“You see, ma'am, a rather singular thing happened to me after I passed the summit. Three times I lost the track, got off it somehow, and found myself traveling in a circle. The third time, when I struck my own tracks again, I concluded I'd just follow them back here. I suppose I might have got the road again by tryin' and fightin' the snow—but ther's some things not worth the fightin'. This was a matter of business, and, after all, ma'am, business ain't everythin', is it?”
He was evidently in some unusual mood, the mood that with certain reticent natures often compels them to make their brief confidences to utter strangers rather than impart them to those intimate friends who might remind them of their weakness. She agreed with him pleasantly, but not so obviously as to excite suspicion. “And you preferred to let your business go, and come back to the comfort of your own home and family.”
“The comfort of my home and family?” he repeated in a dry, deliberate voice. “Well, I reckon I ain't been tempted much by THAT. That isn't what I meant.” But he went back to the phrase, repeating it grimly, as if it were some mandatory text. “The comfort of my OWN HOME AND FAMILY! Well, Satan hasn't set THAT trap for my feet yet, ma'am. No; ye saw my daughter? well, that's all my family; ye see this room? that's all my home. My wife ran away from me; my daughter cleared out too, my eldest son as was with me here has quo'lled with me and reckons to set up a rival business agin me. No,” he said, still more meditatively and deliberately; “it wasn't to come back to the comforts of my own home and family that I faced round on Heavy Tree Hill, I reckon.”
As the woman, for certain reasons, had no desire to check this auspicious and unlooked for confidence, she waited patiently. Hays remained silent for an instant, warming his hands before the fire, and then looked up interrogatively.
“A professor of religion, ma'am, or under conviction?”
“Not exactly,” said the lady smiling.
“Excuse me, but in spite of your fine clothes I reckoned you had a serious look just now. A reader of Scripture, may be?”
“I know the Bible.”
“You remember when the angel with the flamin' sword appeared unto Saul on the road to Damascus?”
“Yes.”