“June 9th, 1877. Rec. Harriet.”
“Jan. 19th, 1880. Have wrestled in prayer without consolation for Charles Sebastian.”
This was the last entry. A faint line ran down across the page connecting the end of “Harriet” with the beginning of “Charles.” Between the two blank leaves at the end was a photograph of himself at seventeen. He remembered suddenly how it was taken by a travelling photographer, who had stirred his soul with curiosity and given him the picture; and David Sebastian had taken it and silently put it away among blank leaves of the Bible.
Sebastian shivered. The written leaves, the look of himself of twenty years before, the cold, the wail of the wind, the clicking flakes on the window panes, these seemed now to be the dominant facts of life. Narrow was it, poor and meagre, to live and labor with a barren farm? The old abolitionist had cut deeper into existence than he had. If to deal with the fate of races, and wrestle alone with God on Edom Hill, were not knowledge and experience, what was knowledge or experience, or what should a man call worth the trial of his brain and nerve?
“He passed me. He won hands down,” he muttered, bending over the page again. “'Rec. Harriet.' That's too much for me.” And he heard a quick noise behind him and turned.
She stood in the door, wide-eyed, smooth, pale hair falling over one shoulder, long cloak half slipped from the other, holding a shotgun, threatening and stem.
“What are you doing here?”
“Out gunning for me?” asked Sebastian gravely.
She stared wildly, put the gun down, cried:
“You're Charlie Sebastian!” and fell on her knees beside the stove, choking, sobbing and shaking, crouching against the cold sheet iron in a kind of blind memory of its warmth and protection.