vil desires, singing
forever of worldly pleasures and inseparably associated with all
forbidden things.

Eric Hermannson had long been the object of the prayers of the
revivalists. His mother had felt the power of the Spirit weeks ago, and
special prayer-meetings had been held at her house for her son. But
Eric had only gone his ways laughing, the ways of youth, which are short
enough at best, and none too flowery on the Divide.

He slipped away from the prayer-meetings to meet the Campbell boys in
Genereau's saloon, or hug the plump little French girls at Chevalier's
dances, and sometimes, of a summer night, he even went across the dewy
cornfields and through the wild-plum thicket to play the fiddle for Lena
Hanson, whose name was a reproach through all the Divide country, where
the women are usually too plain and too busy and too tired to depart
from the ways of virtue. On such occasions Lena, attired in a pink
wrapper and silk stockings and tiny pink slippers, would sing to him,
accompanying herself on a battered guitar. It gave him a delicious sense
of freedom and experience to be with a woman who, no matter how, had
lived in big cities and knew the ways of town folk, who had never worked
in the fields and had kept her hands white and soft, her throat fair
and tender, who had heard great singers in Denver and Salt Lake, and who
knew the strange language of flattery and idleness and mirth.

Yet, careless as he seemed, the frantic prayers of his mother were not
altogether without their effect upon Eric. For days he had been fleeing
before them as a criminal from his pursuers, and over his pleasures had
fallen the shadow of something dark and terrible that dogged his steps.
The harder he danced, the louder he sang, the more was he conscious that
this phantom was gaining upon him, that in time it would track him down.
One Sunday afternoon, late in the fall, when he had been drinking beer
with Lena Hanson and listening to a song which made his cheeks burn, a
rattlesnake had crawled out of the side of the sod house and thrust its
ugly head in under the screen door. He was not afraid of snakes, but he
knew enough of Gospellism to feel the significance of the reptile lying
coiled there upon her doorstep. His lips were cold when he kissed Lena
goodbye, and he went there no more.

The final barrier between Eric and his mother's faith was his violin,
and to that he clung as a man sometimes will cling to his dearest sin,
to