The gleam from the furnace door showed Pete's own light grey eyes intently staring at the visitor, but he said nothing and the matter passed.
When the constable's heart was warmed by the brush whisky he understood the sensation as happiness, and he translated happiness as a religious excitement.
He seemed maudlin as he talked about the parson, who, he declared, had led him to grace, and he recited some wonderful stories of religious experience, tending to illustrate his present righteousness and the depths of iniquity from which he had been redeemed.
Pete's perversity operated to curtail these.
'That's a fac'!' he would heartily assent; 'ye useter be one o' the meanes' men on these hyar mountings!' Or 'Grace hed a mighty wrastle with Satan in yer soul. I dunno whether he air cast out yit!'
The constable—his big owlish head askew—was embarrassed by these manœuvres, and presently the talk drifted to the subject of the parson's spiritual defection. This he considered a mental aberration.
'Hi Kelsey,' he said, 'war always more or less teched in the head. I hev noticed—an' ye may sot it down ez a true word—ez ev'y man es air much smarter'n other men in some ways, in other ways air foolisher. He mought prophesy one day, an' the nex' ye wouldn't trest him ter lead a blind goose ter water. He air smarter'n enny man I ever see—Pa'son Kelsey air. Thar's Brother Jake Tobin ain't got haffen his sense; an' yit nobody can't say ez Brother Jake ain't sensible.'
The philosopher upon the barrel, as he made this nice distinction, gazed meditatively into the bed of live coals that flung its red glare on his broad flushed countenance and wide blinking eyes.
It revealed the others, too: the old man's hard, lined, wrinkled visage and his stalwart supple frame; Pete, with his long tangled hair, his pipe between his great exposed teeth; Ab, filling the furnace with wood, his ragged beard moved by the hot breath of the fire; the big-boned, callow Sol, with his petulant, important face; and Ben, in the dim background tossing the sticks over to Ab from the gigantic wood pile.
They fell with a sharp sound, and the cave was full of their multiplied echoes. The men as they talked elevated their voices so as to be heard.