The Leatherwood God | Page 9

glances of his black eyes roved round the room, but were
devoutly lowered at the prayer which opened the service. It was a
Methodist who preached, but somehow to-night he had not the fervor
of his sect; his sermon was cold, and addressed itself to the faith rather
than the hope of his hearers. He spoke as from the hold of an
oppressive spell; at times he was perplexed, and lost his place in his
exhortation. In the close heat some drowsed, and the preacher was
distracted by snoring from a corner near the door. He lifted his voice as

if to rouse the sleeper, or to drown the noise; but he could not. He came
to the blessing at last, and the disappointed congregation rose to go out.
Suddenly the loud snort that had dismayed the camp-meeting sounded
through the heavy air, and then there came the thrilling shout of
"Salvation."
The people did not need to look where the stranger had been sitting; he
had done what they hoped, what they expected, and he was now
towering over those near him, with his head thrown back, and his hair
tossed like a mane on his shoulders. The people stopped; some who had
gone out crowded in again; no one knew quite what to do. The minister
halted on the pulpit stairs; he had done his part for the night, and he did
not apparently resent the action of the man who now took it on him to
speak.
A tall, stout man among those who had lingered, spoke from the aisle.
He was the owner of the largest farm in the neighborhood and he had
one of the mills on the creek. In his quality of miller everybody knew
him, and he had the authority of a public character. Now he said:
"We want to hear something more than a snort and a shout from our
brother here. We heard them Friday night, and we've been talkin' about
it ever since."
The appeal was half joking, half entreating. The minister was still
hesitating on the pulpit stairs, and he looked at the stranger. "Will you
come up, Brother--"
"Call me Dylks--for the present," the stranger answered with a full
voice.
"Brother Dylks," the minister repeated, and he came down, and gave
him the right hand of fellowship.
The Gillespies looked on with their different indifference. Dylks turned
to them: "Shall I speak?"
"Speak!" the girl said, but her father said nothing.
Dylks ran quickly up the pulpit steps: "We will join in prayer!" he
called out, and he held the congregation, now returned to their places,
in the spell of a quick, short supplication. He ended it with the Lord's
Prayer; then he said, "Let us sing," and line after line he gave out the
hymn,
"Plunged in a gulf of dark despair We wretched sinners lay."
He expounded each stanza, as to the religious sense and the poetic

meaning, before he led the singing. He gave out a passage of Scripture,
as a sort of text, but he did not keep to it; he followed with other
passages, and his discourse was a rehearsal of these rather than a
sermon. His memory in them was unerring; women who knew their
Bibles by heart sighed their satisfaction in his perfectness; they did not
care for the relevance or irrelevance of the passages; all was Scripture,
all was the one inseparable Word of God, dreadful, blissful, divine,
promising heaven, threatening hell. Groans began to go up from the
people held in the strong witchery of the man's voice. They did not
know whether he spoke long or not. Before they knew, he was as if
sweeping them to their feet with a repetition of his opening hymn, and
they were singing with him:
"Plunged in a gulf of dark despair We wretched sinners lay."
It ended, and he gave his wild brutish snort, and then his heart-shaking
cry of "Salvation!"
Some of the chief men remained to speak with him, to contend for him
as their guest; but old David Gillespie did not contend with them. "You
can have him," he said to the miller, Peter Hingston, "if he wants to go
with you." He was almost rude, and his daughter was not opener with
the women who crowded about her trying to make her say something
that would feed their hunger to know more. She remained hard and cold,
almost dumb; it seemed to them that she was not worthy to have had
him under her father's roof. As for her father, they had no patience with
him for not putting in a word to claim the stranger while the others
were pressing him to come home with them. In spite of the indifference
of Gillespie and his girl, Dylks