A LAST HOPE.
Nobody was disposed to serve the culprit. The leaders looked knowingly the one at the other, and shrugged their shoulders.
"If you don't call him back you will be a set of murderers!" cried the despairing Goodwin.
CHAPTER XVII.
DELIVERANCE.
Parson Donaldson was journeying down to Cincinnati—at that time a thriving village of about two thousand people—to attend Presbytery and to contend manfully against the sinful laxity of some of his brethren in the matters of doctrine and revivals. In previous years Mr. Donaldson had been beaten a little in his endeavors to have carried through the extremest measures against his more progressive "new-side" brethren. He considered the doctrines of these zealous Presbyterians as very little better than the crazy ranting of the ungrammatical circuit riders. At the moment of passing the tavern where Morton sat, condemned to death, he was eagerly engaged in "laying out" a speech with which he intended to rout false doctrines and annihilate forever incipient fanaticism. His square head had fallen forward, and he only observed that there was a crowd of godless and noisy men about the tavern. He could not spare time to note anything farther, for the fate of Zion seemed to hang upon the weight and cogency of the speech which he meant to deliver at Cincinnati. He had almost passed out of sight when Morton first caught sight of him; and when the young man, finding that no one would go after him, set up a vigorous calling of his name, Mr. Donaldson did not hear it, or at least did not think for an instant that anybody in that crowd could be calling his own name. How should he hear Morton's cry? For just at that moment he had reached the portion of his argument in which he triumphantly proved that his new-side friends, however unconscious they might be of the fact, were of necessity Pelagians, and, hence, guilty of fatal error.
Morton's earnest entreaties at last moved one of the crowd.
"Well, I don't mind," he said; "I'll call him. 'Pears like as ef he's a-lyin' any how. I don't 'low as he knows the ole coon, or the ole coon knows him—liker'n not he's a-foolin' by lettin' on; but 't won't do no harm to call him back." Saying which, he mounted his gaunt horse and rode away after Mr. Donaldson.