lower lip hung loosely except in
his moments of spasmodic earnestness, when it shut like a steel
trap. Yet about those coarse features there were deep, rugged
furrows, the scars of many a hand-to-hand struggle with the weakness
of the flesh, and about that drooping lip were sharp, strenuous
lines that had conquered it and taught it to pray. Over those seamed
cheeks there was a certain pallor, a grayness caught from many a
vigil. It was as though, after Nature had done her worst with that
face, some fine chisel had gone over it, chastening and almost
transfiguring it. To-night, as his muscles twitched with emotion,
and the perspiration dropped from his hair and chin, there was a
certain convincing power in the man. For Asa Skinner was a man
possessed of a belief, of that sentiment of the sublime before which
all inequalities are leveled, that transport of conviction which
seems superior to all laws of condition, under which debauchees have
become martyrs; which made a tinker an artist and a camel-driver the
founder of an empire. This was with Asa Skinner to-night, as he
stood proclaiming the vengeance of God.

It might have occurred to an impartial observer that Asa Skinner's
God was indeed a vengeful God if he could reserve vengeance for
those of his creatures who were packed into the Lone Star
schoolhouse that night. Poor exiles of all nations; men from the
south and the north, peasants from almost every country of Europe,
most of them from the mountainous, night-bound coast of Norway.
Honest men for the most part, but men with whom the world had dealt
hardly; the failures of all countries, men sobered by toil and
saddened by exile, who had been driven to fight for the dominion of
an untoward soil, to sow where others should gather, the
advance-guard of a mighty civilization to be.

Never had Asa Skinner spoken more earnestly than now. He felt that
the Lord had this night a special work for him to do. To-night Eric
Hermannson, the wildest lad on all the Divide, sat in his audience
with a fiddle on his knee, just as he had dropped in on his way to
play for some dance. The violin is an object of particular
abhorrence to the Free Gospellers. Their antagonism to the church
organ is bitter enough, but the fiddle they regard as a very
incarnation of evil 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
rev