “He'd lay here ev'y night befo' he'd go to sleep an' look up an' call it his heaven; an' he said that big column thar was the great white throne, an' them big things up yander with wings was angels. He had all them other columns named for the fellers you preached about—Moses an' Aaron an' Joseph an' all of 'em, an' that kind o' double one lookin' like a woman holding her child, he called Mary an' little Jesus.”

“He's gone to a prettier heaven than this,” said the Bishop looking down on the little figure, with face as pale and white as any of the columns around him, neatly dressed and wrapped, save his face, in an old oil cloth and lying on the little bed that sat in a corner.

The old man sat down very tenderly by the little dead boy and, pulling out a testament from his pocket, read to the outlaw, whose whole soul was centered in all he said, the comforting chapter which Miss Alice had that night read to the old negro: “Let not your hearts be troubled....”

He explained as he read, and told the father how little Jack was now in one of the many mansions and far better off than living in a cave, the child of an outlaw, for the Bishop did not mince his words. He dwelt on it, that God had taken the little boy for love of him, and to give him a better home and perhaps as a means of changing the father, and when he said the last prayer over the dead child asking for forgiveness for the father's sins, that he might meet the little one in heaven, the heart of the outlaw burst with grief and repentance within him.

He fell at the old man's feet, on his knees—he laid his big shaggy head in the Bishop's lap and wept as he had never wept before.

“There can't be—you don't mean,” he said—“that there is forgiveness for me—that I can so live that I'll see little Jack again!”

“That's just what I mean, Jack,” said the old man—“here it all is—here—in a book that never lies, an' all vouched for by Him who could walk in here to-night and lay His sweet hands on little Jack an' tell him to rise an' laugh agin, an' he'd do it. You turn about now an' see if it ain't so—an' that you'll be better an' happier.”

“But—my God, man—you don't know—you don't understan'. I've robbed, I've killed. Men have gone down befo' my bullets like sheep. They was shootin' at me, too—but I shot best. I'm a murderer.”

The old Bishop looked at him calmly.

“So was Moses and David,” he replied—“men after God's own heart. An' so was many another that's now called a saint, from old Hickory Jackson up.”

“But I'm a robber—a thief”—began Jack Bracken.

“We all steal,” said the old man sadly shaking his head—“it's human nature. There's a thief in every trade, an' every idle hand is a robber, an' every idle tongue is a thief an' a liar. We all steal. But there's somethin' of God an' divinity in all of us, an' in spite of our shortcomin' it'll bring us back at last to our Father's home if we'll give it a chance. God's Book can't lie, an' it says: 'Tho' your sins be as scarlet they shall be white as snow!' ... an' then agin, shall have life everlasting!”

“Life everlastin',” repeated the outlaw. “Do you believe that? Oh, if it was only so! To live always up there an' with little Jack. How do you know it ain't lyin'?—It's too gran' to be so. How do you know it ain't lyin', I say? Hillard Watts, are you handin' it out to me straight about this here Jesus Christ?” he cried bitterly.

“Well, it's this way, Jack,” said the old man, “jes' this away an' plain as the nose on yo' face: Now here's me, ain' it? Well, you know I won't lie to you. You believe me, don't you?”

The outlaw nodded.

“Why?” asked the Bishop.

“Because you ain't never lied to me,” said the other. “You've allers told me the truth about the things I know to be so.”

“But now, suppose,” said the old man, “I'd tell you about somethin' you had never seed—that, for instance, sence you've been an outcast from society an' a livin' in this cave, I've seed men talk to each other a hundred miles apart, with nothin' but a wire betwix' 'em.”

“That's mighty hard to believe,” said the outlaw grimly.

“But I've seed it done,” said the Bishop.

“Do you mean it?” asked the other.

“As I live, I have,” said the Bishop.

“Then it's so,” said Jack.

