"I did not deny it, though I felt very hopeless of anything I might do. In those last days I could have denied him nothing. He seemed to me like all the trouble in the world beating out there in the hut. God had made him, and made him so that he did not rightly see good from evil, and he had ruined his body, and now he was taking the consequences. And the night before he died, he cried out a terrible voice:
"'You don't say a word about Jesus Christ.'
"I stood by his bed in anguish of mind perhaps as great as his. Yet not as great, for he had no strength of body to bear the anguish with.
"'You never have said anything,' he went on.
"I felt as if he was accusing me of not giving him water when he was fevered, or bread if he was hungry. Then he said he remembered something he used to hear when he was little and he had hardly ever heard of it since. But he had heard other things. And I guessed he was remembering he had lived with the people who used the name of Jesus Christ only to swear by. He had heard, he told me, that Jesus Christ was the son of God, and God sent Him here to save sinners, and, if sinners called on Him to save them, they would be saved. And then he looked at me for a minute with that same look, as if he hated me, and he said:
"'You don't believe it. You wouldn't let me suffer like this, if you did.'
"And all my spirit broke up in me, and my legs were weak under me, and the tears ran down on my face, and I said to him:
"'I do believe it.'
"'Will you swear it?' he asked me. He was very wild then. 'Will you swear by Jesus Christ it is so?'
"'Yes,' I said, 'I will swear.'