The Leatherwood God Part 18

"They?"

"The--the--Little Flock," he answered shamefacedly.

"The Herd of the Lost will kill you if you don't." She said it not in mocking, but in realization of the hopeless case, and not without pity.

But at his next words, she hardened her heart again.

"I don't know what to do. I don't know where to go. I have nowhere to lay my head."

"Don't you use them holy words, you wicked wretch! And if you're hintin'

at hidin' in my house, you can't do it--not with Jane here--_she_ would kill you, I believe--and not without her."

"No, Nancy. I can see that. But where can I go? Even that place in the woods, they're watching that, and they would have me if I tried to go back."

From an impulse as of indifference rather than consideration she said, "Go to Squire Braile. He let you off; let him take care of you."

"Nancy!" he exclaimed. "I thought of that."

She gathered up the basin and the towel she brought, and without looking at him again she said, "Well, go, then," and turned and left him where he stood.

XVI

Matthew Braile was sitting in his wonted place, with his chair tilted against his porch wall, smoking. Dylks faltered a moment at the bars of the lane from the field of tall corn where he had been finding his way unseen from Nancy's cabin. He lowered two of the middle bars and when he had put them up on the other side he stood looking toward the old man. His long hair hung tangled on his shoulders; the white bandage, which Nancy had bound about his head, crossed it diagonally above one eye and gave this the effect of a knowing wink, which his drawn face, unshaven for a week, seemed to deprecate.

Braile stared hard at him. Then he tilted his chair down and came to the edge of his porch, and called in cruel mockery, "Why, G.o.d, is that _you?"_

"Don't, Squire Braile!" Dylks implored in a hoa.r.s.e undertone. "They're after me, and if anybody heard you--"

"Well, come up here," the Squire bade him. Dylks hobbled slowly forward, and painfully mounted the log steps to the porch, where Braile surveyed him in detail, frowning and twitching his long feathery eyebrows.

"I know I don't look fit to be seen," Dylks began "but--"

"Well," the Squire allowed after further pause, "you _don't_ look as if you had just come 'down from the s.h.i.+ning courts above in joyful haste'!

Had any breakfast?"

"Nancy--Nancy Billings--gave me some coffee, and some cold pone--"

"Well, you can have some _hot_ pone pretty soon. Laban there?"

"No, he's away at work still. But, Squire Braile--"

"Oh, I understand. I know all about Nancy, and her first husband and how he left her, and she thought he was dead, and married a good man, and when that worthless devil came back she thought she was living in sin with that good man--in _sin_!--and drove him away. But she's as white as any of the saints you lie about. It was _like_ you to go to her the first one in your trouble. Well, what did she say?" "She said--" Dylks stopped, his mouth too dry to speak; he wetted his lips and whispered--"She said to come to you; that you would know what it was best for me to do; to--" He stopped again and asked, "Do you suppose any one will see me here?"

"Oh, like as not. It's getting time for honest folks to be up and going to work. But I don't want any trouble about you this morning; I had enough that _other_ morning. Come in here!" He set open the door of one of the rooms giving on the porch, and at Dylks's fearful glance he laughed, not altogether unkindly. "Mis' Braile's in the kitchen, getting breakfast for you, though she don't know it yet. Now, then!" he commanded when he sat down within, and pushed a chair to Dylks. "Tell me all about it, since I saw you going up the pike."

In the broken story which Dylks told, Braile had the air of mentally checking off the successive facts, and he permitted the man a measure of self-pity, though he caught him up at the close. "Well, you've got a part of what you deserve, but as usually happens with us rascals, you've got too much, at the same time. And what did Nancy advise?"

"She told me to come to you--"

"What did Nancy _advise_?" the Squire repeated savagely.

"She advised me to stop all this"--he waved his hands outward, and the Squire nodded intelligently--"to tell them it wasn't true; and I was sorry; and to go away--"

He stopped, and Braile demanded, "Well, and are you going to do it?"

"I want to do it, and--I can't."

"You can't? What's to hinder you?"

"I'm afraid to do it."

"Afraid?"

"They would kill me, if I did."

"They? Who? The Herd of the Lost?"

"The Little Flock."

The men were both silent, and then after a long breath, the Squire said, "I begin to see--"

"No, no! You don't _begin_ to see, Squire Braile." Dylks burst out sobbing, and uttering what he said between his sobs. "n.o.body can understand it that hasn't been through it! How you are tempted on, step by step, all so easy, till you can't go back, you can't stop. You're tempted by what's the best thing in you, by the hunger and thirst to know what's going to be after you die; to get near to the G.o.d that you've always heard about and read about; near Him in the flesh, and see Him and hear Him and touch Him. That's what does it with _them_, and that's what does it in you. It's something, a kind of longing, that's always been in the world, and you know it's in others because you know it's in you, in your own heart, your own soul. When you begin to try for it, to give out that you're a prophet, an apostle, you don't have to argue, to persuade anybody, or convince anybody. They're only too glad to believe what you say from the first word; and if you tell them you're Christ, didn't He always say He would come back, and how do they know but what it's now and you?"

"Yes, yes," the Squire said. "Go on."

"When I said I was G.o.d, they hadn't a doubt about it. But it was then that the trouble began."

"The trouble?"

"I had to make some of them saints. I had to make Enraghty Saint Paul, and I had to make Hingston Saint Peter. You think I had to lie to them, to deceive them, to bewitch them. I didn't have to do anything of the kind.

They did the lying and deceiving and bewitching themselves, and when they done it, they and all the rest of the believers, they had me fast, faster than I had them."

"I could imagine the schoolmaster hanging on to his share of the glory, tooth and nail," the Squire said with a grim laugh. "But old Hingston, good old soul, he ought to have let go, if you wanted him to."

"Oh, you don't know half of it," Dylks said, with a fresh burst of sobbing. "The worst of it is, and the dreadfulest is, that you begin to believe it yourself."

"What's that?" the Squire demanded sharply.

"Their faith puts faith into you. If they believe what you say, you say to yourself that there must be some truth in it. If you keep telling them you're Jesus Christ, there's nothing to prove you ain't, and if you tell them you're G.o.d, who ever saw G.o.d, and who can deny it? You can't deny it yourself--"

"Hold on!" the old man said. He had risen, and he began to walk up and down, swaying his figure and tilting his head from side to side, and frowning his s.h.a.ggy eyebrows together in a tangled hedge. Suddenly, he stopped before Dylks. "Why, you poor devil, you're not in any unusual fix.

It must have been so with all the impostors in the world, from Mahomet up and down! Why, there isn't a false prophet in the Old Testament that couldn't match experiences with you! That's the way it's always gone: first the liar tells his lie, and some of the fools believe it, and proselyte the other fools, and when there are enough of them, their faith begins to work on the liar's own unbelief, till he takes his lie for the truth. Was that the way, you miserable skunk?"

"It was exactly the way, Squire Braile, and you can't tell how it gains on you, step by step. You see all those educated people like Mr. Enraghty, and all those good men like Mr. Hingston taking it for gospel, and you can't deny it yourself. They convince you of it."

"Exactly! And then, when the Little Flock gathers in all the mentally lame, halt and blind in the settlement, you couldn't get out of it if you had the whole Herd of the Lost to back you, with the Hounds yelping round to keep your courage up; you've got to stay just where you put yourself, heigh?"