“Now that's faith, Jack—an' common sense, too. We know what'll be the earthly end of the liar, an' the thief, an' the murderer, an' him that's impure—because we see 'em come to thar end all the time. It don't lie when it tells you the good are happy, an' the hones' are elevated an' the mem'ry of the just shall not perish, because them things we see come so. Now, if after tellin' you all that, that's true, it axes you to believe when it says there is another life—a spiritual life, which we can't conceive of, an' there we shall live forever, can't you believe that, too, sence it ain't never lied about what you can see, by your own senses? Why ever' star that shines, an' ever' beam of sunlight fallin' on the earth, an' ever' beat of yo' own heart by some force that we know not of, all of them is mo' wonderful than the telegraph, an' the livin' agin of the spirit ain't any mo' wonderful than the law that holds the stars in their places. You'll see little Jack agin as sho' as God lives an' holds the worl' in His hand.”

The outlaw sat mute and motionless, and a great light of joy swept over his face.

“By God's help I'll do it”—and he bowed his head in prayer—the first he had uttered since he was a boy.

It was wonderful to see the happy and reconciled change when he arose and tenderly lifted the dead child in his arms. His face was transformed with a peace the old man had never seen before in any human being.

Strong men are always strong—in crime—in sin. When they reform it is the reformation of strength. Such a change came over Jack Bracken, the outlaw.

He carried his dead child to the next room: “I've got his grave already chiseled out of the rocks. I'll bury him here—right under the columns he called Mary and little Jesus, that he loved to talk of so much.”

“It's fitten”—said the old man tenderly—“it's fitten an' beautiful. The fust burial we know of in the Bible is where Abraham bought the cave of Machpelah for to bury Sarah, his wife. And as Abraham bought it of Ephron, the Hittite, and offered it to Abraham for to bury his dead out of his sight, so I give this cave to you, Jack Bracken, forever to be the restin' place of little Jack.”

And so, tenderly and with many kisses did they bury little Jack, sinless and innocent, deep in the pure white rock, covered as he was with purity and looking ever upwards toward the statue above, wherein Nature's chisel had carved out a Madonna and her child.

CHAPTER XII

JACK BRACKEN

Jack Bracken was comfortably fixed in his underground home. There was every comfort for living. It was warm in winter and cool in summer, and in another apartment adjoining his living room was what he called a kitchen in which a spring of pure water, trickling down from rock to rock, formed in a natural basin of whitest rock below.

“Jack,” said the old man, “won't you tell me about yo'self an' how you ever got down to this? I knowed you as a boy, up to the time you went into the army, an' if I do say it to yo' face, you were a brave hon'rble boy that never forgot a frien' nor—”

“A foe,” put in Jack quickly. “Bishop, if I cu'd only forgive my foes—that's been the ruin of me.”

The old man was thoughtful a while: “Jack, that's a terrible thing in the human heart—unforgiveness. It's to life what a drought is to Nature—an' it spiles mo' people than any other weakness. But that don't make yo' no wuss than the rest of us, nor does robbery nor even murder. So there's a chance for you yet, Jack—a mighty fine chance, too, sence yo' heart is changed.”

“Many a time, Jack, many a time when the paper 'ud be full of yo' holdin' up a train or shootin' a shar'ff, or robbin' or killin', I'd tell 'em what a good boy you had been, brave an' game but revengeful when aroused. I'd tell 'em how you dared the bullets of our own men, after the battle of Shiloh, to cut down an' carry off a measley little Yankee they'd hung up as a spy 'cause he had onct saved yo' father's life. You shot two of our boys then, Jack.”

“They was a shootin' me, too,” he said quietly. “I caught two bullets savin' that Yankee. But he was no spy; he was caught in a Yankee uniform an'—an' he saved my father, as you said—that settled it with me.”

“It turned our boys agin you, Jack.”

“Yes, an' the Yankees were agin me already—that made all the worl' agin me, an' it's been agin me ever since—they made me an outlaw.”

The old man softened: “How was it, Jack? I knowed you was driven to it.”

“They shot my father—waylaid and killed him—some home-made Yankee bush-whackers that infested these hills—as you know.”

The Bishop nodded. “I know—I know—it was awful. 'But vengeance is mine—I will repay'—saith the Lord.”

“Well, I was young, an' my father—you know how I loved him. Befo' I c'ud get home they had burned our house, killed my sick mother from exposure and insulted my sisters.”

“Jack,” said the old man hotly—“a home-made Yankee is a 'bomination to the Lord. He's a twin brother to the Copperhead up north.”

