The Bishop of Cottontown Part 31

To-day, just outside of the church Ben Butler had been hitched up and the Bishop sat in the old buggy.

Bud Billings stood by holding the bit, stroking the old horse's neck and every now and then striking a fierce att.i.tude, saying "Whoa--whoa--suh!"

As usual, Ben Butler was asleep.

"Turn him loose, Bud," said the old man humoring the slubber--"I've got the reins an' he can't run away now. I can't take you home to-day--I'm gwinter take Margaret, an' you an' Jimmie can come along together."

No other man could have taken Margaret Adams home and had any standing left, in Cottontown.

And soon they were jogging along down the mountain side, toward the cabin where the woman lived and supported herself and boy by her needle.

To-day Margaret was agitated and excited--more than the Bishop had ever known her to be. He knew the reason, for clean-shaved and neatly dressed, Jack Bracken pa.s.sed her on the road to church that morning, and as they rode along the Bishop told her it was indeed Jack whom she had seen, "an' he loves you yet, Margaret," he said.

She turned pink under her bonnet. How pretty and fresh she looked--thought the Bishop--and what purity in a face to have such a name.

"It _was_ Jack, then," she said simply--"tell me about him, please."

"By the grace of G.o.d he has reformed," said the old man--"and--Margaret--he loves you yet, as I sed. He is going under the name of Jack Smith, the blacksmith here, an' he'll lead another life--but he loves you yet," he whispered again.

Then he told her what had happened, knowing that Jack's secret would be safe with her.

When he told her how they had buried little Jack, and of the father's admission that his determination to lead the life of an outlaw had come when he found that she had been untrue to him, she was shaken with grief. She could only sit and weep. Not even at the gate, when the old man left her, did she say anything.

Within, she stopped before a picture which hung over the mantle-piece and looked at it, through eyes that filled again and again with tears. It was the picture of a pretty mountain girl with dark eyes and sensual lip.

Margaret knelt before it and wept.

The boy had come and stood moodily at the front gate. The hot and resentful blood still tinged in his cheek. He looked at his knuckles--they were cut and swollen where he had struck the boy who had jeered him. It hurt him, but he only smiled grimly.

Never before had any one called him a wood's-colt. He had never heard the word before, but he knew what it meant. For the first time in his life, he hated his mother. He heard her weeping in the little room they called home. He merely shut his lips tightly and, in spite of the stoicism that was his by nature, the tears swelled up in his eyes.

They were hot tears and he could not shake them off. For the first time the wonder and the mystery of it all came over him. For the first time he felt that he was not as other boys,--that there was a meaning in this lonely cabin and the shunned woman he called mother, and the glances, some of pity, some of contempt, which he had met all of his life.

As he stood thinking this, Richard Travis rode slowly down the main road leading from the town to The Gaffs. And this went through the boy successively--not in words, scarcely--but in feelings:

"What a beautiful horse he is riding--it thrills me to see it--I love it naturally--oh, but to own one!

"What a handsome man he is--and how like a gentleman he looks! I like the way he sits his horse. I like that way he has of not noticing people. He has got the same way about him I have got--that I've always had--that I love--a way that shows me I'm not afraid, and that I have got nerve and bravery.

"He sits that horse just as I would sit him--his head--his face--the way that foot slopes to the stirrup--why that's me--"

He stopped--he turned pale--he trembled with pride and rage. Then he turned and walked into the room where Margaret Adams sat. She held out her arms to him pleadingly.

But he did not notice her, and never before had she seen such a look on his face as he said calmly:

"Mother, if you will come to the door I will show you my father."

Margaret Adams had already seen. She turned white with a hidden shame as she said:

"Jimmie--Jimmie--who--who--?"

"No one," he shouted fiercely--"by G.o.d"--she had never before heard him swear--"I tell you no one--on my honor as a Travis--no one! It has come to me of itself--I know it--I feel it."

He was too excited to talk. He walked up and down the little room, his proud head lifted and his eyes ablaze.

"I know now why I love honesty, why I despise those common things beneath me--why I am not afraid--why I struck that boy as I did this morning--why--" he walked into the little shed room that was his own and came back with a long single barrel pistol in his hand and fondled it lovingly--"why all my life I have been able to shoot this as I have--"

He held in his hand a long, single barrel, rifle-bored duelling pistol--of the type used by gentlemen at the beginning of the century. Where he had got it she did not know, but always it had been his plaything.

"O Jimmie--you would not--" exclaimed the woman rising and reaching for it.

"Tush--" he said bitterly--"tush--that's the way Richard Travis talks, ain't it? Does not my very voice sound like his? No--but I expect you now, mother"--he said it softly--"tell me--tell me all about it."

For a moment Margaret Adams was staggered. She only shook her head.

He looked at her cynically--then bitterly. A dangerous flash leaped into his eyes.

"Then, by G.o.d," he cried fiercely, "this moment will I walk over to his house with this pistol in my hand and I will ask him. If he fails to tell me--d.a.m.n him--I dare him--"

She jumped up and seized him in her arms.

"Promise me that if I tell you all--all, Jimmy, when you are fifteen--promise me--will you be patient now--with poor mother, who loves you so?" And she kissed him fondly again and again.

He looked into her eyes and saw all her suffering there.

The bitterness went out of his.

"I'll promise, mother," he said simply, and walked back into his little room.

CHAPTER VIII

HARD-Sh.e.l.l SUNDAY

"This bein' Hard-sh.e.l.l Sunday," said the Bishop that afternoon when his congregation met, "cattle of that faith will come up to the front rack for fodder. Elder b.u.t.ts will he'p me conduct these exercises."

"It's been so long sence I've been in a Hard-sh.e.l.l lodge, I may be a little rusty on the grip an' pa.s.s word, but I'm a member in good standin' if I am rusty."

There was some laughing at this, from the other members, and after the Hard-sh.e.l.ls had come to the front the Bishop caught the infection and went on with a sly wink at the others.

"The fact is, I've sometimes been mighty sorry I jined any other lodge; for makin' honorable exception, the other churches don't know the diff'r'nce betwixt twenty-year-old Lincoln County an' Michigan pine-top.

"The Hard-sh.e.l.ls was the fust church I jined, as I sed. I hadn't sampled none of the others"--he whispered aside--"an' I didn't know there was any better licker in the jug. But the Baptists is a little riper, the Presbyterians is much mellower, an' compared to all of them the 'Piscopalians rises to the excellence of syllabub an'

champagne.

"A hones' dram tuck now an' then, prayerfully, is a good thing for any religion. I've knowed many a man to take a dram jes' in time to keep him out of a divorce court. An' I've never knowed it to do anybody no harm but old elder Shotts of Clay County. An' ef he'd a stuck to it straight he'd abeen all right now. But one of these old-time Virginia gentlemen stopped with him all night onct, an'