nes
had been cracked in the hot flames; a feud had opened graves before the
allotted time of the victims. It seemed to Elijah, sitting there in his
cabin, as though damnation had visited the faithful, and that death was
the reward of belief.

The ruins of the old Temple stood melancholy where the heavy stone wall,
built by a man who believed in broad, firm foundations, had split an
avalanche, but without avail, for the walls had given way and let the
roof beams drop in. No less certain had been the fate of the
congregation; they, too, were scattered or dead. There remained but one
dwelling in the little valley, with a lone occupant, who was wrestling
with his soul, trying to understand, for he knew in his heart that he
must read the truth and discover the meaning of all this trouble,
privation, disaster, and death.

He was quite practical about it. He had a field of corn, and a little
garden full of truck; over his fireplace hung a 32-20 repeating rifle,
and in one corner were a number of steel traps, copper and brass wire
for snares, and a home-made mattock with which a rabbit could be
extricated from a burrow, or a skunk-skin from its den.

An Almanac, a Bible, and a "Resources of Tennessee" comprised the
library on the shelf. The Almanac had come by mail from away off yonder,
about a hundred miles, perhaps--anyhow, from New York. The "Resources of
Tennessee" had come down with a spring freshet in Jackson River, and was
rather stained with mountain clays. The Bible was, of course, an
inheritance.

It was a very small article, apparently, to create all the disturbances
that seemed to have followed its interpretations there on Temple Run.
Elijah would hold it out at arms length and stare at it with those sharp
eyes of his, wondering in his soul how it could be that the fate of
nations, the future of humanity, the very salvation of every soul rested
within the compass of that leather-covered, gilt-edged parcel of thin
paper which weighed rather less than half as much as a box of
cartridges.

Elijah did not spare himself in the least. He toiled at whatever task
appeared for him to do. As he required for his own wants fifty bushels
of corn for a year, he planted enough to shuck a hundred bushels. Once,
in the fervour of the hope that he was called upon to raise corn for
humanity, he raised five hundred bushels, only to give it all away to
poor white trash who had not raised enough for themselves.

Again he felt the