“Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? Is there a Saul here
to-night who has stopped his ears to that gentle pleading, who has
thrust a spear into that bleeding side? Think of it, my brother; you
are offered this wonderful love and you prefer the worm that dieth
not and the fire which will not be quenched. What right have you to
lose one of God’s precious souls? _Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou
me?_”
A great joy dawned in Asa Skinner’s pale face, for he saw that Eric
Hermannson was swaying to and fro in his seat. The minister fell
upon his knees and threw his long arms up over his head.
“O my brothers! I feel it coming, the blessing we have prayed for. I
tell you the Spirit is coming! Just a little more prayer, brothers,
a little more zeal, and he will be here. I can feel his cooling wing
upon my brow. Glory be to God forever and ever, amen!”
The whole congregation groaned under the pressure of this spiritual
panic. Shouts and hallelujahs went up from every lip. Another figure
fell prostrate upon the floor. From the mourners’ bench rose a chant
of terror and rapture:
“Eating honey and drinking wine,
Glory to the bleeding Lamb!
I am my Lord’s and he is mine,
Glory to the bleeding Lamb!
“
The hymn was sung in a dozen dialects and voiced all the vague
yearning of these hungry lives, of these people who had starved all
the passions so long, only to fall victims to the basest of them
all, fear.
A groan of ultimate anguish rose from Eric Hermannson’s bowed head,
and the sound was like the groan of a great tree when it falls in
the forest.
The minister rose suddenly to his feet and threw back his head,
crying in a loud voice:
“Lazarus, come forth! Eric Hermannson, you are lost, going down at
sea. In the name of God, and Jesus Christ his Son, I throw you the
life-line. Take hold! Almighty God, my soul for his!” The minister
threw his arms out and lifted his quivering face.
Eric Hermannson rose to his feet; his lips were set and the
lightning was in his eyes. He took his violin by the neck and
crushed it to splinters across his knee, and to Asa Skinner the
sound was like the shackles of sin broken audibly asunder.
II.
For more than two years Eric Hermannson kept the austere faith to
which he had sworn himself, kept it until a girl from the East came
to spend a week on the Nebraska Divide. She was a girl of other
manners and conditions, and there were greater distances between her
life and Eric’s than all the miles which separated Rattlesnake Creek
from New York city. Indeed, she had no business to be in the West at
all; but ah! across what leagues of land and sea, by what improbable
chances, do the unrelenting gods bring to us our fate!
It was in a year of financial depression that Wyllis Elliot came to
Nebraska to buy cheap land and revisit the country where he had
spent a year of his youth. When he had graduated from Harvard it was
still customary for moneyed gentlemen to send their scapegrace sons
to rough it on ranches in the wilds of Nebraska or Dakota, or to
consign them to a living death in the sage-brush of the Black Hills.
These young men did not always return to the ways of civilized life.
But Wyllis Elliot had not married a half-breed, nor been shot in a
cow-punchers’ brawl, nor wrecked by bad whisky, nor appropriated by
a smirched adventuress. He had been saved from these things by a
girl, his sister, who had been very near to his life ever since the
days when they read fairy tales together and dreamed the dreams that
never come true. On this, his first visit to his father’s ranch
since he left it six years before, he brought her with him. She had
been laid up half the winter from a sprain received while skating,
and had had too much time for reflection during those months. She
was restless and filled with a desire to see something of the wild
country of which her brother had told her so much. She was to be
married the next winter, and Wyllis understood her when she begged
him to take her with him on this long, aimless jaunt across the
continent, to taste the last of their freedom together. It comes to
all women of her type—that desire to taste the unknown which
allures and terrifies, to run one’s whole soul’s length out to the
wind—just once.
It had been an eventful journey. Wyllis somehow understood that
strain of gypsy blood in his sister, and he knew where to take her.
They had slept in sod houses on the Platte River, made the
acquaintance of the personnel of a third-rate opera company on the
train to Deadwood, dined in a camp of railroad constructors at the
world’s end beyond New Castle, gone through the Black Hills on
horseback, fished for trout in Dome Lake, watched a dance at Cripple
Creek, where the lost souls who hide in the hills gathered for their
besotted revelry. And now, last of all, before the return to
thraldom, there was this little shack, anchored on the windy crest
of the Divide, a little black dot against the flaming sunsets, a
scented sea of cornland bathed in opalescent air and blinding
sunlight.
Margaret Elliot was one of those women of whom there are so many in
this day, when old order, passing, giveth place to new; beautiful,
talented, critical, unsatisfied, tired of the world at twenty-four.
For the moment the life and people of the Divide interested her. She
was there but a week; perhaps had she stayed longer, that inexorable
ennui which travels faster even than the Vestibule Limited would
have overtaken her. The week she tarried there was the week that
Eric Hermannson was helping Jerry Lockhart thresh; a week earlier or
a week later, and there would have been no story to write.
It was on Thursday and they were to leave on Saturday. Wyllis and
his sister were sitting on the wide piazza of the ranchhouse,
staring out into the afternoon sunlight and protesting against the
gusts of hot wind that blew up from the sandy river-bottom twenty
miles to the southward.
The young man pulled his cap lower over his eyes and remarked:
“This wind is the real thing; you don’t strike it anywhere else. You
remember we had a touch of it in Algiers and I told you it came from
Kansas. It’s the key-note of this country.”
Wyllis touched her hand that lay on the hammock and continued
gently:
“I hope it’s paid you, Sis. Roughing it’s dangerous business; it
takes the taste out of things.”
She shut her fingers firmly over the brown hand that was so like her
own.
“Paid? Why, Wyllis, I haven’t been so happy since we were children
and were going to discover the ruins of Troy together some day. Do
you know, I believe I could just stay on here forever and let the
world go on its own gait. It seems as though the tension and strain
we used to talk of last winter were gone for good, as though one
could never give one’s strength out to such petty things any more.”
Wyllis brushed the ashes of his pipe away from the silk handkerchief
that was knotted about his neck and stared moodily off at the
sky-line.
“No, you’re mistaken. This would bore you after a while. You can’t
shake the fever of the other life. I’ve tried it. There was a time
when the gay fellows of Rome could trot down into the Thebaid and
burrow into the sandhills and get rid of it. But it’s all too
complex now. You see we’ve made our dissipations so dainty and