call to preach, and he went forth with all the
eagerness of a man who had at last discovered his life's calling. He
went on foot, through storms, over mountains, and into a hundred
schoolhouses and churches, showing his little leather-skinned Bible and
warning sinners to repent, Christians to keep faith, and Baal to lower
his loathly head.

He had returned from his five months' pilgrimage with the feeling that
his utmost efforts had been futile, and that for all his good will, it
had not been vouchsafed him to leave behind one thought in fertile soil.
The matter had been brought home to him by an incident of the last
meeting he had addressed, over on Clinch.

In the Painted Church he had volunteered a sermon, and no sermons had
been preached there in years. Feuds, inextricably tangled, had involved
five different families, and members of all those families were in the
church, answering to his challenge.

They sat there with rifles or shotguns between their knees, with their
pistols on their hips, and eternal vigilance in their eyes. While
listening to his sermon they kept their gaze fastened upon one another,
lest an unwary moment bring upon them the alert shot of an enemy.

As he had stood there, gaunt in frame, famished of soul, driven by the
torments of an ambition to see the right, to do it, it seemed to him as
though the final burden had been heaped upon him, and that he must
break under the weight on his mind.

"What can I say to you all?" he burst out with sudden passion. "Theh yo'
set with guns in yo' hands an' murder in yo' souls--to listen to the
word of God! How do yo' expect the Prince of Peace to come to yo' if yo'
set there thataway?"

His indignation rose as he saw them, and his scorn unbridled his tongue,
so that in a few minutes the congregation watched one another less, the
preacher more, and all settled back, to listen and blink under his
accusations and his declarations. It really seemed, for the time, as
though he had caught and engaged their attention. But when the sermon
ended and he had taken his departure, before he was a hundred yards down
the road he heard loud words, angry shouts, and then the scream of a
woman.

The next instant there came a salvo of gun and pistol shots and in all
directions up and down the cross-roads people fled on horseback. Three
men had been killed, five wounded and a dozen become fugitives from
justice at the end of the church service.

Elijah Rasba fled ho