“Why are you here, Aaron and Silvia Bees?”
Aaron recovered himself, and fell to chewing his birch twig.
“We-ell, you see, it's the old man.”
“What of him?”
“He'd lick us with a hoe-handle, wouldn't he? And maybe he'd throw us out, after all. What'd be the use? Might as well stay away,” Aaron finished, grumbling. “Save the hoe.”
The Hermit's glare relaxed. Some recollection of former times may have passed through his rifted mind, or the scent of a new denunciation drawn it away from the abornination of Assyria, who lay split and smoking in the ashes. He leaped from the altar-stone, and vanished under the leafage of the birches. We listened to him crashing and plunging, chanting something incoherent and tuneless, down the mountain, till the sound died away.
Alas, Baal-Peor! Even to this day there are twinges of shame, misgivings of conscience, that we had fled in fear and given him over to his enemy, to be trampled on, destroyed and split through his green jacket and red eye. He never again stood gazing off into anywhere, snuffing the fumes of sacrifice and remembering Babylon. The look of things has changed since then. We have doubted Baal, and-found some restraints of liberty more grateful than tyrannous. But it is plain that in his last defeat Baal-Peor did not have a fair chance.
Concerning the Hermit's progress from this point, I can only draw upon guesses and after report. He struck slantingwise down the mountain, left the woods about at the Kincard place, and crossed the fields.
Old Kincard sat in his doorway smoking his pipe, thick-set, deep-chested, long-armed, with square, rough-shaven jaws, and steel-blue eyes looking out of a face like a carved cliff for length and edge. The Hermit stood suddenly before and denounced him under two heads—as a heathen unsoftened in heart, and for setting up the altar of lucre and pride against the will of the Lord that the children of men should marry and multiply. Old Kincard took his pipe from his mouth.
“Where might them marriers and multipliers be just now?”