But for the present Tom resolved to stick faithfully to his toil. As the days wore on, and he became accustomed to the strain, he found the work a sedative; he was usually too tired to think much of his disappointment. Only the face of Rachel Albaugh haunted his visions in lonely hours, and at times a rush of indignant feeling towards George Lockwood disturbed his quiet.
In the early days of August there came a time of comparative leisure. The summer harvests were over, and the fields of tall corn had been "laid by" after the last plowing. Then Illinois had a breathing spell; and shutting up its house, and hitching up its horse, and taking all the children, it went to visit its "relations," staying a week at a place. Farmers frequented the town to meet old friends and get the better of them in swapping horses; and in this time of relaxation came the season of Baptist Associations and Methodist Camp-meetings and two-days' Basket Meetings—jolly religious picnics, where you could attend to your soul's salvation and eat "roas'in' ears" with old friends in the thronged recesses of the forests, among a people who were perhaps as gregarious as any the world has ever produced. Children looked forward to this gypsying with eagerness, and adults gave themselves over to it with the abandon of children. What night-scenes there were! Within the oval of tents at a camp-meeting two great platforms were raised on posts six or eight feet high and covered with earth; on these were built blazing bonfires, illuminating all the space inclosed by the tents and occupied by the enthusiastic assembly, which, as one great chorus, made the wide forest vocal with a tide of joyous or pathetic song. But there were two poles to the magnetism of a camp-meeting. In the region of outer blackness, quite beyond the reach of any illumination from platform bonfires or pulpit eloquence, there were also assemblies of those who were attracted by the excitement, but to whom the religious influences were a centrifugal force. Here jollity and all conceivable deviltry rejoiced also in a meet companionship.
The Great Union Camp-Meeting was held in the first half of August on the Timber Creek camp-ground, only a mile and a half from the Grayson place. The mother and Barbara went every evening and came back with accounts of the attendance, of the old friends encountered, and of the sermons of favorite preachers. They told how "powerfully" the elder had preached, and how the eloquent young preacher, who was junior on the next circuit, had carried all before him in a pathetic exhortation. But Tom showed no desire to attend. He was slowly sinking into a depression quite unusual with him. He had been accustomed to the excitement of the town, and the prospect of a life of dull routine on a farm ate into his spirit like a biting rust. Barbara amused him with stories of the camp-meeting; she told him of the eccentric German exhorter whose broken English she mimicked, and of the woman she had heard relate in a morning "speaking-meeting" that, when convinced of the sin of wearing jewelry, she had immediately taken off her ear-rings and given them to her sister. These things lightened his spirit but for a moment; he would relapse soon into the same state of mental lassitude, or more acute melancholy. Barbara endeavored to cheer him with projects; he could take a school the next winter, and with the money earned pay his board somewhere in town and take up the study of law again. But all of Barbara's projects were moderate and took full account of difficulties. Tom had little heart for a process that demanded plodding and patient waiting; nor did any of Barbara's suggestions hold out any prospect of his recovering his ground with Rachel, which was the thing he most desired.
One evening, as he finished a supper which he had eaten with little relish and in silence, he pushed back his chair and sat moodily looking into the black cave of the kitchen fire-place, where the embers were smoldering under the ashes. Then when his mother had left the kitchen, and Barbara was clearing away the plates, he said:
"The more I think of it, the worse I feel about George Lockwood. The tricky villain got me into that scrape and then told all about it where he knew it would do me the most harm. I'd just like to shoot him."
"You'd better shoot him and get yourself hanged!" said Barbara with impatience. "That would mend matters, wouldn't it?"
"'T wouldn't matter much to me," said Tom. "This country life doesn't suit me; I'd just as well be out of it, and they do say hanging is an easy way of dying." This last was spoken with a grim smile.
"I suppose you don't think of us," said Barbara.
"I'm more trouble than good to you and mother."
"And now if you would only commit a crime"—Barbara was looking at him with a concentrated gaze—"that would put an end to all mother's sorrows; she would soon die in torture, and I would be left alone in the world to be pointed at by people who would say in a whisper: 'That's the sister of the fellow that was hanged.'" And Barbara caught her breath with a little gasp as she turned away.