The Seeker | Page 4

him with great rumbling purrs, nosing its head
under one of his hands suggestively, and, when he stroked it, looking
up at him with lazily falling eye-lids.
He crossed his knees to make a better lap for the cat, and fell to musing
backward into his own boyhood, when the Christmas Saint was a real
presence. Then he came forward to his youth, when he had obeyed the
call of the Lord against his father's express command that he follow the
family way and become a prosperous manufacturer. Truly there had
been revolt in him. Perhaps he had never enough considered this in
excuse for his own daughter's revolt.
Again he dwelt in the days when he had preached with a hot passion
such truth as was his. For a long time, while the old clock ticked on the
mantel before him and the big cat purred or slept under his absent
pettings, his mind moved through an incident of that early ministry.
Clear in his memory were certain passages of fire from the sermon. In

the little log church at Edom he had felt the spirit burn in him and he
had movingly voiced its warnings of that dread place where the flames
forever blaze, yet never consume; where cries ever go up for one drop
of water to cool the parched tongues of those who sought not God
while they lived. He had told of one who died--one that the world
called good, a moral man--but not a Christian; one who had perversely
neglected the way of life. How, on his death-bed, this one had called in
agony for a last glass of water, seeming to know all at once that he
would now be where no drop of water could cool him through all
eternity.
So effective had been his putting of this that a terrified throng came
forward at his call for converts.
The next morning he had ridden away from Edom toward Felton Falls
to preach there. A mile out of town he had been accosted by a big,
bearded man who had yet a singularly childish look--who urged that he
come to his cabin to minister to a sick friend. He knew the fellow for
one that the village of Edom called "daft" or "queer," yet held to be
harmless--to be rather amusing, indeed, since he could be provoked to
deliver curious harangues upon the subject of revealed religion. He
remembered now that the man's face had stared at him from far back in
the church the night before--a face full of the liveliest terror, though he
had not been among those that fled to the mercy-seat. Acceding to the
man's request, he followed him up a wooded path to his cabin.
Dismounting and tying his horse, he entered and, turning to ask where
the sick man was, found himself throttled in the grasp of a giant.
He was thrust into an inner room, windowless and with no door other
than the one now barred by his chuckling captor. And here the
Reverend Allan Delcher had lain three days and two nights captive of a
madman, with no food and without one drop of water.
From the other side of the log partition his captor had declared himself
to be the keeper of hell. Even now he could hear the words maundered
through the chinks: "Never got another drop of water for a million
years and still more, and him a burning up and a roasting up, and his
tongue a lolling out, all of a sizzle. Now wasn't that fine--because folks

said he'd likely gone crazy about religion!"
Other times his captor would declare himself to be John the Baptist
making straight the paths in the wilderness. Again he would quote
passages of scripture, some of them hideous mockeries to the tortured
prisoner, some strangely soothing and suggestive.
But a search had been made for the missing man and, quite by accident,
they had found him, at a time when it seemed to him his mind must go
with his captor's. His recovery from the physical blight of this captivity
had been prompt; but there were those who sat under him who insisted
that ever after he had been palpably less insistent upon the feature of
divine retribution for what might be called the merely technical sins of
heterodoxy. Not that unsound doctrine was ever so much as hinted of
him; only, as once averred a plain parishioner, "He seemed to bear
down on hell jest a _lee-tle_ less continuously."
As for his young wife, she had ever after professed an unconquerable
aversion for those sermons in which God's punishment of sinners was
set forth; and this had strangely been true of their daughter, born but a
little time after the father's release from the