The Leatherwood God | Page 2

from the other world and fix them on this. In their
remoteness from the political centers of the young republic, they
seldom spoke of the civic questions stirring the towns of the East; the
commercial and industrial problems which vex modern society were

unknown to them. Religion was their chief interest and the seriousness
which they had inherited from their Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran,
and Moravian ancestry was expressed in their orderly and diligent lives;
but the general prosperity had so far relaxed the stringency of their
several creeds that their distinctive public rite had come to express a
mutual toleration. The different sects had their different services; their
ceremonies of public baptism, their revivals, their camp-meetings; but
they gathered as one Christian people under the roof of the log-built
edifice, thrice the size of their largest dwelling, which they called the
Temple.

I
A storm of the afternoon before had cleared the mid-August air. The
early sun was hot, but the wind had carried away the sultry mists, and
infused fresh life into the day. Where Matthew Braile sat smoking his
corncob pipe in the covered porchway between the rooms of his
double-log cabin he insensibly shared the common exhilaration, and
waited comfortably for the breakfast of bacon and coffee which his
wife was getting within. As he smoked on he inhaled with the odors
from her cooking the dense rich smell of the ripening corn that stirred
in the morning breeze on three sides of the cabin, and the fumes of the
yellow tobacco which he had grown, and cured, and was now burning.
His serenity was a somewhat hawklike repose, but the light that came
into his narrowed eyes was of rather amused liking, as a man on a
claybank horse rode up before the cabin in the space where alone it was
not hidden by the ranks of the tall corn. The man sat astride a sack with
a grist of corn in one end balanced by a large stone in the other, and he
made as if he were going on to the mill without stopping; but he
yielded apparently to a temptation from within, since none had come
from without. "Whoa!" he shouted at the claybank, which the slightest
whisper would have stayed; and then he called to the old man on the
porch, "Fine mornun', Squire!"
Braile took out his pipe, and spat over the edge of the porch, before he
called back, "Won't you light and have some breakfast?"
"Well, no, thank you, Squire," the man said, and at the same time he
roused the claybank from an instant repose, and pushed her to the cabin
steps. "I'm just on my way down to Brother Hingston's mill, and I

reckon Sally don't want me to have any breakfast till I bring back the
meal for her to git it with; anyway that's what she said when I left."
Braile answered nothing, and the rider of the claybank added, with a
certain uneasiness as if for the effect of what he was going to say, "I
was up putty late last night, and I reckon I overslep'," he parleyed. Then,
as Braile remained silent, he went on briskly, "I was wonderin' if you
hearn about the curious doun's last night at the camp-meetun'."
Braile, said, without ceasing to smoke, "You're the first one I've seen
this morning, except my wife. She wasn't at the camp-meeting." His
aquiline profile, which met close at the lips from the loss of his teeth,
compressed itself further in leaving the whole burden of the affair to
the man on the claybank, and his narrowed eyes were a line of mocking
under the thick gray brows that stuck out like feathers above them.
"Well, sir, it was great doun's," the other said, wincing a little under the
old man's indifference. Braile relented so far as to ask, "Who was at the
bellows?"
The other answered with a certain inward deprecation of the grin that
spread over his face, and the responsive levity of his phrase, "There
was a change of hands, but the one that kep' the fire goun' the hardes'
and the hottes' was Elder Grove."
Braile made "Hoonck!" in the scornful guttural which no English
spelling can represent.
"Yes, sir," the man on the claybank went on, carried forward by his
own interest, but helpless to deny himself the guilty pleasure of falling
in with Braile's humor, "he had 'em goun' lively, about midnight, now I
tell you: whoopun' and yellun', and rippun' and stavun', and fallun'
down with the jerks, and pullun' and haulun' at the sinners, to git 'em up
to the mourners' bench, and hurrahun' over 'em, as fast as they was
knocked down and drug out. I never seen the beat of it in