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Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? Is there a Saul here

to-night who has stopped his ears to that gentle pleading, who has

thrust a spear into that bleeding side? Think of it, my brother; you

are offered this wonderful love and you prefer the worm that dieth

not and the fire which will not be quenched. What right have you to

lose one of God’s precious souls? _Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou

me?_”

A great joy dawned in Asa Skinner’s pale face, for he saw that Eric

Hermannson was swaying to and fro in his seat. The minister fell

upon his knees and threw his long arms up over his head.

“O my brothers! I feel it coming, the blessing we have prayed for. I

tell you the Spirit is coming! Just a little more prayer, brothers,

a little more zeal, and he will be here. I can feel his cooling wing

upon my brow. Glory be to God forever and ever, amen!”

The whole congregation groaned under the pressure of this spiritual

panic. Shouts and hallelujahs went up from every lip. Another figure

fell prostrate upon the floor. From the mourners’ bench rose a chant

of terror and rapture:

“Eating honey and drinking wine,

Glory to the bleeding Lamb!

I am my Lord’s and he is mine,

Glory to the bleeding Lamb!

The hymn was sung in a dozen dialects and voiced all the vague

yearning of these hungry lives, of these people who had starved all

the passions so long, only to fall victims to the basest of them

all, fear.

A groan of ultimate anguish rose from Eric Hermannson’s bowed head,

and the sound was like the groan of a great tree when it falls in

the forest.

The minister rose suddenly to his feet and threw back his head,

crying in a loud voice:

Lazarus, come forth! Eric Hermannson, you are lost, going down at

sea. In the name of God, and Jesus Christ his Son, I throw you the

life-line. Take hold! Almighty God, my soul for his!” The minister

threw his arms out and lifted his quivering face.

Eric Hermannson rose to his feet; his lips were set and the

lightning was in his eyes. He took his violin by the neck and

crushed it to splinters across his knee, and to Asa Skinner the

sound was like the shackles of sin broken audibly asunder.

II.

For more than two years Eric Hermannson kept the austere faith to

which he had sworn himself, kept it until a girl from the East came

to spend a week on the Nebraska Divide. She was a girl of other

manners and conditions, and there were greater distances between her

life and Eric’s than all the miles which separated Rattlesnake Creek

from New York city. Indeed, she had no business to be in the West at

all; but ah! across what leagues of land and sea, by what improbable

chances, do the unrelenting gods bring to us our fate!

It was in a year of financial depression that Wyllis Elliot came to

Nebraska to buy cheap land and revisit the country where he had

spent a year of his youth. When he had graduated from Harvard it was

still customary for moneyed gentlemen to send their scapegrace sons

to rough it on ranches in the wilds of Nebraska or Dakota, or to

consign them to a living death in the sage-brush of the Black Hills.

These young men did not always return to the ways of civilized life.

But Wyllis Elliot had not married a half-breed, nor been shot in a

cow-punchers’ brawl, nor wrecked by bad whisky, nor appropriated by

a smirched adventuress. He had been saved from these things by a

girl, his sister, who had been very near to his life ever since the

days when they read fairy tales together and dreamed the dreams that

never come true. On this, his first visit to his father’s ranch

since he left it six years before, he brought her with him. She had

been laid up half the winter from a sprain received while skating,

and had had too much time for reflection during those months. She

was restless and filled with a desire to see something of the wild

country of which her brother had told her so much. She was to be

married the next winter, and Wyllis understood her when she begged

him to take her with him on this long, aimless jaunt across the

continent, to taste the last of their freedom together. It comes to

all women of her type—that desire to taste the unknown which

allures and terrifies, to run one’s whole soul’s length out to the

wind—just once.

It had been an eventful journey. Wyllis somehow understood that

strain of gypsy blood in his sister, and he knew where to take her.

They had slept in sod houses on the Platte River, made the

acquaintance of the personnel of a third-rate opera company on the

train to Deadwood, dined in a camp of railroad constructors at the

world’s end beyond New Castle, gone through the Black Hills on

horseback, fished for trout in Dome Lake, watched a dance at Cripple

Creek, where the lost souls who hide in the hills gathered for their

besotted revelry. And now, last of all, before the return to

thraldom, there was this little shack, anchored on the windy crest

of the Divide, a little black dot against the flaming sunsets, a

scented sea of cornland bathed in opalescent air and blinding

sunlight.

Margaret Elliot was one of those women of whom there are so many in

this day, when old order, passing, giveth place to new; beautiful,

talented, critical, unsatisfied, tired of the world at twenty-four.

For the moment the life and people of the Divide interested her. She

was there but a week; perhaps had she stayed longer, that inexorable

ennui which travels faster even than the Vestibule Limited would

have overtaken her. The week she tarried there was the week that

Eric Hermannson was helping Jerry Lockhart thresh; a week earlier or

a week later, and there would have been no story to write.

It was on Thursday and they were to leave on Saturday. Wyllis and

his sister were sitting on the wide piazza of the ranchhouse,

staring out into the afternoon sunlight and protesting against the

gusts of hot wind that blew up from the sandy river-bottom twenty

miles to the southward.

The young man pulled his cap lower over his eyes and remarked:

“This wind is the real thing; you don’t strike it anywhere else. You

remember we had a touch of it in Algiers and I told you it came from

Kansas. It’s the key-note of this country.”

Wyllis touched her hand that lay on the hammock and continued

gently:

“I hope it’s paid you, Sis. Roughing it’s dangerous business; it

takes the taste out of things.”

She shut her fingers firmly over the brown hand that was so like her

own.

“Paid? Why, Wyllis, I haven’t been so happy since we were children

and were going to discover the ruins of Troy together some day. Do

you know, I believe I could just stay on here forever and let the

world go on its own gait. It seems as though the tension and strain

we used to talk of last winter were gone for good, as though one

could never give one’s strength out to such petty things any more.”

Wyllis brushed the ashes of his pipe away from the silk handkerchief

that was knotted about his neck and stared moodily off at the

sky-line.

“No, you’re mistaken. This would bore you after a while. You can’t

shake the fever of the other life. I’ve tried it. There was a time

when the gay fellows of Rome could trot down into the Thebaid and

burrow into the sandhills and get rid of it. But it’s all too

complex now. You see we’ve made our dissipations so dainty and