She reached out a delicate, expressive hand, and laid it gently on his brawny arm. It came to him, at that hour, like a benediction from God.
"What do you wish?" she repeated.
"I wisht you'd give me a Bible."
She lifted the Bible from her desk, one long used by her and carefully marked, and placing it in his open hand, she said:
"Never forget, John, that Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God, has bought your soul with a great price, and that it belongs to God."
He tried to thank her. Then turning, without a vocal word of thanks, he left the room; and with long, easy, rapid strides, sought the solitude of the mountains.
The something within him that had long been beating to be free, now asserted itself. It would have way. It seemed to be his real self, and yet a new man, risen up out of his dead and fruitless past. It seemed to sing within him, yet it sorrowed. And in the midst of the sorrow, a great hope was born. He knew it now,—this Something was his own Soul!
There, on the heights of the rugged foothills, he stood alone. Only the fathomless deeps of the sky saw the struggle of that human soul. For a while he seemed to be passing through the tortures of the damned. He fought his way inch by inch. Great beads of sweat covered his forehead; then, lifting one clenched hand high in the air, as though he had burst forth from a dungeon of death into the light of day, he said: