remarked the keen, curious
eye, the musing look, the habitual disdain at the lips. It had all
touched him, confused him; and now he had a kind of anger.

"You know it so well, why don't you preach yourself?" he said
feverishly.

"I have been preaching all my life," Pierre answered drily.

"The devil's games: cards and law-breaking; and you sneer at men who try
to bring lost sheep into the fold."

"The fold of the Church--yes, I understand all that," Pierre answered.
"I have heard you and the priests of my father's Church talk. Which is
right? But as for me, I am a missionary. Cards, law-breaking--these are
what I have done; but these are not what I have preached."

"What have you preached?" asked the other, walking on into the
fast-gathering night, beyond the Post and the Indian lodges, into the
wastes where frost and silence lived.

Pierre waved his hand towards space. "This," he said suggestively.

"What's this?" asked the other fretfully.

"The thing you feel round you here."

"I feel the cold," was the petulant reply.

"I feel the immense, the far off," said Pierre slowly.

The other did not understand as yet. "You've learned big words," he said
disdainfully.

"No; big things," rejoined Pierre sharply--"a few."

"Let me hear you preach them," half snarled Sherburne.

"You will not like to hear them--no."

"I'm not likely to think about them one way or another," was the
contemptuous reply.

Pierre's eyes half closed. The young, impetuous half-baked college man.
To set his little knowledge against his own studious vagabondage! At
that instant he determined to play a game and win; to turn this man into
a vagabond also; to see John the Baptist become a Bedouin. He saw the
doubt, the uncertainty, the shattered vanity in the youth's mind, the
missionary's half retreat from his cause. A crisis was at hand. The
youth was fretful with his great theme, instead of being severe upon
himself. For days and days Pierre's presence had acted on Sherburne
silently but forcibly. He had listened to the vagabond's philosophy, and
knew that it was of a deeper--so much deeper--knowledge of life than he
himself possessed, and he knew also that it was terribly true; he was
not wise enough to see that it was only true in part. The influence
had been insidious, delicate, cunning, and he himself was only "a voice
crying in the wilderness," without the simple creed of that voice. He
knew that the Methodist missionary was bel