“We'll go west,” said Alcott. “Come on, Lolly. Never mind.”
But Allen took the issue in his own freakish hands, and disappeared, a weak-willed youth, yet secret and sudden, reckless, violent, fierce, affectionate. Alcott thought no adjectives about him, but followed him to Nevada, and there lost his trail; there staked a claim and dug a pit, like other men, in search of the flecked ore; there fell in with a circuit-riding bishop, and began making speeches to heavily armed miners. There he found his wrapped-up talent, his gift of moving men.
“You've got no beliefs that I can make head or tail of. Eccentric youth,” said the hard-riding bishop, “go ahead!”
There he met T. M. Secor, that breezy money-maker and man of level horizons, who bore other resemblances to a prairie; who listened in astonishment to Alcott's torrent of extraordinary language, delivered in an ore shed from the tail of a dump cart.
“By gad, sonny, you can talk tall!” said T. M. S. “Want to bombard hell, do you? Got any idea where it is?”
“Yes.”
“Ho! You have!”
“Some hot chunks of it in this town.”
“You don't say! Look here! You come back to my place in Port Argent, and I'll build you a church. We'll raise a congregation or blow the roof off. What church are you, anyhow?”
“I'm no church. I'm a freak.”