“I don’t know what to say, but it is safe to pray.”
After I had prayed, I urged him to pray; but he said:
“If I do, it means the penitentiary.”
I asked him to come the next day at twelve. He met me at the appointed hour, and said:
“It is all settled; if I ever meet the God of Bethel I must go through the prison to meet Him, and God helping me, I will give myself up. I am going back, and I should like to have you keep quiet until I give myself over into the hands of the law; then you may hold me up as a warning. Little did I think when I started out in life that I was coming to this! Little did I think when I married a girl from one of the first families in the state that I should bring such disgrace on her.”
At four o’clock that afternoon he went back to Missouri. He reached home a little past midnight, and spent a week with his family. In a letter he said that he didn’t dare let his children know he was there, lest they should tell the neighbor’s children. At night he would creep out and look at his children, but he couldn’t take them in his arms or kiss them. Oh, there is the result of sin! Would to God we could every one of us just turn from sin to-day!
One day, when this man was in hiding, he heard his little boy say:
“Mamma, doesn’t papa love us any more?”
“Yes,” his mother replied. “Why do you ask?” “Why,” the little fellow said, “he has been gone so long and he never writes us any letters and never comes to see us.”
The last night he came out from hiding and took a long look at those innocent, sleeping children; then he took his wife and kissed her again and again, and leaving that once happy home he gave himself up to the sheriff. The next morning he pleaded guilty, and was sent to the penitentiary for nineteen years. I believe that God had forgiven him, but he couldn’t forgive himself, and he had to reap what he sowed. I pleaded with the governor for mercy, and the man was pardoned.