t is.
Dessie's shorely got principle. No two ways about it.' He shifted the
stone back to place, tilted back in his chair, and patting his foot
began to whistle a rakish tune. He was still whistling as I rode off
into the bitter night."

There was another time Dyke recalled when old Granny Partlow sent word
that she couldn't hold out against the Lord no longer. Granny was
nearing eighty and for thirty of her years she had sat a helpless
cripple in a chair. At the birth of her seventeenth child, paralysis had
overtaken Deborah, wife of Obadiah Partlow, rendering her useless to her
spouse and their numerous offspring. She had protested bitterly, saying
right out that it wasn't fair and that so long as the affliction was
upon her she meant to ask no favor of the Lord. Deborah Partlow was
through with prayer and Scripture and Meeting, though in health never
had been there a more pious creature than Obadiah Partlow's wife.
Neighbor folk saw her wither and pine through the years. A grim figure,
she sat day in and day out in her chair wherever it was placed. Lifeless
from the waist down, using her hands a little to peel potatoes or string
beans, though so slow and laborious were the movements of the stiff
fingers her children and Obadiah said they'd rather do any task
themselves than to give it to her. At last she had become an old woman,
shriveled, grim, still bitter about her fate.

No one was more surprised than Uncle Dyke Garrett when she sent for him.

"Granny Partlow craved baptism," Uncle Dyke remembered the story as
clearly as though it had happened but yesterday. "The ice was all of a
foot thick in the creek but men cut it with ax and maddock, spade and
saw. It had to be a big opening to make room for Deborah Partlow and her
chair. Though her children and grandchildren and old Obadiah
protested--'It'll kill you!' 'You'll be stone dead before
night!'--Granny had her way. Nor would she put on her bonnet or shawl.
Resolute, she sat straight in her chair as neighbor men packed her
through the snow to the creek. The women standing on the bank wept and
wailed till they couldn't sing a hymn. 'It'll kill Granny Partlow!' they
cried."

Uncle Dyke was silent a long moment. "No one could ever rightly say how
it come about. But the minute my two helpers brought the old woman up
out of the icy waters she leaped out of her chair and took off up the
bank for home, fleet as a partridge, through snow up to her knees,
holding up h