“My little brother—they might have spared him,” went on the outlaw—“they might have spared him. He tried to defen' his mother an' sisters an' they shot him down in col' blood.”

“'Vengeance is mine,' saith the Lord,” replied the old man sadly.

“Well, I acted as His agent that time,”—his eyes were hot with a bright glitter. “I put on their uniform an' went after 'em. I j'ined 'em—the devils! An' they had a nigger sarjent an' ten of their twenty-seven was niggers, wearin' a Yankee uniform. I j'ined 'em—yes,—for wasn't I the agent of the Lord?” He laughed bitterly. “An' didn't He say: 'He that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword.' One by one they come up missin', till I had killed all but seven. These got panicky—followed by an unknown doom an' they c'udn't see it, for it come like a thief at midnight an' agin like a pesterlence it wasted 'em at noonday. They separated—they tried to fly—they hid—but I followed 'em 'an I got all but one. He fled to California.”

“It was awful, Jack—awful—God he'p you.”

“Then a price was put on my head. I was Jack Bracken, the spy and the outlaw. I was not to be captured, but shot and hung. Then I cut down that Yankee an' you all turned agin me. I was hunted and hounded. I shot—they shot. I killed an' they tried to. I was shot down three times. I've got bullets in me now.

“After the war I tried to surrender. I wanted to quit and live a decent life. But no, they put a bigger price on my head. I came home like other soldiers an' went to tillin' my farm. They ran me away—they hunted an' hounded me. Civilization turned ag'in me. Society was my foe. I was up ag'in the fust law of Nature. It is the law of the survival—the wild beast that, cowered, fights for his life. Society turned on me—I turned on Society.”

“But there was one thing that happen'd that put the steel in me wuss than all. All through them times was one star I loved and hoped for. I was to marry her when the war closed. She an' her sister—the pretty one—they lived up yander on the mountain side. The pretty one died. But when I lost faith in Margaret Adams, I lost it in mankind. I'd ruther a seen her dead. It staggered me—killed the soul in me—to think that an angel like her could fall an' be false.”

“I don't blame you,” said the old man. “I've never understood it yet.”

“I was to marry Margaret. I love her yet,” he added simply. “When I found she was false I went out—and—well, you know the rest.”

He took a turn around the room, picked up one of little Jack's shoes, and cried over it.

“So I married his mother—little Jack's mother, a mountain lass that hid me and befriended me. She died when the boy was born. His granny kep' him while I was on my raids—nobody knowed it was my son. His granny died two years ago. This has been our home ever sence, an' not once, sence little Jack has been with me, have I done a wrong deed. Often an' often we've slipt up to hear you preach—what you've said went home to me.”

“Jack,” said the old man suddenly aroused—“was that you—was it you been puttin' them twenty dollar gol' pieces in the church Bible—between the leds, ever' month for the las' two years? By it I've kep' up the po' of Cottontown. I've puzzled an' wonder'd—I've thought of a dozen fo'ks—but I sed nothin'—was it you?”

The outlaw smiled: “It come from the rich an' it went to the po'. Come,” he said—“that's somethin' we must settle.”

He took up the lantern and led the way into the other room. Under a ledge of rocks, securely hid, sat, in rows, half a dozen common water buckets, made of red cedar, with tops fitting securely on them.

The outlaw spread a blanket on the sand, then knelt and, taking up a bucket, removed the top and poured out its contents on the blanket. They chuckled and rolled and tumbled over each other, the yellow eagles and half eagles, like thoroughbred colts turned out in the paddocks for a romp.

The old man's knees shook under him. He trembled so that he had to sit down on the blanket. Then he ran his hand through them—his fingers open, letting the coins fall through playfully.

Never before had he seen so much gold. Poor as he was and had ever been—much and often as he had suffered—he and his, for the necessities of life, even, knowing its value and the use he might make of it, it thrilled him with a strange, nervous longing—a childish curiosity to handle it and play with it.

Modest and brave men have looked on low-bosomed women in the glitter of dissipative lights with the same feeling.

The old man gazed, silent—doubtless with the same awe which Keats gave to Cortez, when he first looked on the Pacific and stood